More likely, with the president having made a typically grandiose and poorly thought-through political gesture to domestic supporters — in this case, those who staunchly back Israel’s hard-line Likud government — wiser heads in the administration are trying to mollify Palestinians and other Arabs antagonized by his posturing. Since Mr. Trump’s decision, there have been protests across the Middle East. More than 50 Muslim leaders, meeting in Istanbul on Wednesday, criticized the decision and urged the world to recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state. In Brussels, most leaders of the European Union, one of the Palestinian Authority’s biggest donors, have rejected the idea of following Mr. Trump’s lead.

But the backpedaling on Jerusalem doesn’t appear to be having much effect. On Friday, Israeli troops fatally shot four Palestinians and wounded more than 300 others during demonstrations in Gaza and the West Bank.

With Vice President Mike Pence set to visit Israel next week, Palestinian leaders are refusing to meet him. Administration officials say they realize that the Palestinians “may need a bit of a cooling-off period.”

Israel’s government has been in West Jerusalem since the state’s founding in 1948. In the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Israel drove Jordan back from East Jerusalem and occupied the whole city. But the United States, like most of the world, had withheld formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital pending a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that would fairly resolve all major disputes. One might refer to such bargaining, to maximize leverage in pursuit of the best outcome, as the art of the deal.

But that’s just not how this White House operates. In fact, it conceded another piece of leverage on Friday and again angered Palestinians for no apparent purpose. White House officials made clear their expectation that Jerusalem’s Western Wall, which lies outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders and abuts some of Islam’s most sacred sites, will eventually be declared part of Israel. This time, they were careful to say that the final borders of Israel and any Palestinian state must be settled in negotiations. But it seemed another case of America taking Israel’s side on an explosive issue.