In recognizing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, President Trump was simply following the longstanding verdict of Congress, which has more than once called upon the executive branch to acknowledge reality. But, write the editors of the New York Sun, Congress would never have come to this conclusion without the efforts of the late Daniel P. Moynihan during his time in the U.S. Senate. They cite an incident that occurred in the early 1990s at the offices of the Forward:
[Moynihan] pulled out of his pocket a State Department telephone directory, which had Jerusalem listed as, in effect, its own country. The Democratic senator, formerly America’s envoy at the United Nations and ambassador to India, ranted at our foreign service. He was eager to move forward with some kind of legislative action.
At the same time, Moynihan quoted a warning that he attributed to Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin. It was that the Jerusalem question can’t be solved in the United States Congress. Moynihan’s point was that only Israel itself can decide where its capital is. Of course, Israel had long since done that, and Moynihan’s view was that it was up to us to acknowledge, to recognize it. Had he lived, the Democrats might have had a leading role in winning recognition.
In the years after Moynihan, the Democratic party started to put distance between itself and Israel’s democratically elected government. This became painfully obvious in 2012, when the Jerusalem issue was temporarily stripped from the Democratic platform and the party’s pro-Israel faction was left humiliated.
Read more on New York Sun: http://www.nysun.com/editorials/missing-mr-moynihan/90145/