The State Department has avoided taking a clear position on the matter but relies on the fact that Israel and Jordan had informally divided the contested enclave.

The provisional embassy site, in the Arnona neighborhood, “has been in continuous Israeli use since 1949,” the department said in a statement last week. “It is today a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood.”

The Palestinians are less equivocal.

“No Man’s Land is occupied territory,” said Ashraf Khatib of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Affairs Department. “Any permanent status for that territory should be part of a final status negotiation.”

The dispute could turn the American ambassador, David M. Friedman, an avid supporter of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, into a new kind of diplomatic settler himself.

The plan is for the embassy to be housed in what is now the consular services section of the United States Consulate General in Jerusalem while the search is on for a permanent site. The fortresslike compound sits partly in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem and partly in a section of No Man’s Land between West Jerusalem and predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.