Watching the historic agreement normalizing relations between Israel and two Arab states at the White House — an event neither I nor anyone else who has watched the Middle East closely for the past half-century ever really thought would happen — I had to acknowledge to myself how wrong I had been.
Back in 2018, when Team Trump announced it was going to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, I didn’t think it was all that big a deal — even though I was and remain a resolute and unconditional supporter of the Jewish state.
I thought it was a nice gesture that acknowledged an undeniable reality, which is that Israel’s capital is Jerusalem. Moreover, the move was fully in keeping with the 1995 law that mandated the embassy move by 1999 — a law the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had “suspended” every six months since 1999 on the largely spurious grounds that doing so would pose a danger to our security.
But the move didn’t mean much beyond that, I thought.
Oh, I was wrong — though I’m happy to say I was right in dismissing the doom-and-gloom warnings of the foreign-policy establishment about how destabilizing and dangerous it would be for the United States to make the move.










