Donald Trump is coming under pressure from both sides of the aisle to press ahead quickly with his controversial proposal to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – and to do it by stealth.
The former Republican Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee told DailyMail.com that the State Department should "do it – do it quickly, do it boldly. In fact, my advice to them is don't announce you're going to do it."
Huckabee added: "Do it and just say you did it...You do it, and you just say, 'Yesterday we moved the embassy.' ... It would be totally unnecessary and counterproductive to say, 'We're going to start laying a building cornerstone,' and it just creates an environment for tension that's unnecessary...announce that you did it last night, and the ambassador has taken up residence there."
The Republican former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton also told the Mail website: "You can move the embassy by changing the name-plate on the consulate, and then build a permanent embassy in due course."
Bolton also said that just as "Air Force One" is a designation that applies to whichever plane carries the US President, any US-owned building in a world capital can be designated an "embassy" if an ambassador lives and works there. "The sooner they do it the better," Bolton added.
Meanwhile the former Democratic Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman said that moving the embassy "really must happen. And the sooner it happens the better."
Lieberman, who ran for vice president in 200 with Al Gore, warned the White House not to listen to advisers who hold "a kind of conventional wisdom about foreign policy."
The comments come ahead of a meeting between Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 15 February.
Trump appointed as the new ambassador to Israel David Friedman, a lawyer who has advocated to embassy move for decades.
He said in a statement upon being appointed: "I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region...and look forward to doing this from the US embassy in Israel's eternal capital, Jerusalem."
The concept of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is controversial because Palestinian east Jerusalem has been occupied for fifty years.
While Israel considers Jerusalem its "eternal, undivided capital", the Palestinians regard the east of the city – occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War – to be the capital of any future Palestinian state. Critics argue that Trump's plan effectively rules out a two-state solution to which the agreed division of Jerusalem would be key.
The White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last week that the administration is "at the very beginning stages of even discussing the subject."
