Arab-Israeli Conflict: Part 1

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As usual, Hamas scrambles to get some attention as the world is focused on Fatah's leader.

 

[lifelessheap]

Why should the Israelis be allowed to continue occupying the way they do? Its basically modern imperialism. Give the Palestinians their state or don't and just annex the territories into Israel. They could also negotiate something in between like a permanent settlement for autonomy like in Aceh Indonesia or like what the Kurds have been agitating for.

But they don't, they continue their project of colonialism and apartheid.

Yeah, the Jews tend to get to do whatever they want and nobody will call them on their shit. Nobody will challenge them.

 

[Arkain2K]

Why Abbas asked Israel to cut power to Gaza
Ahmad Abu Amer | May 9, 2017

A Palestinian vendor uses battery-powered lights as he sells cigarettes during a power cut at Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, Gaza, April 25, 2017​

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Several Israeli media outlets, including Israel’s Channel 10, reported April 27 that the Palestinian Authority had asked the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories to stop funding electricity for the Gaza Strip.

Channel 10 reported that the PA submitted a formal request to the body's head, Yoav Mordechai, to halt funding in the amount of 40 million shekels ($12 million) a month, which Israel withholds from Palestinian tax revenues. However, Israel did not respond to the Palestinian demand and continued to supply electricity to Gaza.

The request appears to be part of the PA’s plan to pressure Hamas to hand over control of the Gaza Strip. Gazans rallied to condemn the Palestinian request.

Fathy Sheikh Khalil, deputy head of the Palestinian Energy Authority (PEA) in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, “We contacted the concerned Israeli authorities, who confirmed that the PA did in fact make the request to Israel.”

Al-Monitor contacted PA officials about the matter, but they declined to comment.

PEA acting director Zafer Melhem told the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Ayyam April 28 that the PA is likely to try to halt the electricity supplies in Gaza should “the officials of the electricity company in Gaza governorates continue to collect taxes without sending them to the PA treasury in Ramallah.” When asked about Channel 10's report, he said no Palestinian party informed him that the PA had made such a request.

Sheikh Khalil said that the Israeli lines supplying Gaza with 120 megawatts are the only source of electricity in Gaza after Egyptian power lines halted operations April 20 for maintenance and the only power plant in Gaza stopped operating April 9 due to lack of fuel. The PEA refused to continue to purchase fuel with the heavy taxes imposed on it by the PA, which pushes costs to 270% of the fuel’s original price.

Sheikh Khalil warned that should Israel decide to halt the supply of electricity to Gaza via its lines, which provide a portion of Gaza’s energy needs, amounting to a total of 450-500 megawatts a day, Gaza will face a complete blackout, which could lead to environmental and health disasters.

Electricity is available in Gaza homes for only three to four hours a day. Some citizens get a few extra hours of electricity from small generators.

Sheikh Khalil further noted that the PEA has been in contact with several donor countries in the past several days, including Qatar and Turkey, to try to solve the problem and pressure the PA to supply fuel to Gaza’s power plant tax-free.

On April 25, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth quoted an unnamed Israel Defense Forces officer as saying, “The Gaza Strip will live without electricity in the next few days. … It is important to know how Hamas will act. Will it continue to strengthen its military structure, or will it mobilize its efforts to solve the electricity problem?”

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the news of the PA request points to a worsening political rivalry between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Gaza.

Qassem warned Israel not to comply with the PA's request because it would bring Gaza into major crises. Speaking to Al-Monitor, he called on the PA to ease the siege on the Gaza Strip and treat it as part of the Palestinian homeland.

Until recently, Gaza partially relied on its own power station that has run out of fuel. The station supplied Gaza with 60 megawatts a day. The Israeli lines supply Gaza with 120 megawatts, while Egyptian lines that provided 32 megawatts are currently out of order.

Political analyst and former head of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network Mohsen Abu Ramadan told Al-Monitor that Israel has a consistent policy of not tightening the siege on the Gaza Strip, as a crisis would have undesirable results — potentially including violent reactions by Hamas.

He does not believe that the PA's pressure on Hamas will succeed. “On April 27, the PA announced that it will no longer pay for the electricity Israel supplies to Gaza. Before that, it cut 30% of the salaries of PA employees in Gaza to pressure Hamas to hand over Gaza,” he said.

