HERE'S HOPING TRUMP SHUTS THE PLACE DOWN

An embassy in disguise

From the day the U.S. Office of Palestine Affairs was created, it has functioned as an independent diplomatic body. 

 

By Naomi Linder Kahn

 

JNS

Nov 21, 2024

 

The U.S. Office of Palestine Affairs on Agron Street in Central Jerusalem 

 

Members of the Israeli Knesset from the coalition and the opposition recently came together in an act of unity and clarity, and despite heavy political pressure, approved the second and third readings of an amendment to Israel’s Sixth Basic Law, “Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel,” prohibiting the establishment of foreign consulates in Israel’s capital.

The bill, initiated by Knesset members Dan Illouz and Ze’ev Elkin, seeks to prevent the establishment of consulates dedicated to Palestinians, with the understanding that consulates of this sort would grant de facto recognition to a Palestinian state and prop up the dangerous “two-state solution” that is now in its death throes.

The bill was passed just days before the dramatic U.S. elections and for good reason. Media predictions and a reasonable grasp of reality led to concern among Israeli legislators that if the Democrats won and Vice President Kamala Harris were to take up residence in the White House, she would act without delay to fulfill her commitment to establishing a consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem. The Illouz-Elkin amendment would have hindered and perhaps even prevented this move.

So far, so good, as the saying goes—but only on paper. The reality on the ground is that there is in fact, a foreign embassy to “Palestine” in Jerusalem.

In 2018, then-President Donald Trump made the historic and courageous decision to finally allow the relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The Arab world fumed, but the move went ahead nonetheless, enjoying virtually wall-to-wall support among the Israeli public. A few years later, during the tenure of the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government in Israel, the Biden-Harris administration sought to establish the “Consulate for Palestinian Affairs” in the building that had previously housed the American consulate in Jerusalem. The move was a means of appeasing the Palestinian lobby and turning back the Trump administration’s demands for Palestinian accountability and negotiated compromise.

To be clear, there has never in the history of diplomatic relations been a comparable situation anywhere in the world. No country has ever maintained an embassy and a consulate in the same city. The Biden administration’s attempt to pull the wool over Israelis’ eyes failed; large-scale public protests ensued, the Israeli government pushed back and the project was shelved, but only on paper. The Biden administration repackaged it, and the “Office of Palestine Affairs” was born. Housed in the U.S. consulate building on Agron Street in western Jerusalem, the OPA is, for all intents and purposes, an embassy, and not even a mere consulate, to the non-existent state of Palestine.

From the day this unique “office” was created, it has functioned as an independent diplomatic body. The head of the office is not subordinate to the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Instead, he answers directly to the U.S. State Department, like any other ambassador. His freedom of action and movement, his budget and powers parallel those of an ambassador, and he conducts himself accordingly.

The ambassador-in-disguise, Hans Wechsel, is responsible for a territory and not for the more or less amorphous needs of people who identify as Palestinians, wherever they may be. The territory for which he is responsible spans “the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza.”

Wechsel and his entourage conduct official visits to illegal Palestinian Authority outposts, support and encourage Arab invaders and perpetrators of violence, and affix an official seal of approval to the false narratives of the “occupation” and “settler violence.” The OPA is, first and foremost, the promulgator of the anti-democratic sanctions regime that is one of the major legacies of the outgoing Biden-Harris administration. The sanctions that have been imposed on Israeli organizations and individuals, including U.S. citizens, trample civil rights and stifle protected forms of speech based on rumors, unproven accusations and fabricated reports by Wechsel’s interlocuters in the Palestinian Authority. Surely, a seasoned and capable American diplomat of Wechsel’s caliber could have found a way to investigate, to dialogue with Israeli law-enforcement authorities and to communicate with American citizens accused of violent activity. Instead, unprecedented draconian measures have been taken based only on specious accounts provided by radical anti-Israel sources.

As the new U.S. administration begins to take shape and take up the reins of government, the elected representatives of the Israeli public—members of the Knesset from coalition and opposition parties—have a duty to the people of Israel and to history itself to complete the legislative process and pass the Illouz-Elkin amendment to the Sixth Basic Law of Israel, and work together with the incoming Trump administration to disband the Office of Palestinian Affairs.

Israeli sovereignty in our eternal, undivided capital is non-negotiable, and it is not a matter of semantics. The words of the late-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin resonate as clearly today as they have throughout our history, and remain a tenet of Israel’s national consensus: “There are no two Jerusalems. There is only one Jerusalem. For us, Jerusalem is not a subject for compromise.”