On Jerusalem

I'm way too busy these days for much blogging. Fortunately, however, there are lots of others out there still doing a fine job, and I can link to them. David Hazony, for example, who has done a great job of summarizing the issues the Obama adminstration raised earlier this week when they urgently summoned our ambassador Michael Oren to Foggy Bottom, (over the weekend apparently, so urgent it was) to reprimand him for the intention to build some apartments in Sheich Jarach.

At the same blog (Contentions), Rick Richman has dug up an interesting historical document:

Neither Resolution 242 nor 338 mentions Jerusalem, and the omission was intentional. On March 12, 1980, Arthur J. Goldberg, who was U.S. ambassador to the UN when Resolution 242 was adopted, wrote a letter to the New York Times to “set the record straight”:
Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem, and this omission was deliberate. . . . In a number of speeches at the UN in 1967, I repeatedly stated that the armistice lines fixed after 1948 were intended to be temporary. This, of course, was
particularly true of Jerusalem. . . . I made it clear that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiable and that the armistice lines dividing Jerusalem were no longer viable. In other words, Jerusalem was not to be divided again.

Personally, I have not yet written off the Obama administration in its attempt to make the world better, though my original scepticism is being reinforced steadily. One does however wonder if anyone there knows much about history.