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Israel wants to name a train station after Donald Trump to thank him for recognizing Jerusalem as its capital, but the site of the planned building could be as divisive as the U.S. president's declaration.
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Transport Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday he had chosen a proposed subway stop near the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City, right in the middle of the area that the Palestinians want as their own future capital.
"I have decided to name the Western Wall station ... after U.S. President Donald Trump for his courageous and historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel," Katz said in a statement.
The envisaged underground extension of a high-speed rail link between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is still on the drawing board and a transport ministry spokeswoman said other departments still needed to approve it.
The announcement was quickly condemned by Palestinian leaders and anti-occupation activists already angered by Trump's Dec. 6 decision to overturn decades of U.S. policy on the city.
"The Israeli extremist government is trying to race against time to impose facts on the ground in the city of Jerusalem," Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, told Reuters.
Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, called the government's decision "yet another indicator of the broad collusion between the U.S. and Israel," and told progressive website Common Dreams it illustrates "the inability of the U.S. to be a broker of any kind of just peace between Israel and Palestinians."
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Others pointed out the fact that trump has been courting to anti-semitic, white supremacist and neo-Nazi factions in the United States. “Sure, let's name a Jerusalem train station after a guy who calls neo-Nazis 'very fine people.' Makes perfect sense,” Noah Shachtman, the Daily Beast’s executive wrote in a tweet responding to the news.
Trump’s controversial declaration has been condemned by most world leaders and the U.N. General Assembly has passed a resolution calling on the U.S. to withdraw the recognition. Many protests have taken place across the Middle East against Trump’s move and Palestinians have been protesting since the Dec. 6 announcement under intense Israeli forces crackdown.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, among whose shrines is Islam's third-holiest mosque, Al-Aqsa, as the capital of a state they seek in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.
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