First of two parts

Dateline Jerusalem  — Now that President Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — and announced plans to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem — Arab and Muslim leaders and spokespersons have been trying to frighten other nations out of following his lead.

To counter that effort, the world should consider a few salient points.

• Jerusalem, the capital of the state of the Jewish people, is one of the most ancient capitals in the world. It became the capital of Israel’s monarchy during the reign of King David — around 1000 B.C.E., more than 3,000 years ago, when the capitals of the countries who now refuse to recognize it were still boggy swamps, leafy forests, or arid deserts. The history of the oldest nations of Europe — the Greeks and the Romans — proves without a doubt that Jerusalem was already the capital of the Jewish nation in ancient times.

• The Jews are the only indigenous people of the land of Israel. They lived in Jerusalem for over 1,600 years prior to the birth of Islam, which occurred in 610 C.E.

Putting it bluntly, the Jews lived in Jerusalem when Islam’s forefathers were still pagan nomads in the Arabian Peninsula. The Muslims of today certainly don’t have the right to oppose Jerusalem’s being recognized as the capital of the Jewish state.

• It is unacceptable in the modern world for Muslim threats of terror attacks and mass rioting to be granted sufficient clout to limit or direct the political decisions of world powers.

• No other country in the world accepts external dictates regarding the location of its own capital city. The very idea is risible.

• Why doesn’t the world recognize Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem despite Israel’s liberation of the city’s eastern sector from illegal and illegitimate Jordanian occupation — unrecognized by the entire international community (apart from Britain and Pakistan)?

• King Abdullah II, the current Jordanian monarch, is trying to pressure Israel into establishing a Palestinian state on the hills of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Yet his father, King Hussein, who assumed the throne in 1952, refrained from doing so. Not only did Palestinian statehood not become an issue for Jordan prior to its loss of the West Bank in the June 1967 war, but Jordan did its utmost to obliterate any trace of Palestinian nationalism.

• The Arab League now demands that Israel establish a Palestinian state in the same area delineated by Abdullah II. Yet it demanded no such thing of King Hussein during the years of his illegal control of the West Bank. Nor did it ever express any interest in Palestinian statehood prior to that war. The same applies to the many governments and political figures backing the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Once all foreign embassies move to Jerusalem, Israel’s enemies will be forced to realize that their prolonged struggle to destroy the Jewish state has failed. They will have to accept Israel as a fait accompli, a state that there is no longer any reason to fight — which, incidentally, is the definition of “peace” in the Middle East. Relocating all foreign embassies to Jerusalem will serve as a significant step forward in the quest for peace between Israel and the Arab and Islamic world.

One of the international organizations urging the world not to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which consists of 57 Islamic states. This organization aspires, among other things, to make it illegal under international law to criticize Islam, thereby eliminating two fundamental freedoms of modern culture: freedom of thought and freedom to express an opinion. All those holding dear their freedom of thought and expression are obliged to support everything this organization opposes.

(To be continued)

Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence, specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and Israeli Arabs, and is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

This essay originated at www.algemeiner.com