Abu Ramadan explained that there are no feasible alternatives for Hamas and the PEA, as alternative sources of energy such as large generators and solar cells are very scarce. He added, “A radical solution to the problem would be for Hamas to hand over control of the Gaza Strip in return for Fatah ending its dominance over the Palestinian political system, to include Hamas in the PLO and its Temporary Leadership Framework and to maximize [the PA's] partnership with Hamas.”

Mustafa al-Sawaf, a political analyst and former editor-in-chief of Felesteen newspaper, told Al-Monitor, “Israel probably denied the PA’s request to stop the electricity supply through its lines out of fear that the situation in Gaza would spiral out of control. Israel wants to avoid an explosion in the Gaza Strip and is not ready to face one now.”

He said that Hamas’ leadership is in constant contact with several donor countries that consider Abbas’ actions toward Gazans inhumane.

Several economists believe Abbas will continue to pressure Gaza and Hamas, while local and international bodies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, warn that the perpetuation of the electricity crisis in Gaza will lead to health and environmental disasters.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/ori...ity-stop-funding-electricity-israel-gaza.html

 

[jeffk]

This is the annual anti-Israel week at the local college. There is one now retired teacher who goes to the events and trolls them.

I am not sure who organized it but a student group had Israeli reservists come to the campus and have a question and answer thing. The anti-Israel group showed up and the retired teacher said he respects the reservists for putting on the uniform. Then asked if any of the anti-Israel folks if they would ever serve in the military.

It caused a good ruckus. It starts at about 3:00 in. I'd say he succeeded with his trolling at this event.

 

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Mahmoud Abbas, Donald Trump, and the Politics of Peace
By Bernard Avishai | 02:45 P.M.

Donald Trump’s meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, raises questions and speculation about the peace process between Israel and Palestine.​

Donald Trump met Mahmoud Abbas, in Bethlehem today, a twofer for a President intent, as the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, put it last week, on visiting “homelands and holy sites” and expressing “his desire for dignity and self-determination for the Palestinians.” Reading prepared remarks, in a Presidential palace outfitted with the trappings of sovereignty, Trump told reporters that he’d work with Abbas on “unlocking the potential of the Palestinian economy.” Naftali Bennett, the Israeli education minister and a settlement advocate, probably spoke for most of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government last November, when he declared that, with Trump’s election, “the era of the Palestinian state is over.” Today, in Bethlehem, it was prolonged.

Much has been written about the Trump Administration’s growing desire to conceive that state from the region in, rather than from the conflict out. Yesterday, in Riyadh, Trump reportedly agreed with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to hold a peace summit, with Netanyahu, Abbas, and Jordanian and possibly even Saudi representatives in attendance. There is also much discussion about the vulnerability of Netanyahu’s government, due to the ongoing criminal investigations (he is accused of, among other things, enabling close associates to profit from Israel’s procurement of naval vessels) but also to the threat posed by coalition partners like Bennett’s Jewish Home Party, which would rather topple the government than accept concessions—particularly a prospective Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem—under U.S. pressure. But Palestinians have a politics, too, which usually gets only cursory attention. Abbas has an ongoing rivalry with Hamas, but other challenges besides; if the Trump Administration procrastinates, or expects significant new concessions from him, Abbas’s staying power is similarly uncertain.

Abbas is eighty-two, with a smoking habit, and he has no designated successor. He is the head of the Fatah movement and was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. (As a Palestinian friend told me, Abbas is in his twelfth year of a four-year term.) He won with more than sixty per cent of the vote. Yet polls now show that more than sixty per cent of Palestinians want him gone. His achievements—two rounds of peace negotiations with Israel, first with Ehud Olmert, in 2008, then with Netanyahu, in 2014; securing non-member observer-state status for Palestine at the United Nations, and Palestinian standing with the International Criminal Court—are shadowed by suspicions that P.A. leaders engage, if only by necessity, in a form of collaboration that occasions financial corruption and undermines Palestinian honor.

