On Sunday's New Day on CNN, during a discussion of Donald Trump's choice of David Friedman as ambassador to Israel, and his stated support for relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel's capital of Jerusalem, CNN political commentator Errol Louis worried that such a move would be equivalent to "giving" Jerusalem to Israel because the Palestinian Authority has expressed a desire to place the capital of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem.
Alluding to Friedman's lack of experience in diplomacy, CNN co-anchor Christi Paul turned to Louis and posed the question:
PAUL: Well, we talk about the places that, direction that he wants to go. We had Ben Ferguson on earlier saying, "You know, this is just draining the swamp, this is what Donald Trump promised to do with some of these picks who are people who do not have diplomacy under their belt." Is this just a changing of the guard, Errol?
Referring to Friedman's support for Israeli settlers and his opposition to recognizing an independent Palestinian state based on the West Bank, Louis fretted:
LOUIS: No, I think it is not. It is a radical departure from, as your reporter points out, decades of American policy. We've got to keep in mind a couple of things. One is that Israel itself has not made up its mind about this question. The notion that, you know, simply backing the most radical settlers, rejecting a two-state solution, moving the embassy and so forth is what Israel wants is by no means determined. And if you take any kind of even a casual look at Israeli politics, that becomes clear. It's a controversy.
Viewers were not informed that both the Israeli prime minister's office and its parliament -- the Knesset -- have been located in Jerusalem since the 1940s as Jerusalem has been Israel's capital since the Jewish state's founding. Louis suggested that the U.S. would be "giving" Jerusalem to Israel by relocating its embassy there:
LOUIS: The second thing, though, which is more important, it that this is not America's deal to make. This is between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And, to the extent that the United States can be helpful at all, as it was at Camp David with the Camp David Accords, is as a broker of a deal, not as a participant. And so to sort of get involved and to give away all of this political capital and to simply say, "Well, we're going to take one of the most controversial parts of this deal that two other parties have to negotiate between themselves and simply, you know, give it away before day one" -- namely the location of the capital -- not a very good way to make or broker a deal.
But even left-leaning Israeli governments that have offered to give a Palestinian state control over part of Jerusalem would only have given over control of predominantly Arab parts of East Jerusalem that used to be under Jordan's control before 1967, and not the entire city. There is no practical reason to believe that Israel's capital would ever cease being in Jerusalem even if a Palestinian state were recognized that included East Jerusalem.
