Having ambassador’s residence in Jerusalem is tantamount to moving the U.S. embassy
By J. Zel Lurie
DELRAY BEACH, Florida — If a fraction of the women from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio who left their homes o participate in the massive Women’s March against President Donald Trump on Saturday, January 21st had voted in the November election, Sheldon Adelson would not have been sitting in the dais in Washington as his boy Donald Trump was taking the Oath of Office as President of the United States.
Many of you know women who didn’t bother to vote because the polls showed that Hillary was far ahead, so her vote didn’t matter. But it did matter, because each of these three states was taken by Trump by a very small margin.
The same holds true for all of those who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary and did not vote in the general election. The total number of voters was the same as in 2012, despite an increase in population of 1.7%.
Still, Hillary’s popular majority was almost 3 million votes.
President Trump has not forgotten them. He is acting as if he won fair and square. Obviously, the majority of the voters opposed him. But how are they going to make their voices heard with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress?
President Trump has gotten around the fact that the majority of Americans have voted against him by claiming that the elections were rigged against him, and by making the absurd claim that Hillary Clinton received five million illegitimate votes.
They must resist.
Bernie Sanders sent out a mailing recommending a subscription to “The Hightower Lowdown.” He wrote, “I’m not interested in peddling a product, but I am deeply passionate about spreading our democracy movement. Just as the revolutionaries of 1776 needed the feisty pamphleteers to rally the people, so do we – and Hightower is one of the feistiest ever. The revolution continues.”
My days as a revolutionary began 75 years ago at Cornell University. They faded away a few years later, when I was drafted. Though I have never subscribed to Jim Hightower’s monthly publication.
I am indebted to my grand-nephew, Professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who showed in a column in the Los Angeles Times that the 75,000 voters for Obama in Detroit in 2012 had not bothered to vote in 2016. Similar deficiencies occurred in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Any one of them alone would have given Hillary sufficient electoral votes to be a majority.
Another anomaly in the primary vote made many Bernie Sanders voters feel robbed. In those states which nominate by caucus, Bernie Sanders was far ahead, but in the states that nominate by primary using machine voting, Clinton had the advantage of the 450 superdelegates which she had lined up.
President Trump has not waited for an investigation, which probably will never happen. He is spending the first couple weeks of his administration by slashing at the democratic values of the Obama administration in health, education, economy, taxes, and other matters promised in his campaign speeches. His inauguration speech was a rehash of his campaign aimed at new voters, but it didn’t work. A very slim majority of 18-29 year old voters supported him. When taking this together with the increase in population, Trump actually lost young voters.
MOVING THE EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM
One dramatic change which he promised is moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
Apparently, Prime Minister Netanyahu has asked that he wait until David Friedman, one of Trump’s lawyers who found ways to stop income tax payments, takes up his post as the American ambassador to Israel. Friedman serves as the president of the American Friends of Beth El, one of the large Jewish settlements in the West Bank. He insults American Jews who oppose the West Bank settlements, who are a majority of those who care, by calling them “Jewish kapos,” those that coordinated with the Nazi wardens of the death camps.
Apparently, Netanyahu and Trump have decided that when Friedman settles in Jerusalem, the problem will be solved without publicity that would incite violence throughout the Muslim world. The official American embassy in Israel will be his residence in Jerusalem, just as the official American embassy in Israel has been the Ambassador’s residence in a posh Tel Aviv suburb for many decades.
His office on Hayarkon Street on the Tel Aviv waterfront is commonly called the American Embassy, but is actually his Chancellery. Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem has been a staple of United States politics for decades. All that was needed was to move the Ambassador’s residence to Jerusalem.
Although no country outside of Micronesia has ever recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Isreali government has built a government campus in Jerusalem. Ambassador Friedman is the only one who will maintain a residence, which will be his embassy, in the same city.
All the other ambassadors will have to travel to Jerusalem for political talks. The large business of American officials in Israel – military, trade, economy, and other matters – will continue to be done by their offices in Tel Aviv. No more will a political slogan, “move the embassy to Jerusalem,” arouse the emotions of religious Jews. The embassy will have been moved.
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Lurie is a freelance writer based in Delray Beach, Florida. The centenarian sage may be reached via jzel.lurie@sdjewishworld.com