“Despite some shrewd diplomatic moves, the reality on the ground is bitter, muddled,” Sam Bahour, a prominent business consultant in Ramallah, told me. Ordinary Palestinians resent what they see as a “defunct political system, no parliamentary elections since January, 2006, and police brutality, especially against Hamas supporters.” Some P.A. officials have managed the flow of aid to monopolistic enterprises that provide perks and inflated salaries to friends and family—reportedly including Abbas’s son. According to the Times of London, European Union auditors can’t account for nearly two billion pounds in aid distributed between 2008 and 2012. But the World Bank reports that about thirty per cent of Palestinians are categorized as unemployed, and youth unemployment in Gaza is nearly sixty per cent. Abbas has also appeared powerless to prevent new Israeli settlements, military aggression, and the siege on Gaza.

None of this means that Hamas is viewed as the necessary alternative. According to Khalil Shikaki, the director of Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, leads Abbas in Presidential polls forty-nine per cent to forty-four. This seems more a barometer of frustration, though, than an endorsement of Hamas ideology. The Islamist group rarely polls above thirty per cent in parliamentary elections, while Fatah polls above forty. Hamas violently expelled the Fatah leadership of the P.A. from Gaza, in 2007; it has since refused to renounce terrorist acts against Israel, or to recognize Israel’s legitimacy—even in the group’s recently revised charter, which accepts a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders. Among the public, Hamas’s tough talk and missile attacks excite general pride but also a fear of fatal recklessness, particularly given the horrors in Syria. “For older Palestinians, Damascus feels next door,” the veteran West Bank journalist Danny Rubinstein told me. “They focus on normal life. They’ll overlook a lot—corruption, even collaboration—to keep things from descending into chaos. But what do young people overlook?”

Meanwhile, the recent meetings with Trump have given Abbas a boost. During his visit to the White House, earlier this month, he reportedly proposed restarting negotiations with Israel where he and Olmert left off, in 2008. Those negotiations covered most major issues—security, borders, Jerusalem, and refugees—and both leaders considered the remaining gaps bridgeable. He is also turning up the heat on Hamas in Gaza, in an effort to force a genuine reunification—an action that may backfire, as Gazans are suffering in the process. Abbas has, for example, insisted that Hamas, not the P.A., pay the taxes due to Israel for the fuel that runs Gaza’s only power plant; Gazan homes currently get barely four hours of electricity a day. But, to fully regain its moral prestige, Fatah needs the promise of charismatic leadership, and Abbas’s old rival in the movement, Marwan Barghouti, is turning up the heat on him.

Barghouti has been held in Israeli prison since 2002, for murder and terror crimes, but before that he was an open advocate for the 1993 Oslo Accords. Khalil Shikaki says that Barghouti is the most popular leader in the Palestinian territories, acceptable to both Fatah and Hamas supporters, in part because he has remained defiant in prison. Last month, Barghouti organized a hunger strike of more than fifteen hundred high-security prisoners, whose goals he outlined in an Op-Ed for the Times. They are calling for, among other concessions, more phone calls and visits with family members. Abbas has no choice but to support the strike, but, if Barghouti wins more open paths of communication, he will be better positioned to challenge Abbas for the Presidency, even from prison. Israel’s efforts to break the strike, including the release of a video showing Barghouti desperately sneaking a candy bar, prompted his wife, Fadwa, to declare that they would “only strengthen the prisoners’ resolve.” Seven hundred prisoners are still on strike. If they begin to die—or, more likely, if they are force-fed—West Bank streets are likely to be roiled by demonstrations. (Rioting broke out on Friday, leaving thirty people injured.) It is hard not to see Barghouti’s strike as a campaign to revive Fatah’s reputation for insurgency, while positioning himself as the movement’s natural heir.

Barghouti is not Abbas’s only challenger, however. More conventional rivals have emerged, especially since Fatah held its seventh congress, last December, in Ramallah. Jibril Rajoub, a former guerrilla who was himself imprisoned in the nineteen-eighties, placed second to Barghouti in elections to Fatah’s executive committee. Rajoub is now the head of Palestine’s branch of FIFA—international soccer’s governing body—and has campaigned to have Israeli settlement teams expelled from the association. The P.A.’s intelligence chief, Majid Faraj, has met with Mike Pompeo, the new C.I.A. director, to discuss the P.A.’s coördination with the Israeli military. The P.A. can’t hold new Presidential and parliamentary elections while Gaza and the West Bank remain divided, but the aging Fatah leadership might nevertheless try to reëstablish its legitimacy—to “rebrand” the P.A., as one official put it to me—by rebuilding the National Council, the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as absorbing Hamas as a political party and forming a new executive committee of that organization, which would be led by a new Fatah chairman and P.A. technocrats.

