Israel will in turn be able to decide what the US can build in Washington, D.C. then?
The trouble with that analogy is that there isn’t the least dispute over what people or governing body is entitled to make building decisions in Washington, D.C.
I know that many Israelis and others who support their view claim that it’s indisputable that the Israeli government is fully entitled to make decisions about urban planning in East Jerusalem, but that claim doesn’t make the dispute go away.
Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann assessed the claim in a March 19 Foreign Policy article as follows:
This is simply not the same thing as the US government making urban planning decisions in Washington D.C., an area in which it has universally recognized and absolutely unchallenged sovereignty.
If the United States was taking a lot of Israeli money in and relied on Israel to protect it from the sanctions that the rest of the world was trying to impose on it then uh yeah, Israel would be able to use those things to influence what the US built in Washington, and elsewhere, if by so doing the US was acting against what Israeli leadership decided was Israeli interests. But only if Israel was actually really willing to withdraw some of that support if America did not comply. And I have little doubt that Israeli leadership would use that influence, they’s nobody’s fools. That would be realpolitik, which was what the op asked about.
I suspect some Native Americans may have issues with that.
The US Army in WWII was not particularly effective. The war in Europe was won through sheer numbers, and the production of materiel, not because our soldiers were better than theirs.
They’re all US citizens. Why would they?
But we’re not talking about certain hypothetical individuals in a historically oppressed and displaced minority group hypothetically having personal “issues” with the absolute and unchallenged sovereignty of the state entity that historically oppressed them over the territory they used to inhabit.
We’re talking about nations and international organizations worldwide officially disputing and challenging the claims to sovereignty of a state entity over a particular piece of territory.
Most of the nations of the world officially disagree with Israel’s claims to control East Jerusalem, to the extent that they have refused to move their embassies in Israel from Tel Aviv to Israel’s declared new capital of Jerusalem. No country would consider for a minute the idea of refusing to locate an embassy in Washington on the grounds that the US government ought to be sharing its capital with American Indian Nations. Face it, Jerusalem’s status is disputed on the world stage in a way that Washington’s status simply is not, never has been for the past two hundred years or thereabouts, and never will be in the foreseeable future.
I can’t really tell whether you actually understand this and are simply making these comparisons as a joke (which your use of smilies seems to suggest), or whether you’re seriously attempting to argue that pressuring Israel about its urban planning policies in East Jerusalem really is in any way rationally comparable to pressuring the US about its urban planning policies in Washington.
If the former, sorry for spoiling your joke by taking it seriously, and if the latter, well, it’s kind of hard to know what to say that would have any chance of getting through the tinfoil.
I was being polite.
Oh, okay, I appreciate it. I’m afraid I still don’t get whether you were seriously attempting to claim that there’s any realistic analogy between the recognized territorial status of Washington D.C. and that of East Jerusalem, though.
(And by the way, just a clarification of my remark in the previous post about Jerusalem as the “declared new capital”: it was of course declared as such before the Jerusalem Law in 1980, but that was when a lot of the physical institutions of national government were moved from Tel Aviv.)
Either way it misses the point. You can agree or disagree whether or not America has “the right” to influence the policies of other countries in ways that America perceives are in its best interest (either directly or indirectly) - and that analogy is an apparent attempt to imply that America has no such right - but the fact is that countries will try to influence policies of other countries, and the tools of aid and actions (or inaction) in international bodies are some of those tools.
Focus people. The question is how would America actually using those tools effect realpolitik considerations.