While supporting the final statement of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit in Istanbul, Turkey, the Islamic Republic refused to ratify its articles which recognized Israel, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman announced Friday, December 15.
“Iran has delivered the OIC’s secretariat its written refusal to recognize Israel”, Bahram Qassemi asserted.
Citing Qassemi, Iranian government’s official news agency, IRNA reported Friday, “Supporting the final statement of the OIC’s extraordinary summit last Wednesday in Istanbul does not necessarily mean that Tehran recognizes Israel”.
Archive photo of a billboard installed in Tehran showing "countdown to annihilation of Israel", Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei famously retorted in 2015: “if Muslims & Palestinians unite and all fight, the Zionist regime will not be in existence in 25 years."
The Islamic Republic’s reservation on recognizing Israel, Qassemi insisted, was reflected in a written document officially delivered to the OIC’s secretariat.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, while supporting the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, announced that supporting the resolution endorsed at the meeting of Islamic countries’ foreign ministers and the final declaration of OIC extraordinary summit in Istanbul on the issue of al-Quds (Jerusalem) does not in any way constitute recognition of the usurper Zionist regime by Tehran,” Mehr news agency, MNA quoted Qassemi as saying.
Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in1979, the leaders of Iran have repeatedly described Israel as a “cancerous tumor” and promised to wipe it off the world map.
Such remarks have always led to widespread negative reactions from the west. “Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map,” US President Barack Obama said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, in September 2011.
Reacting to President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, the representatives of 57 Muslim countries attending the extraordinary OIC session on Wednesday in Istanbul, called on the international community to recognize Palestine as a legitimate country and East Jerusalem as its capital.
Supporting the final statement of the OIC’s extraordinary summit last Wednesday in Istanbul does not necessarily mean that Tehran recognizes Israel.Iran Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Bahram Qassemi
President Trump on Wednesday, December 6, formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, reversing nearly seven decades of American foreign policy and setting in motion a plan to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“Today we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” President Trump said from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House. “This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done.”
The OIC rejected and condemned “in the strongest terms the unilateral decision by the president of the United States of America in recognizing Jerusalem (al-Quds) as the so-called capital of Israel, the occupying Power,” the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)-run news agency reported on Friday.
At OIC’s extraordinary summit in Istanbul, the Islamic Republic’s president, Hassan Rouhani rejected President’s Trump decision and called for following the case of Jerusalem at the UN Security Council.
Saudi Arabia also criticized President Trump’s decision, while it had assigned a low ranking official to attend OIC summit in Istanbul.
Though President Trump's decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is without precedent, the plan is not new.
During President Ronald Reagan’s administration, a piece of West Jerusalem was leased to the American government, one day to become the new location of the US embassy to Israel.
Later, on October 24, 1995, the U.S. Congress passed a bill called the “Jerusalem Embassy Act,” which formally recognized the city as the Israel’s capital and called for the U.S. Embassy in Israel to be moved there from Tel Aviv by 1999.
Support for the bill was overwhelming. It passed the Senate by a 93 to 5 vote, with four Republicans and one Democrat voting no. It also passed the House 374 to 37, with 153 Democrats joining most of the new Republican majority that had swept into power in 1994.
However, Donald Trump’s predecessors preferred not to ratify the bill, arguing that it might be detrimental to the Middle East peace talks.