New U.S. Embassy May Be in Jerusalem, but Not in Israel<br />Eugene Kontorovich, the director of international law at the conservative Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, contends<br />that by moving the embassy to the Arnona site the United States is recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over areas it captured in the 1967 war.<br />The diplomatic compound that will serve as the American Embassy until a permanent<br />site is found lies partly in a contested zone known as No Man’s Land.<br />But if the American recognition was already vague, leaving the eventual boundaries of sovereignty in Jerusalem up to the Israelis<br />and Palestinians, this odd quirk of political geography raises even sharper questions about which parts of the city the United States considers as Israel’s capital.<br />"Any permanent status for that territory should be part of a final status negotiation." The dispute could turn the American ambassador,<br />David M. Friedman, an avid supporter of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, into a new kind of diplomatic settler himself.<br />The provisional embassy site, in the Arnona neighborhood, "has been in continuous<br />Israeli use since 1949," the department said in a statement last week.<br />The fortresslike compound sits partly in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem<br />and partly in a section of No Man’s Land between West Jerusalem and predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.
