Former White House Mideast envoy under Donald Trump, Jason D. Greenblatt, told Israel Hayom this week that the controversial proclamation to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital by the 45th president has proved itself over the past five years.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Greenblatt has recently released a book about his time in the administration called "In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East – And How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It."
Greenblatt, along with then Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner, was privy to the deliberations inside the administration leading up to the Dec. 6, 2017 proclamation, and shared some of what transpired in the weeks and months leading up to the momentous decision, recalling how Trump defied warnings that had been sounded by some officials both before and after.
"It was ultimately the president's decision, after reviewing all the information that was presented to him by all parts of the US government. So turned out he was right," Greenblatt said, adding that Trump had the courage to implement the Jerusalem Embassy Act that had been legislated more than 20 years earlier mandating the shift in US policy and the moving of the US diplomatic mission to the capital.
"For 20 years, we've had presidential presidential candidates promise that. Let's come back to the law; the law was passed in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. That itself is a remarkable thing. And then you have all these presidential candidates who make these statements and say they're going to do it. But when they get in the White House, they decide not to do it. And I don't blame them. There were the briefings that I sat in on, and I am sure they sat in on similar briefings. It's not for me to say what the risk is for the president at the time to decide. But they all decided to sign a waiver. That's unfortunate. It's unfortunate that they didn't respect US law. I think part of it might have been the briefings, but also because they didn't want to mess around with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The fact that President Trump had the courage to do it and realized that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wasn't resolved irrespective of those waivers and that standing by Israel and standing by the truth should be the only way to step in the right direction of peace – to me was a very, very big deal."
Greenblatt recalls that Trump encountered resistance to the move all the way to the end.
"There are a lot of people in government, ours, yours everywhere, that for their own political reasons, make statements have opinions, call themselves experts, and say things that turned out not to be true. So sometimes you need a strong leader who will listen and weigh what they say. But ultimately, it's the leader's decision to make, not the person from the State Department or the National Security Council, or any of us, Dave [Friedman], myself, Jared [Kushner]. We all had our ability to say something. Each of us has our thoughts, our opinions on how the president or in your case, the prime minister, have to make a decision based on how they think the right what they think the right thing was to do."
Greenblatt added that even after the decision was announced in a special presidential address from the White House, there were some who continued to fight, hoping the president would get cold feet in implementing the relocation of the embassy or even walk back the historic shift in policy.
"I remember that people accepted it, but then they tried to talk us out of moving the embassy, meaning they said, 'He did what he did fine. But don't do part II'.Some people even tried to get him to rescind it [the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital]," Greenblatt said. He stressed that the best response was to tell them this was a policy decision that was written into the law books in the 1990s.
"There were groups of people within our government and even people outside of government who felt that to do it was extremely dangerous. You know, that it would start significant conflict, riots, and way beyond riots throughout the Middle East if he did it. The other school of thought felt that what he should be doing is giving something to the Palestinians because they felt he was giving something to Israel for free. And I was very shocked at that. For each of those people who came to me, I said that they should go back and read the law," Greenblatt said. "The law says absolutely nothing about giving the Palestinians something. What the law says is that the capital should be Jerusalem. And once I explained, reminding them of what the law said, they took a step back and stop talking because they realized just how wrong they were."
Greenblatt's recollection is different than Kushner's when it comes to how then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the emerging proclamation, stressing that Netanyahu was very much in favor of the decision and advocated for it all the way to the end.
Kushner recently claimed that Netanyahu was not enthusiastic about the decision, but Greenblatt has a different take. "Netanyahu didn't want to make any guarantees for the president that security is going to be perfect. He respected President Trump to make his decision for the US. Netanyahu said that he will make sure that things are safe as best as he can with respect to what Israel can do, but it needed to be President Trump's decision. My recollection is that he didn't want to push Trump beyond making a request. I wouldn't say that he wasn't supportive. He had pushed for it in all the meetings that he had with President Trump. So I think he was not only supportive of it, but argued for it up to the point of, that it ultimately needs to be your [Trump's] decision as president."
Greenblatt also shared what it was like being in the White House in the buildup to the address with the president in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. He said he was overcome with emotion not just by being witness to history, but because of the immediate reaction in the press.
"I have this memory from the actual day itself when he made the announcement in December. Only he and the vice president were in the actual room. The rest of us were standing right outside looking in. It was very, very moving to see it. The press, of course, was in the room with him. And from there, we went to his private dining room, outside the Oval Office. And then I remember, of course, walking out of the White House calling my wife, almost crying and thinking, 'Wow, I can't believe after all these years after Congress passed the law that finally we had somebody who kept his word and did what he promised to do.'"
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
