A Small Detail But A Large Statement

Last week, the official White House site made a subtle but important change to one of the pictures it has been displaying. Previously, there was a shot taken in "Jerusalem, Israel." "Jerusalem" is now an island without a country, and "Israel" has been deleted from the photo. If Obama can make the victims of Fast and Furious into non-persons, I guess they can turn Jerusalem into a non-capital.

There has been a two-administration battle between Congress's insistence that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the administration's insistence that such a determination belongs to the executive branch through its constitutional authority to conduct the nation's foreign affairs. As far as the executive branch is concerned through both the Bush and Obama administrations, the status of Jerusalem remains unsettled.

Fair enough. But the White House website has always shown the picture of Jerusalem in conjunction with the word Israel. The photo was a picture of Vice President Joe Biden meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2010. It was entitled: "Biden and Peres meet in Jerusalem, Israel. Suddenly, Biden met with Peres in Jerusalem, (fill in the blank). Either that, or they met in just-plain-Jerusalem.

The whole brouhaha was set off when American naturalized citizens wanted their passports to read: "Birthplace--Jerusalem, Israel." Before removal of the word "Israel" from the photo, the state department issued a brief statement reiterating the administration's position that "US citizens born in Jerusalem may not have 'Israel' listed in their passports as their place of birth." Yet in another photo, still extant on the website, there is a story about a trainee foreign service officer whose "first assignment will be in Jerusalem, Israel, beginning August 2011."

The closest historical parallel I can think of is the airbrushing out of Nazis loyal to Hitler and communists loyal to Stalin when those same dictators decided that the loyalists had become a drug on their respective agendas. In 2002, Congress passed a law allowing naturalized American Jews to include the word "Israel" on their passports if they chose to do so. The representatives who supported the move claim it had no foreign policy significance whatsoever, and merely addressed the concerns of naturalized American Jews that a simple elementary truth be imprinted on the passports.

There's an old Borscht-belt comedian's joke that somewhat fits the situation. An angry husband comes home to find a man hiding in his wife's closet. He asks: "What are you doing in there?" The man replies: "Everybody's gotta be somewhere." Likewise, every city has to be somewhere. So where is Jerusalem--Mars? The State Department is consistently inconsistent. Its address for the US Consulate is officially in zip code 91002--no country. But in applications for social security deposits and its official guidebook to Jerusalem, it gives "Jerusalem, Israel" as its address.

The department has not been nearly so scrupulous about its unitary authority on diplomatic documents when it comes to other disputed homelands. Since 1994, naturalized Americans from Taiwan have been allowed to state their birthplace as simply Taiwan, or alternatively, Taiwan, China. It seems the State Department is less worried about offending a superpower than it is about offending Jihadistan and the Palestinians. China has never acknowledged Taiwan as a separate nation, and continues to deem it an unlawful breakaway province. Officially, the US does not recognize Taiwan as a formal state or country either, but it's a whole lot looser about what can be written on a passport.

To put another exclamation point on the silliness, the State Department is not nearly so doctrinaire about certain other "disputed homelands" in the Middle East. Naturalized American citizens from the Golan Heights are free to declare Syria as their birth nation. This is in spite of the fact that the Golan Heights have been under Israel's control since 1967, and were formally annexed into Israel in 1981. Before that time, the Golan Heights were Syrian for only twenty-three years, previously having been a French protectorate and part of the Ottoman Empire.

So now the question becomes, "is this change on the White House website a reflection of a genuine difference of position between the executive and legislative branches, or merely a prelude to another Obama apology tour of the Middle East?" It also raises the question "why now?"