WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release) — U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the following announcement on Thursday:
I am pleased to announce that following the May 14 opening of the U.S. Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, we plan to achieve significant efficiencies and increase our effectiveness by merging U.S. Embassy Jerusalem and U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem into a single diplomatic mission. I have asked our Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, to guide the merger.
We will continue to conduct a full range of reporting, outreach, and programming in the West Bank and Gaza as well as with Palestinians in Jerusalem through a new Palestinian Affairs Unit inside U.S. Embassy Jerusalem. That unit will operate from our Agron Road site in Jerusalem.
This decision is driven by our global efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our operations. It does not signal a change of U.S. policy on Jerusalem, the West Bank, or the Gaza Strip. As the President proclaimed in December of last year, the United States continues to take no position on final status issues, including boundaries or borders. The specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem are subject to final status negotiations between the parties.
The Administration is strongly committed to achieving a lasting and comprehensive peace that offers a brighter future to Israel and the Palestinians. We look forward to continued partnership and dialogue with the Palestinian people and, we hope in the future, with the Palestinian leadership.
The move was promptly condemned by Americans for Peace Now in a press release suggesting that it will undermine efforts to achieve a two-state solution.
Americans for Peace Now (APN) strongly condemns the Trump Administration’s decision to subsume diplomatic outreach to the Palestinians into the US embassy to Israel. We call upon fellow American Jewish organizations to join our demand that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reverse this disastrous decision.
Turning the US consulate to Jerusalem, which until now has served as a de facto embassy to the Palestinians, into a “new Palestinian Affairs Unit inside US Embassy Jerusalem” (to use the language of today’s State Department press release) is a severe blow to efforts to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Past US policy was based on the goal of achieving a two-state solution. Under the Trump administration, this is no longer the case. Even before the two-state solution became official US policy, all American administrations – both Republican and Democratic –since 1967 have maintained a firewall between what is sovereign Israel and the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war. The manifestation of that approach was assigning the Jerusalem consulate to act as a liaison to the Palestinians, while keeping the mandate of the US embassy to Israel strictly within the Green Line.
Downgrading the US diplomatic mission to the Palestinians to a subsidiary of the US embassy to Israel signals that American policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has changed dramatically. It puts a giant question mark over the assumption of a future Palestinian state. It is yet another gesture in a series of humiliating measures toward the Palestinians and their leadership by the Trump administration.
More than anything, this measure signals an acceptance, if not outright embrace, of Israel’s accelerating process of annexing the West Bank, a declared goal of the most extreme right-wing elements in Israel’s governing coalition.
The fact that this “merger” (more accurately, a hostile takeover) will be led by US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman makes this development even more alarming. David Friedman has openly and publicly attacked the two-state solution. He is an avid supporter and past financier of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and has been openly contemptuous of the Palestinian leadership, availing himself of any opportunity to demean it. Disastrously, Friedman has emerged as the architect of the Trump administration’s calamitous policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and no one within the administration is willing or able to stop him from ramming through his agenda.
Coming after the Trump administration’s decision to close the PLO mission in Washington, this latest development further diminishes the potential for the US to play a constructive role in brokering a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As our sister-organization, the Israeli peace movement Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) has stated, “The price of Trump’s drawing from the hip and acting unilaterally will be paid by civilians on both sides.”
To American Jewish leaders: as a poll released yesterday further underscores, most American Jews oppose President Trump’s policies toward the Palestinians. Accordingly, we call on you to act as stewards of our community by calling on the Trump administration to reverse this decision and adhere to the longstanding US policy of promoting the two-state solution. US national security interests and the future of Israelis and Palestinians demand it.
*
Preceding from the U.S. State Department and from Americans for Peace Now