Minister wants ‘Jerusalem, Israel’ listed on American passports

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri urges Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work with the Trump administration to recognize the birthplace of Jerusalem-born Americans as “Jerusalem, Israel” on official documents.

Deri pens a letter to Netanyahu encouraging him to seek a change in longstanding US policy, hours after the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem on Monday.

“It’s important that the United States recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on its official documents,” the minister tweets.

Current US policy is that American citizens born in Jerusalem have only the city as their birthplace in their passports, unless they were born before Israel’s creation in 1948. In those cases, they can list “Palestine” as their birthplace. Some pro-Israel groups had hoped Trump’s recognition of the capital in December would herald a change in a long-standing US policy that bars American citizens born in Jerusalem from recording “Israel” as their place of birth. The State Department said in December it would not revise the policy, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in 2015.

— AP contributed