U.S Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley defended President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, telling a hostile U.N. Security Council: “Change is hard.”
“For nearly 70 years, the city of Jerusalem has been the capital of the State of Israel, despite many attempts by others to deny that reality,” Haley said at an emergency session of the Security Council on Friday.
In her remarks, Haley noted that the U.S. was the first nation to recognize Israel as an independent state, and in 1995 Congress formally declared that Jerusalem is the Israeli capital and that the U.S. embassy should, as a consequence, be located there.
“For 22 years, the American people have overwhelmingly supported that position, and they have waited…and waited. This week, President Trump finally made the decision to no longer deny the will of the American people,” she said.
She noted that while the State Department is moving the embassy, the U.S. has not taken a position on borders, and is leaving the “specific dimensions of sovereignty” up to the Israelis and Palestinians. Haley added that they support a “two-state solution,” and that there should be status quo at the holy sites.
“I understand the concern members have in calling this session. Change is hard. But we should never doubt what the truth can do,” she said. “We should never doubt that when we face the truth, believe in the human spirit, and encourage each other, that peace can happen.”
While she recognized that there were those with concerns in good faith about the move, she also had a stern warning for hostile actors: “To those who do not act in good faith – to any person, leader, country, or terrorist group that uses this week’s decision as a pretext for violence – you are only showing yourselves to be unfit partners of peace.”
Haley has been a vocal opponent of anti-Israel bias at the U.N. In particular, she has targeted the Security Council and the Human Rights Council for their attacks on Israel while ignoring violations from other countries. In her remarks, she repeated that theme, saying that the U.N. has been one of the globe’s “foremost centers” of anti-Israel hostility:
The UN has done much more to damage the prospects for Middle East peace than to advance them. We will not be a party to that. The United States no longer stands by when Israel is unfairly attacked in the United Nations. And the United States will not be lectured to by countries that lack any credibility when it comes to treating both Israelis and Palestinians fairly.
It seems likely that there will be continued pushback at the U.N. over the move. According to Fox News, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour told reporters that he expects a draft resolution to come up in the next few weeks asking the U.S. to rescind its position.
Such a resolution would be likely to pass, but unlikely to have much effect on the Trump administration.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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