What’s most salient about the plausible Fatah challengers, however, is that none offer strategic principles different from those that Abbas has proposed. They all want two states, with Hamas co-opted into the P.A., in order to continue nonviolent state building and to rally the world’s powers against Israel and the occupation. Erel Margalit, the founder of the firm Jerusalem Venture Partners, who is running for the leadership of the Israeli Labor Party, met with Rajoub in late April. “We spoke about ideas we can start working on now,” Margalit told me, including “the groundwork for a two-state solution, economic and security projects between Israel and Palestine and the region at large.”

Israeli rightists, by contrast, seem perversely contented with the thought that the P.A. would collapse if Abbas exits. The Likud environmental minister, Ze’ev Elkin, said, “The P.A. was born with Abu Mazen”—Abbas’s nickname—“and the P.A. will disappear with Abu Mazen.” Despite the many problems, however, collapse seems improbable. After twelve years of Abbas, the P.A. is a state apparatus in the making, whose resilience should not be obscured by the ups and downs of peacemaking.

The P.A. directly employs more than a hundred and fifty thousand people—police, teachers, office workers. Its officials anticipate an eight-hundred-million-dollar shortfall in this fiscal year, yet the G.D.P. in the Palestinian territories doubled from 2008 to 2016, to about eight billion dollars—the growth managed by economists trained in the U.S. Palestinian universities graduate more than a thousand computer-science specialists a year. Ariel Ezrahi, the director of infrastructure in the Office of the Quartet, the international body set up in 2002 to aid Palestinian development, told me that the P.A. has worked “persistently and constructively” with Israel and international sponsors to gain independent sources of power generation. A new power plant is projected for Jenin, as is a gas pipeline to generate electricity in Gaza.

The six-billion-dollar private sector is more obviously resilient. Banks chartered by the Palestine Monetary Authority have net assets of more than thirteen billion dollars. Palestine has a billion-dollar telecommunications sector, a half-billion-dollar stone-and-marble industry, and prime contractors active in Israel’s furniture and food-processing supply chains. Rawabi, a planned city expected to house forty thousand residents, is rising, north of Ramallah; its growth will be driven by a high-tech core, with branch plants of international software companies. Israel’s Mellanox Technologies is already committed, Bashar Masri, the C.E.O. of the Rawabi development, told me.

If the P.A. did not exist, in other words, Palestinian civil society and the business sector would have to invent it. So would Israel’s defense establishment, which dreads the prospect of having to reimpose naked military rule. That makes any new round of peace negotiations—despite Abbas’s wobbly prestige or Trump’s uncertain impulses—irresistible. But there is urgency, too. On Sunday, a general strike in support of the hunger strikers was announced in the West Bank. “Ramallah is a city of ghosts—road blocks and burning tires in the main streets,” Ammar Aker, the C.E.O. of Paltel Group, the P.A.’s preëminent telecom company, told me. “The status quo is a provocation. Yet violence will destroy everything we’ve built.”


Bernard Avishai’s latest book is “Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness.” He is a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College and an adjunct professor of business at the Hebrew University.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/mahmoud-abbas-donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-peace

 

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Palestinian prisoners in Israel suspend hunger strike
Deal struck with Israel after intense talks hailed as 'victory' for Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike for 40 days.
27 May 2017

Palestinians celebrated in Ramallah after prisoners ended their 40-day hunger strike ​

A mass hunger strike staged by Palestinian prisoners over conditions in Israeli jails was suspended on Saturday after a deal with Israel, officials said.

About 1,500 inmates launched the actionon April 17, in one of the largest such strikes.

The 40-day hunger strike raised tensions with Israel as protests in support of the strikers spilled over into clashes in the occupied West Bank and along the Israel-Gaza border.

More than 800 prisoners, who had stuck with the hunger strike until Saturday, ended it after talks held with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestinian Authority concluded in an agreement with Israel, allowing prisoners to receive two visitors per month.

Issa Karaka, Chairman of Prisoners' Affairs at the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), confirmed the inmates had agreed to stop the strike.

On Wednesday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein urged Israel to improve conditions for Palestinians in its custody.

