When the US Supreme Court recently struck down a law that would have allowed American parents of children born in Jerusalem to obtain passports saying the children were born in Israel, the court was following US government policy that refuses to recognize any nation's sovereignty over Jerusalem until Palestinians and Israelis resolve the city's status through negotiations. The ruling ended a 13-year-old lawsuit by a Jerusalem-born American and his US-citizen parents. Under the State Department's policies, their son's passport says that he was born in Jerusalem. The parents sought to have the passport also say “Israel” in order, they said, to express pride in his birth there. In their ruling the majority of Supreme Court justices made it clear that the president, rather than Congress, must determine national policy on the status of Jerusalem. In the US, that the president, and not Congress, has the power to determine how Jerusalem is listed on US passports was an important separation-of-powers case. In the Middle East, reaction was focussed more on the status of Jerusalem and not on the Supreme Court's differing conceptions of the separation of powers required by the US Constitution. Mayor Nir Barkat of Jerusalem called on President Obama to recognize the city as Israel's capital, “just as Washington is the capital of the United States, London the capital of England and Paris the capital of France”. It's not that simple. The American embassy is in Tel Aviv; it was never put in Jerusalem and the law the court struck down would have forced the State Department to alter its long-standing policy of doing otherwise because the status of Jerusalem is unresolved, subject to the outcome of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The Bush administration did not change that, nor did Obama's. This, despite numerous attempts by Congress through the years to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, including attempting to withhold 50 percent of the funds appropriated to the State Department specifically for such an embassy. Congressional acts have also called for Jerusalem to remain an undivided city and for it to be recognized as the capital of Israel. But this is not internationally recognized, pending final status talks in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Since no settlement has been reached, the US has withheld recognition of the city as Israel's capital. Successive administrations have said that Jerusalem is in a de jure sense part of Palestine and has not until now become part of any other sovereignty. Since 1998, all US presidents serving in office during this period have determined that moving forward with a relocation would be detrimental to US national security concerns and opted to issue waivers suspending any action on this front. Thus the US has never enforced the passport law, which has been on the books since 2002. The Bush administration did not follow the Jerusalem provision, saying that it interfered with the president's constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs. The Obama administration has followed suit. Israel has controlled all of Jerusalem since the Six-Day War in 1967 and has proclaimed a united Jerusalem as its eternal capital. Congress has for years tried to push administrations of both parties to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. However, the Palestinians have declared that east Jerusalem will be the capital of their independent state. As for US policy, neither Israel nor any other country is acknowledged as having sovereignty over Jerusalem. The executive branch's policy since Harry Truman's presidency has been to recognize no state as having sovereignty over Jerusalem, and the Supreme Court decision simply maintains that policy.
