Pope Voices ‘Deep Concern’ Over Trump Plan on Jerusalem

ROME — A chorus of international leaders criticized the Trump administration on Wednesday for officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, describing the declaration as a dangerous disruption that would inflame one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Secretary-General António Guterres and Pope Francis both expressed alarm that President Donald Trump’s announcement would provoke new tensions in the Holy City, which is revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Within minutes of Trump’s speech, in which he said the U.S. Embassy would be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Guterres delivered what amounted to a diplomatic rebuke.

Reading a statement outside the Security Council chambers at U.N. headquarters in New York, Guterres criticized “any unilateral measures that would jeopardize the prospect of peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” The message was clearly directed at the Trump administration’s departure from decades of U.S. policy.

“Jerusalem is a final-status issue that must be resolved through direct negotiations between the two parties on the basis of the relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, taking into account the legitimate concerns of both the Palestinian and the Israeli sides,” Guterres said.

“In this moment of great anxiety, I want to make it clear: There is no alternative to the two-state solution,” he said. “There is no Plan B.”

In Rome, Francis prayed that Jerusalem’s status be preserved and needless conflict avoided.

“I cannot remain silent about my deep concern for the situation that has developed in recent days,” Francis said at his weekly general audience at the Vatican. “And at the same time, I wish to make a heartfelt appeal to ensure that everyone is committed to respecting the status quo of the city, in accordance with the relevant resolutions of the United Nations.”

He added: “Jerusalem is a unique city, sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, where the Holy Places for the respective religions are venerated, and it has a special vocation to peace.”

In especially strong language, the pope added, “I pray to the Lord that such identity be preserved and strengthened for the benefit of the Holy Land, the Middle East and the entire world, and that wisdom and prudence prevail, to avoid adding new elements of tension in a world already shaken and scarred by many cruel conflicts.”

The pope’s remarks seemed to be a clear warning and an appeal to Trump, whose recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital broke with U.S. foreign policy that has been in place since 1948, when Israel was founded. Trump also set in motion a plan to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Critics said the announcements would be the death knell for an already moribund peace process and would pull the plug on a two-state solution. The change, they say, removes any pretense of the United States as a neutral broker for peace, and Palestinians and other Arabs in the region would view the Trump administration as extension of Israel’s right-wing government.

The change in U.S. policy “destroys the peace process,” said the Palestinian prime minister, Rami Hamdallah. (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.) Some long-standing U.S. allies expressed apprehension.

“Clearly this is a decision that makes it more important than ever that the long-awaited American proposals on the Middle East peace process are now brought forward,” Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday.

That process, led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has seemingly failed to get off the ground.

Leaders in the region had already warned against the move. A statement from the royal palace of King Abdullah II of Jordan, whose kingdom is the custodian of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, stressed that the city was a key component to “achieving peace and stability in the region and the world.”

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was convening a summit meeting of the main Pan-Islamic body next week in Istanbul to discuss the American moves and to show, as his spokesman Ibrahim Kalin told reporters in Ankara, “joint action among Islamic countries.”

Kalin called the expected change a “grave mistake,” adding that “Jerusalem is our honor, Jerusalem is our common cause, Jerusalem is our red line.”

Iran, unsurprisingly, condemned the change, with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying at a conference in Tehran on Wednesday that it reflected the “incompetence and failure” of the American government.

Even Israel was bracing for a reaction to Trump’s expected declaration, though Trump had long telegraphed his intentions.

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised evangelical members of his base and Orthodox Jewish supporters who, unlike many other Jews, tend to vote Republican, that “we will move the American Embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”

The Vatican, like Italy, has long been sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians. (Alessandro Di Battista, a leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement, called the idea of moving the embassy “a stupid provocation.”)

The Vatican established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1994, and Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both visited Israel and the Palestinian territories.

In 2012, the Vatican called for “an internationally guaranteed special statute” for Jerusalem, with the goal of “safeguarding the freedom of religion and of conscience, the identity and sacred character of Jerusalem as a Holy City, (and) respect for, and freedom of, access to its holy places.”

Francis visited the Holy Land in 2014, but he upset some Israelis by flying via helicopter directly from Jordan to the “State of Palestine,” as the Vatican schedule at the time referred to the territories. He visited Israel afterward. In 2015, the Vatican entered into a treaty recognizing Palestine.

While the notion that conflict in Jerusalem is linked to unrest and instability throughout the region has long been disputed by Middle East analysts, the pope, along with others around the globe, seemed to consider Trump’s expected change of policy a purely political and needless aggravation.

The speech is just as likely to cause consternation among Jewish voters in the United States, who are increasingly polarized.

Jews traditionally vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats, but the hard-right policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel have anguished liberal Zionists in the United States, who often have found themselves torn between their liberalism and Zionism.

Trump’s declaration is likely to add to the radicalization of a small but increasing number of American Jews who — already disgusted by the Netanyahu government — have promoted boycotts and sanctions against Israel, which they publicly call a racist or apartheid state.

The hostility of the growing left-wing fringe of American Jews is seeping into the Democratic Party, where, in 2012, delegates to the Democratic National Convention booed when officials sought to reinstate a recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel into the party platform.

But the change from a party platform to definitive U.S. foreign policy is a major one that has seized the world’s attention.

On Tuesday, Francis spoke by telephone to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, about the unfolding crisis. And before the pope’s public remarks to the faithful at the Vatican on Wednesday, he met privately with a group of Palestinians participating in interfaith dialogue with officials at the Vatican.

“The Holy Land is for us Christians the land par excellence of dialogue between God and mankind,” he said. “The primary condition of that dialogue is reciprocal respect and a commitment to strengthening that respect, for the sake of recognizing the rights of all people, wherever they happen to be.”