The proposed move of the United States embassy to Jerusalem, announced Monday by Vice President Mike Pence before Israel’s Knesset, would serve as a “tangible rejection” of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which characterized Israel’s presence in the Old City of Jerusalem and other areas captured by Israel in 1967 as “illegal,” according to an assessment written last year by legal scholar, Eugene Kontrovich.

Kontorovich, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law and director of the Kohelet Policy Forum ‘s International Law Department, wrote that if the Trump administration would choose to relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to the U.S. Consular Section in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood, it would mark the “most tangible rejection” of 2334’s declaration that Israel’s presence in any area captured in 1967  is illegal. The Arnona neighborhood, Kontorovich wrote, “is a few hundred meters over the imaginary line across which the United Nations says Jews may not go.”

In addition to marking a rejection by the U.S. of resolution 2334, moving the embassy to Arnona, Kontorovich explained, “would also fulfill the Republican Party platform of moving the embassy to ‘indivisible’ Jerusalem, and be in accordance with the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which calls for moving the embassy to a ‘unified’ Jerusalem, i.e., including those parts which were reunified in 1967.”

[Photo: me / WikiCommons]