In their book, Because It’s Just and Right, lawyers Farley Weiss and Leonard Grunstein chronicle the history and implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act 1995, which was initiated and led by senator Jon Kyl and passed overwhelmingly in the US Congress without a presidential signature.

The lineal centrality of the Hebrew Bible as the irrefutable legal title report of Jewish ownership of ‘the Land of Israel vested in Abraham’ (Genesis 15:18-21) is set out, confirming Jewish ownership of the land because it’s just and right as ‘due justice must be dispensed fairly and impartially’ (Deuteronomy 6:18-20). Indeed, among the first legal challenges to Jewish ownership of Eretz Israel were those brought by the descendants of the Canaanites and dismissed by Alexander the Great. With this confirmation comes the further dismissal of recent charges by Palestinian Arabs falsely professing Canaanite descent.

The profound and unbroken attachment of the Jewish People to Jerusalem is attested to by Jewish liturgy and the continued presence of Jews in the city, despite violent expulsions and debarments. As the authors demonstrate, no other religion embraces Jerusalem as does Judaism, and the city has never been the capital of any people but the Jewish People. Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur’an, which fully recognises Jewish ownership of Eretz Israel. Over the centuries, Jerusalem was neglected by Muslims, and, under Jordanian occupation in 1948–67, ancient synagogues and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were defiled and destroyed.

The US Embassy Act was unnecessary, as detailed in that part of the book dedicated to the history of the legislation officially recognising the Jewish people’s rights to the ownership of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. Legal challenges to the title of the land and city, including calls for the ‘internationalisation’ of Jerusalem, fell by the wayside, because the political nature of the ‘Jewish national home’ was repeatedly recognised and verified in the 1920 Supreme Council of Allied Powers San Remo Resolution and unanimously confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, the Anglo-American Treaty of 1925 and, more recently, in UN resolutions and other US legislation.

The Palestinians’ appropriation of Jewish culture, as well as the moral decrepitude of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, bring into focus their claims to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. The authors show that the Palestinians’ real aim is not possession of Jerusalem – because the PLO, in its Operation Sig Soviet-manufactured charter, laid no claim to it – but rather the eradication of the Jewish state. The atrocious charter of Hamas, which ruled Gaza since 2006, specifically calls for the destruction of the Jews. Hamas waged several wars against Israel to implement its charter, word for word, as was definitively proven by its genocidal attack on the Jewish state on 7 October 2023.

In evidence-based analyses throughout the book, the authors ‘challenge and rebut every baseless assertion’ made against the rights of the Jewish People to its sovereign state and capital. By doing so, the authors also provide a well-sourced compendium that puts the immediate history of the US recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem into a much broader perspective.

The ethical determination of the many people involved in the formulation and implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act, including US ambassador to Israel David Friedman and author Weiss, was driven by Kyl’s paradigm that ‘it was just and right’. Time and again, they faced down strong State Department prejudices against the Jewish national home with Jerusalem as its undivided capital. It was these prejudices which forced the inclusion of the presidential waiver in the Jerusalem Embassy Act, whereby the US president could ‘waive’ the provisions of the act if its implementation was considered a threat to national security. The waiver provision was applied for 22 years by consecutive administrations in favour of continuing the illusionary role of ‘honest broker’ in Arab–Israeli talks.

In March 2018, President Donald Trump ordered the defunding of the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the Taylor Force Act, because of the Palestinian ‘pay-to-slay’ policy of remunerating terrorists and their families. This act was named after Taylor Force, an American former serviceman who was murdered by a terrorist in Israel in 2016.

It was Trump’s moral courage that saw him fulfil his campaign promise to authorise the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem. The embassy opened on 14 May 2018, a date which coincided with the seventieth anniversary of President Harry S. Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel.

These events ushered in the Abraham Accords of 2020, one of the most momentous developments in the modern Middle East, heralding a new era of negotiations and peace between Israel and several Arab states, guided by the ‘principles of enlightened self-interest’. Thus ended a significant part of the Arab–Israeli conflict.

The Biden administration, which followed the Trump administration, has facetiously considered installing a Palestinian ‘consulate’ inside the US embassy, patently contravening the 1963 Vienna Convention requiring ‘the consent of the receiving state’. Not to be outdone, the EU ‘warned’ Hungary in March 2023 against moving its embassy to Jerusalem.

Because It’s Just and Right is the only book so far written about the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem. It is a deeply perceptive, highly analytical and indispensable discussion and record of this pivotal and historical event.

Source - by Farley Weiss and Leonard Grunstein, Boca Raton, FL, Geviyah Publishing Company, 2023, xxxvii + 602 pp., £22.77 (paperback)