It is discouraging that at this stage of the game Secretary of State Tillerson is equivocating in respect of whether to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It is little more than a week before President Trump is due in the capital of Israel. Yet Mr. Tillerson went on the National Broadcasting Company to announce that “the president is being very careful to understand how” a decision to move the American embassy “would impact the peace process.”

What is the purpose of such handwringing? The idea that the peace process ought to trump — forgive the word — Israel’s sovereign rights is classic State Department bilge. It strikes us, in any event, as something Mr. Trump might have addressed before delivering his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. That was the speech in which Mr. Trump gave an unequivocal vow, the clearest by any politician, to move the American embassay to Israel’s capital.

“President Obama thinks that applying pressure to Israel will force the issue,” Mr. Trump said, drawing a distinction between himself and the Obama-Clinton administration. “But it’s precisely the opposite that happens. Already half of the population of Palestine has been taken over by the Palestinian ISIS and Hamas, and the other half refuses to confront the first half, so it’s a very difficult situation that’s never going to get solved unless you have great leadership right here in the United States.”

“We’ll get it solved,” Mr. Trump said. “One way or the other, we will get it solved. But when the United States stands with Israel, the chances of peace really rise and rise exponentially. That’s what will happen when Donald Trump is president of the United States.” And then the famous words: “We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem. And we will send a clear signal that there is no daylight between America and our most reliable ally, the state of Israel.”

This logic has been apparent to many of us for years. Denying it is precisely one of the reasons we lack for peace. So it was encouraging to see Mr. Trump swing behind it in his campaign. For him to reverse himself on this head would be a genuine betrayal. And it was just bizarre to hear Mr. Tillerson say on NBC that the president is “listening to input from all interested parties” and “whether Israel views it as being helpful to a peace initiative or perhaps a distraction.”

Which is no doubt why Prime Minister Netanyahu moved quickly after Secretary Tillerson’s comments to remove any doubt of Israel’s view. He said, according to a dispatch in Haaretz, that moving the embassy to Jerusalem “would not harm the peace process” and, “on the contrary, would advance it by correcting a historic injustice and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy according to which Jerusalem isn’t the capital of Israel.”

Not only that, but, Haaretz pointed out, Israel has already made that clear to both Messrs. Trump and Tillerson. It also quoted a “senior Israeli official” as saying that Mr. Netanyahu himself “expressed his desire that the embassy be moved to Jerusalem in his meetings with Trump and Tillerson during his latest visit in Washington.” The prime minister, it reported, also brought up the issue in phone calls with Mr. Trump since the president acceded to office.

Tomorrow’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, moreover, will carry a dispatch by a leading Israeli legal scholar, Eugene Kontorovich, noting that within days of Mr. Trump’s return from the Middle East he will have to decide whether to sign the Jerusalem embassy waiver that Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton signed every six months. He notes that Russia recently recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and warns against letting terrorists dictate policy.

America has had its head in the sand over Jerusalem since the capital’s liberation in 1967. It has reserved Jerusalem for so-called final status talks. It would be one thing were such a policy to have produced peace. But the prospect of delaying Jerusalem until the end of negotiations has provided an incentive to the Arabs to avoid stepping up. Mr. Trump has clearly understood this, and it’s hard to imagine an issue on which he is in a better position to lead.