PERSPECTIVE ON JERUSALEM : Keep U.S. Politics Out of the Peace Process : Dole would subvert 50 years of bipartisan policy with his bill mandating a U.S. embassy in the still-contested city.

The struggle for Jerusalem is being fought on many fronts. Palestinians are feverishly intent on establishing an official presence in East Jerusalem which Israel will have no choice but to recognize when the city’s future is placed on the diplomatic calendar in 1996.

Palestinian efforts, however, are a pathetic shadow of Israel’s far more successful policy of “creating facts”-- facts that aim at irrevocably changing the face of the city’s eastern sector. Captured and annexed by Israel in June, 1967, East Jerusalem today is home to more Israelis than Palestinians.

The government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is pursuing the goal of putting Israeli control over East Jerusalem beyond the reach of diplomats with a vigor no less intense than its predecessors. Since 1992, East Jerusalem’s Israeli Jewish population has increased by 25,000 to 170,000, most of it in neighborhoods built on lands expropriated from Palestinian owners. Not only have more than 13,000 dwelling units inherited from the government of Yitzhak Shamir been completed during this period; Rabin has also initiated construction of 5,000 units per year, and plans have been approved to continue at this rate for years to come. “I do not remember a time when . . . such a (construction) drive ever took place,” Rabin boasted shortly after his 1992 election--having campaigned on a promise to end the Shamir government’s building frenzy in the occupied territories.

Halfway across the globe, another front in this battle for the city’s identity has been opened. Washington is far from the alleyways of the Old City, and many in Congress may have trouble distinguishing the Dome of the Rock from the Holy Sepulcher, but that does not mean that their power to affect the destiny of the city is any less than that of the principals themselves.

During the Clinton Administration, opposition to Israel’s land confiscation and settlement activities in East Jerusalem has waned to the point of indifference. Despite the continuing applicability of international conventions to Israel’s activities in the eastern sector, and the United States’ own policy history, the Administration has adopted a hands-off stance regarding Israel’s efforts to secure Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. It has even gone so far as to refuse to characterize continuing settlement construction in East Jerusalem as a unilateral action of the kind that all previous administrations have opposed as a matter of principle.

This green light to Israel’s de facto annexation has grown even more pronounced since the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in September, 1993. Administration officials now argue that settlement construction and associated land expropriation in East Jerusalem are solely the concern of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

This Administration’s abdication of traditional positions has emboldened efforts to force a wholesale repudiation of U.S. policy concerning Jerusalem. The most recent attempt is being led by Senate Majority Leader and presidential wannabe Bob Dole, who has introduced legislation that would begin construction of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem next year and mandate its opening by 1999.

The United States’ refusal to locate an embassy in Jerusalem is rooted in an international consensus born almost 50 years ago. At that time, the United States, in concert with the United Nations, supported Jerusalem’s internationalization as an appropriate means of safeguarding the religious rights of Jews, Christians and Muslims. That option was eclipsed by the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, which resulted in Jerusalem being divided between Israeli forces, which controlled its western half, and Jordanian forces in the east. Every administration since Harry Truman’s has continued to view the city’s status as unsettled and refused to recognize any part of it as the Israeli capital.

Passing legislation to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem before Israel and its Arab neighbors complete their halting process of reconciliation might serve some domestic political purpose. However, acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, at a time when its final status has not been resolved through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations sponsored by Washington, would be tantamount to endorsing Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem.

Administration officials, whose flaccid opposition to Israel’s settlement efforts opened the way for Dole’s initiative, acknowledge that such a move would “explode” negotiations that have been the central feature of U.S. diplomacy in the region since the Gulf War. This should be reason enough for Clinton to exercise his veto if the bill recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital crosses his desk.