Jerusalem: Obama the Pragmatist Puts A Challenge to Israel

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On Friday, the Obama Administration announced that it was delaying the decision on moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for another six months.

The decision is significant in two ways. First, it separates Obama the President from Obama the Presidential candidate. Last spring, when he was still not quite the Democratic nominee for President, Obama declared to the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

Second, the delay is a gesture of goodwill to Arab states, hoping that they in return will make some symbolic step of reconciliation with Israel. Leaders of these states would prefer a longer-term US suspension of the move to Jerusalem but will weclome this as an initial signal from Washington in the start-up of the peace process.

With this decision, Obama the "pragmatist" has again come to the fore, rebuffing the declaration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 21 May that “Jerusalem would be the capital of Israel forever”. On the same day, Obama outlined this pragmatism in an  interview with C-SPAN:

SCULLY: Your Senior Advisor David Axelrod describes you as a pragmatist, what does that mean?

OBAMA: Well, I think what it means is that I don’t approach problems by asking myself, is this a conservative – is there a conservative approach to this or a liberal approach to this, is there a Democratic or Republican approach to this. I come at it and say, what’s the way to solve the problem, what’s the way to achieve an outcome where the American people have jobs or their health care quality has improved or our schools are producing well educated workforce of the 21st century.

And I am willing to tinker and borrow and steal ideas from just about anybody if I think they might work. And we try to base most of our decisions on what are the facts, what kind of evidence is out there, have programs or policies been thought through.

I spend a lot of time sitting with my advisors and just going through a range of options. And if they are only bringing me options that have been dusted off the shelf, that are the usual stale ideas, then a lot of times I ask them, well, what do our critics say, do they have ideas that maybe we haven’t thought of.

Now that issue of pragmatism crosses to Israel. Given the Friday decision and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's guarantee that East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, how does Netanyahu --- facing a difficult position in his Cabinet and with Israeli public opinion --- respond?