Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu weighed in Sunday evening on the issue of the US embassy in Israel, after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said President Trump was still considering whether to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and was “listening to input from all interested parties in the region.”
The Prime Minister’s Office released a statement Sunday evening reaffirming the Prime Minister’s support for the relocation of not only the American embassy, but all embassies, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
In the statement, the Prime Minister’s Office said that such actions would be conducive to regional peace by finally putting to rest Arab aspirations to divide the Israeli capital.
"Israel's position has often been expressed to the American administration and to the world,” the PMO’s statement read. "The transfer of the American Embassy to Jerusalem not only will not harm the peace process, but the opposite. It will advance it by correcting a historic injustice and by smashing the Palestinian fantasy that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel."
Last week, the Prime Minister made similar comments, saying the US and other countries with ties to Israel should relocate their embassies to the Israeli capital.
"Israel's stance is that all the embassies belong in Israel's capital of Jerusalem, and the US Embassy should be one of the first to move."
The statement was released following calls by Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) for the Prime Minister to confront the White House over the issue of President Trump’s campaign promise to relocate the embassy.
“I call on the Prime Minister to make it clear that we expect the American government to move the embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel,” Bennett wrote on Twitter Sunday.
Media reports had claimed that the Israeli government had told the Trump administration to hold off on the move. Others wrote that Trump did not want to act in any way that might adversely affect his desire to reach a deal between the PA and Israel. The relocation is, in fact, the implementation of the US Congress Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 and a congressional delegation arrived in Israel this past March to see what the move would entail.