Palestinian U.N. Ambassador: We’ll Use ‘Weapons That We Have in U.N.’ If Trump Moves U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem



Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour said Friday that if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, then “nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the U.N. to defend ourselves, and we have a lot of weapons in the U.N.”

Trump promised in March during a speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that, “We will move the U.S. embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”
Following a private meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in September, his campaign wrote that Trump “acknowledged that Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish People for over 3,000 years, and that the United States, under a Trump administration, will finally accept the long-standing Congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.”


The Trump campaign statement is referring to a 1995 law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and that “the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999.” All three presidents since then have issued national security waivers.
“If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which is a violation of Security Council resolutions, it is a violation of resolution 181 of the U.N. General Assembly that was drafted by the U.S.,” Mansour claimed. “If they do that, nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the U.N. to defend ourselves, and we have a lot of weapons in the U.N.”

Mansour said that while the Palestinian Authority could not respond to a move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem with a Security Council resolution – because the United States would veto it – there were actions that he could take.


“Maybe I can't have resolutions in the Security Council but I can make their lives miserable every day with precipitating a veto on my admission as a member state. Italy in 1949 received three consecutive vetoes on its admission to the U.N. from the Soviet Union. These are the kind of things that I can do,” he said.


“Many candidates gave the same election promise [to move the embassy] but didn’t implement it, because what you do when you are campaigning is one thing, but when you have to deal with the legal thing it is something else,” Mansour added.
Hopes are raised for the move among politicians in Israel, however, and David Friedman, an advisor to the Trump campaign, told The Jerusalem Post that “it was a campaign promise, and there is every intention to keep it.”