Both Karaka and the Israeli Prisons Service did not initially divulge the full details of the agreement. However, the Prison Service did say that a second monthly family visit would be reinstated after it had been cut in the past.

"After intense negotiations, a compromise was reached on the just demands of the prisoners and based on the agreement, the details of which will be disclosed later, the strike has ended," Jamal Mheysen, a member of the central committee of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement, said in Ramallah.

"Today, we declare the victory of the prisoners and the Palestinian people. We declare the triumph of the prisoners in their epic struggle and fight for freedom and dignity," he added.

The strike was called by Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, the most high-profile Palestinian jailed in Israel, to protest against solitary confinement and an Israeli practice of detention without trial that has been applied to thousands of prisoners since the 1980s.

Other demands included longer and more regular family visits, landlines installed in prisons and better healthcare.

There are currently 6,500 Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel, including more than 500 administrative detainees, according to Jerusalem-based prisoner rights group Addameer.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Ramallah, Majed Bamya, who oversees the prisoner files for the Palestinian foreign ministry, said the outcome of the hunger strike was a success.

"This was one of the widest and longest Palestinian hunger strikes in history of the prisoners' movement and it was for basic demands.

"Israeli reaction was that there will not be a dialogue, nothing will be given. They tried to break the hunger strike by force and utterly failed. The hunger strikers remained steadfast, dialogue was established and the demands were met.

"We will have the details in the coming hours."

The Free Marwan Barghouti campaign said in statement that "the Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike prevailed".

"This is an important step towards full respect of the rights of Palestinian prisoners under international law. It is also an indication of the reality of the Israeli occupation, which has left no option to Palestinian prisoners but to starve themselves to achieve basic rights they are entitled to under international law," the statement added.

Barghouti was convicted for his involvement in the second Palestinian intifada, and sentenced in 2004 to five life terms.

Surveys show many Palestinians want him to be their next president.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/...el-suspend-hunger-strike-170527074751097.html

 

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With an eye toward a Mideast peace deal, President Trump puts off his promise to move U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem - for now
Tracy Wilkinson and Brian Bennett | June 1, 2017

With an eye toward a potential Middle East peace deal, President Trump on Thursday issued a waiver that delays moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem for at least six months, a decision in keeping with previous administrations.

The move marks a reversal for Trump, who repeatedly vowed during last year’s campaign to swiftly move the embassy from Tel Aviv, where it has always been located, to Jerusalem. Other candidates have made the same promise, but no president has ever followed through.

Israel considers Jerusalem its capital, but the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem for their capital in a future state.

The U.S. and most major world powers agree that the status of Jerusalem should be settled in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and no country keeps its embassy in Jerusalem because of the dispute.

In a statement, the White House said Trump made this decision "to maximize the chances of successfully negotiating a deal between Israel and the Palestinians."

It added, "But as he has repeatedly stated his intention to move the embassy, the question is not if that move happens, but only when."

After Trump took office, Jordan's King Abdullah and other Arab leaders warned the White House that moving the embassy would enrage Arab communities, especially the Palestinians, and severely complicate any peace talks.

Since then, the White House has said Trump is reviewing the matter. During his visit to the Middle East last month, he met with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders and called for a resumption of negotiations toward what he has called “the ultimate deal.”

Moving the embassy is a priority for many Republican evangelicals in Trump’s political base, as well as some of his Jewish supporters.

Presidents of both parties have issued the waiver every six months since Congress passed a law mandating the embassy move in 1995. Trump was facing a Thursday deadline to renew the waiver or see the State Department lose half its funding for its overseas facilities.

Trump's new ambassador to Israel, his former bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, has vowed to live in Jerusalem, about 30 miles from Tel Aviv.

Palestinians welcomed the waiver and said they look forward to more consultation with the Trump administration.

"This is in line with the long-held U.S. policy and the international consensus, and it gives peace a chance," said Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the United States.

Israeli officials expressed disappointment, but several said they believed Trump will transfer the embassy before he leaves office.

In a statement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that keeping embassies “outside the capital” only “drives peace further away” because it keeps alive “the Palestinian fantasy that the Jewish people and the Jewish state have no connection to Jerusalem.”

The statement added that the Israeli government appreciated Trump’s “commitment to moving the embassy in the future.”

Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told a radio interviewer that keeping the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv “is a surrender to Arab and Muslim pressure.”

