The White House has said it is in the early stages of talks to fulfil Donald Trump’s pledge to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an action that is likely to spark anger in the Arab world.
“We are at the very beginning stages of even discussing this subject,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said on Sunday.
Washington’s embassy is in Tel Aviv, as are most foreign diplomatic posts. Israel calls Jerusalem its eternal capital, but Palestinians also lay claim to the city as part of an eventual Palestinian state. Both sides cite religious, historical and political claims.
Trump, who vowed during the 2016 presidential campaign to move the embassy, spoke with with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, in their first call since the US president took office on Friday.
After the call Netanyahu said that Trump had invited him to a meeting in Washington in February. The two leaders discussed the nuclear deal with Iran, the peace process with the Palestinians and other issues, Netanyahu’s office said.
In Washington, Trump said the call had been “very nice”. The White House later said that Trump had told the Israeli prime minister that peace with the Palestinians could only be “negotiated directly between the two parties”.
Any decision to break with the status quo on the embassy issue is likely to prompt protests from US allies in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Washington relies on those countries for help in fighting Islamic State, which the new president has said is a priority.
The US Congress passed a law in 1995 that described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and said it should not be divided, but successive Republican and Democratic presidents have used their foreign policy powers to maintain the US embassy in Tel Aviv and to back negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on the status of Jerusalem.
In early December, the then president, Barack Obama, renewed the presidential waiver until the beginning of June. It is unclear whether Trump would be able to legally override that waiver and go ahead with the relocation of the embassy.
US diplomats say that despite the legislation, Washington’s foreign policy is in practice broadly aligned with that of the UN and other major powers, which do not view Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and do not recognise Israel’s annexation of Arab East Jerusalem after its capture in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel approved building permits on Sunday for hundreds of homes in three East Jerusalem settlements in expectation that Trump will retreat from the previous administration’s criticism of such projects.
