WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump's administration plans to officially move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the state, two U.S. officials said Friday.
The timetable is earlier than the one offered as recently as last month by Vice President Mike Pence, who said during a visit to Israel that the embassy would open by the end of 2019.
The State Department will formally designate a facility in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood, currently used for consular affairs, as an embassy, even as plans proceed to eventually build a new compound that could take several more years to complete.
Trump on Friday boasted of his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, drawing enthusiastic applause.
While other presidents held back from such a move for fear of triggering a backlash among Arabs and prejudging final peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, Trump said he defied "incredible" pressure in order to do what he considered the right thing.
"You know, every president campaigned on, 'We're going to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,' everybody, for many presidents, you've been reading it, and then they never pulled it off, and I now know why," Trump said. "I was hit by more countries and more pressure and more people calling, begging me, 'Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.' I said, 'We have to do it, it's the right thing to do.'"
The Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment. But a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition welcomed the plan to go ahead with an embassy move. "I would like to congratulate Donald Trump, the President of the US @POTUS on his decision to transfer the US Embassy to our capital on Israel's 70th Independence Day," Israel Katz, the minister of transportation and intelligence, wrote on Twitter. "There is no greater gift than that! The most just and correct move. Thanks friend!"
Furious over Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and its intention to move the embassy, Palestinian leaders have declared they will no longer accept a U.S. monopoly on brokering a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians.
For the Palestinians, Israel's 70th anniversary also marks 70 years of the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes and became refugees during the hostilities leading up to, and the war surrounding, Israel's creation in 1948.
"The decision of the U.S. administration to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to choose the anniversary of the Nakba of the Palestinian people for carrying out this step expresses a flagrant violation of the law," Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the veteran Palestinian chief negotiator, said in a statement Friday.
U.S. officials Friday did not comment on why they decided to move up the date for the opening, but it will carry special emotional resonance in Israel coming on its Independence Day on May 14, the anniversary of the state's founding in 1948.
A new embassy building will take between six to eight years to construct, said a State Department official, who like others demanded anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the issue.
The Arnona building, where visas and passports are processed, is not nearly big enough for the embassy's entire staff. Only the ambassador, a chief of staff and a staff secretary will be situated there in its first years of operation, the official said.
Israel has always made Jerusalem its capital, but the Palestinians have also claimed the city as the capital of a future state. Until Trump's decision last year, no other country located its embassy in Jerusalem to avoid seeming to take sides in the dispute.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is in preliminary discussions with Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate, Republican donor and prominent Israel backer, for a donation to potentially pay for at least some of the cost of constructing a new embassy complex, the State Department official said. The Associated Press reported that State Department lawyers are looking into the legality of such a move.
In an interview Friday, a confidant of Adelson said that the casino magnate "was very excited" when Trump told him after his election victory that he would move the embassy.
The confidant, Morton Klein, said Adelson "called me as soon as he walked out of Trump Tower and got into his car to say that President Trump said that he is going to fulfill his promise to move the embassy."
"It is a critically important issue to Sheldon Adelson," said Klein, who runs a nonprofit group called the Zionist Organization of America that is funded partly by Adelson.
A Section on 02/24/2018