A Wary Response, So Far, on Trump’s Expected Declaration on Jerusalem

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JERUSALEM — There were warnings of a new Palestinian uprising and calls for protests at United States embassies, dire predictions that hopes for peace would be dashed irretrievably — and expressions of relief from Israelis who have waited a half-century for the world to remove the asterisk next to this city’s name.

Yet on the whole, the responses in the region to reports that President Trump will declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel — something no president has done in the nearly 70 years since Israel’s founding — remained hedged, if not entirely restrained, on Saturday. Arabs and Israelis alike were impatient to see whether Mr. Trump would really do it, precisely how he would define Jerusalem, and what else he might say or do to qualify the change.

Mr. Trump’s announcement, expected in a speech on Wednesday, would amount to the not-quite-fulfillment of a campaign promise to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a step for which many of Mr. Trump’s Jewish and evangelical supporters, and their allies in the Israeli right wing, have been clamoring.

For Israelis, it would acknowledge the obvious: that their government sits in Jerusalem, mainly on its western side — though the United States, along with the rest of the world, has not recognized the Holy City as Israeli territory, particularly since the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel conquered East Jerusalem.

“That Trump will declare it? I’m glad, in case anyone was in any doubt,” said Betty Mizrahi, 40, a government worker living in Har Homa, a neighborhood built on captured territory. “Jerusalem was always the capital. That people deny it is another matter.”

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Yet of all the issues that have defied resolution despite decades of talks between Palestinians and Israelis, the final status of Jerusalem — with its sites holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, and warring claims dating back to the Crusades and the Romans — has been uniquely nettlesome.

The United States has taken pains to refrain from recognizing the Holy City as Israel’s capital precisely to avoid being seen as prejudging the outcome of peace talks, in which Palestinians seek to make East Jerusalem the seat of their eventual government.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said dispensing with that longstanding reticence would reveal the United States as “so incredibly one-sided and biased” that it “would be the total annihilation of any chances of peace, or any American role in peacemaking.”

“They’re sending a clear message to the world: We’re done,” she said.

While physically moving the embassy would require little more than putting a new sign on existing American consular offices in Jerusalem, Mr. Trump’s declaring Jerusalem the capital would carry great symbolic power, Palestinian officials said.

“If anything, it is worse, actually,” said Nasser al-Kidwa, a member of the central committee of Fatah, the dominant P.L.O. faction, and a nephew of its Yasir Arafat, its onetime leader. Recognition matters, he said, “not the stones” of an embassy building.

Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to Ismail Haniya, leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, was similarly critical of Mr. Trump’s expected declaration. “I don’t understand why he wants to antagonize over a billion Muslims around the world,” he said.

The specific way in which Mr. Trump makes his declaration, however, could mean a dramatically different response on both sides of the conflict.

If he just refers to “Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital, or refers to the city’s present municipal borders, Mr. Trump would be likely to set off a strong backlash in much of the Arab world, analysts said.

“For Palestinians, this will be perceived as dividing the cake while negotiating over it,” said Ofer Zalzberg, a Jerusalem-based analyst at International Crisis Group.