Trump’s decision had been widely expected. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month that Trump had to weigh what effect moving the embassy would have on potential peace talks.

“The president has recently expressed his view that he wants to put a lot of effort into seeing if we cannot advance a peace initiative between Israel and Palestine," Tillerson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on May 14. "And so I think in large measure the president is being very careful to understand how such a decision would impact a peace process."

Still, a few White House advisors continued to argue as late as Wednesday that Trump should fulfill his campaign pledge and relocate the embassy, or at least let the existing waiver lapse and promise to move the embassy at a later date.

Military and national security officials, including Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that moving the embassy now — and the protests it might spark in Arab nations — would put U.S. personnel overseas at risk, according to a person familiar with the deliberations and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal White House discussions.

In addition, Trump remains determined to help deliver a peace deal and was encouraged by his meetings with Arab leaders in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last month.

He decided that moving the embassy to Jerusalem might sap support from other Arab states and drive Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from the negotiating table, officials said.

The White House has made overtures to Abbas, hosting him for a lunch in the West Wing in early May and allowing the Palestinian flag be placed behind Trump while the two leaders made statements about the visit.

During his two-day stop in Israel, Trump visited Abbas in the West Bank at Abbas’s presidential compound in Bethlehem, just outside Israel’s border wall on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Trump signaled to Abbas that he must show progress in the peace talks and start delivering on several U.S. demands: shutting down terrorist incitement, stopping Palestinian Authority payments to the families of those killed or imprisoned in terrorist attacks against Israelis, and refraining from lobbying the United Nations for additional resolutions against Israel.

Trump made clear to Abbas that payments to families of militants are an “impediment to peace,” a White House official said.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-fg-trump-israel-20170601-story.html

 

[Arkain2K]

10:02 a.m.

President Donald Trump has temporarily waived a law requiring the U.S. to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Trump's move to renew the waiver for six months keeps the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv for now. Trump has said he's reviewing whether to fulfill his campaign promise to move it to Jerusalem.

Trump was facing a Thursday deadline to renew the waiver or see the State Department lose half its funding for its overseas facilities. Presidents of both parties have renewed the waiver every six months for years.

Israel considers Jerusalem its capital, but the Palestinians claim east Jerusalem for the capital of a future state.

The U.S. says its policy on Jerusalem hasn't changed and that Jerusalem's status must be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians.

 

[Arkain2K]

10:20 a.m.

The White House says President Donald Trump decided to delay moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem to maximize chances of reaching a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians.

But press secretary Sean Spicer says Trump still intends to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. Spicer says, "The question is not if that move happens, but only when."

Spicer says the six-month waiver Trump signed Thursday shouldn't be considered a retreat from Trump's "strong support for Israel" and for the alliance between the U.S. and Israel. He says pursuing a Mideast peace deal fulfills the president's "solemn obligation to defend America's national security interests."

Trump was facing a Thursday deadline to either waive or comply with a law requiring him to move the embassy.

 

[Arkain2K]

10:50 a.m.

A senior Israeli official is expressing disappointment over Trump's decision against relocating the embassy to Jerusalem and is accusing the U.S. of caving in to Arab pressure.

Cabinet Minister Yuval Steinitz says the refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital makes no sense. Steinitz is a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Steinitz tells Israel's Army Radio station: "I think the time has come to put an end to this farce. Everybody recognizes Israel as the capital of Israel. When Trump comes here, he goes to Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv."

When told that Trump said he will move the embassy later, Steinitz says: "I hope that happens before the Messiah comes."

He said leaving foreign embassies in Tel Aviv is "a surrender to unfair Arab and Muslim pressure."

 

[Arkain2K]

11 a.m.

Jordan has welcomed President Donald Trump's decision to delay moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem.

The pro-Western kingdom had warned that such a move was a "red line" that it would bolster extremists if crossed. Jordan is the custodian of a major Muslim holy site in east Jerusalem, an area captured and annexed by Israel in 1967 and sought by Palestinians as a capital.

More than half of Jordan's citizens are of Palestinian descent.

Jordanian government spokesman Mohammed Momani said Thursday that "we strongly welcome the decision and highly value the message it is sending."

Momani says the president's decision shows "how much the administration values the advice of its allies" and that the focus must be on relaunching serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.