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US opens Jerusalem Embassy

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The US formally opened its new Embassy in Jerusalem yesterday as US and Israeli leaders praised the move as a sign of the enduring bilateral alliance.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “[US President Donald] Trump, by recognising history, you have made history. You can only build peace on truth and the truth is that Jerusalem has always been and will always will be the capital of the Jewish people, of the Jewish state.”

Several members of the 250-strong American delegation, led by Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, gave speeches at the opening ceremony. Trump’s son-in-law and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner said that being the first country to move its embassy to Jerusalem, “we have shown the world once again that the US can be trusted”.

Trump did not attend the opening ceremony but in a video message broadcast at the event he congratulated Israel, saying the opening had been “a long time coming.” He said “Israel is a sovereign nation with the right, like every other sovereign nation, to determine its own capital. Yet for many years we failed to acknowledge the obvious. The plain reality that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital”.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeineh said the US had “cancelled its role in the peace process and has insulted the world, the Palestinian people and the Arab and the Islamic nation and it has created incitement and instability”. Abbas himself described the embassy as a “new settlement” in Jerusalem.

France expressed its official disapproval of the opening of the US embassy whilst South Africa withdrew its Ambassador from Israel and Turkey pulled its ambassadors from both the US and Israel.  The British Government said: “The Prime Minister said in December when the announcement was first made that we disagree with the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital before a final status agreement. The British embassy to Israel is based in Tel Aviv and we have no plans to move it.”

The embassy will temporarily be located in the Consular Section of the US Consulate-General on David Flusser Street in the Arnona neighbourhood. In the longer term the embassy is expected to be built on the large adjacent site of the Diplomat Hotel, which was bought by the US in 2014.