Ln December 6, 2017, Donald Trump dealt his first blow to the implementation of international law in the Middle East. He recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a decision that all his predecessors had refused to endorse because of the disputed nature of the Holy City, of which only the western part has been integrated into Israel since 1949, the eastern part not having been occupied only in 1967.
It was while waiting for a definitive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the United States, in unison with the other members of the UN, had until then maintained their embassy in Israel in Tel Aviv. Bill Clinton had even proposed in 2000, within the framework of the “two-state solution”that Jerusalem be a capital shared between Israel and the future Palestinian state, with Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish neighborhoods and Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighborhoods (the 300,000 Palestinians remain a 60% majority in the occupied territory of East Jerusalem).
A domestic policy decision
Trump sweeps aside such considerations to stick to the one and only freedom of worship, according to him perfectly guaranteed by Israel in Jerusalem. Thus denying the national attachment of the Palestinian people to the Holy City, as well as the daily violence of the occupation in East Jerusalem, Trump continues his enterprise of demolishing international legality by disengaging the United States from the agreement on the Iranian nuclear power, then by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian territory of the Golan, occupied since 1967. The Republican president thus intends to satisfy the evangelical right which supports him unconditionally in the name of a “Christian Zionism”.
In addition to his daughter and his son-in-law, he is represented in Jerusalem, on May 14, 2018, during the official inauguration of the new American embassy, by two pastors whose anti-Semitic excesses did not disqualify him in the eyes of Benyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister since 2009. It is because the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is paradoxically much more important for the ” christian zionists of the hard right in the United States than for American Jews, who consistently continue to vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
Netanyahu’s bet on Christian fundamentalists goes well beyond the United States, with, on the evening of May 14, 2018 in Jerusalem, a coordination meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister and evangelical leaders from Latin America, where their messianism Zionist is driven by militant proselytism. It is in this context that the White House can be pleased to see its gesture in Jerusalem soon followed by Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay. But the actual move of the Paraguayan embassy to Jerusalem is so linked to the personality of President Horacio Cartes that it only lasts a few months. The new Paraguayan head of state, Mario Abdo Benitez, although a member of the same party as Cartes, decided in September 2018 to repatriate his embassy to Tel Aviv in order to ” to contribute ” at ” a broad, just and lasting peace in the Middle East “. Netanyahu, furious at this setback, had to content himself with the commitment, this time followed by effect, of the president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, who was closely linked to the evangelical right.
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