Report: Biden’s Plan for Separate Jerusalem Consulate for Palestinians Is Illegal

President Joe Biden’s plan to re-open a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem is illegal under the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which requires all diplomatic functions in Israel’s capital to be conducted in one embassy, two former Trump administration officials claim.

In 2019, the building known as the U.S. consulate and its functions were absorbed into the new U.S. embassy, which itself had previously been another consular branch until being designated as the embassy in 2018 under President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken formally announced the decision to reopen the consulate in a meeting with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tried to defend the move as a way to reach out to Palestinians.

But former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former assistant to U.S. Ambassador David Friedman David Milstein wrote Wednesday in the New York Past that Biden’s consular proposal violates the original U.S. law:

On May 25, Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Washington would seek to reopen this diplomatic mission. The move contradicts Biden’s campaign promise not to renege on the recognition of Jerusalem, since a pair of missions in the same city undercuts Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital. It also breaks the Jerusalem Embassy Act that sought to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem no later than 1999 — a law Biden voted for along with 92 other senators.

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The Biden administration’s intent to reopen a separate diplomatic mission to the Palestinians in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital and the location of the US Embassy, would be a violation of US law, wrongly signaling that Washington supports dividing Jerusalem.

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If implemented, this could signal the return to a misguided diplomatic arrangement, under which the US ambassador to Israel historically lacked jurisdiction over the eastern part of Jerusalem, the West Bank or Gaza. Instead, a US consul general led a separate diplomatic mission to the Palestinians, who had jurisdiction over those geographic areas. The consulate general didn’t even report to the US ambassador to Israel, but directly to the State Department, often sending conflicting reports to DC.

The diplomatic mission included the US consulate general’s official residence, located in the western part of Jerusalem, thus resulting in the US having a diplomatic mission to the Palestinians in Jerusalem, despite that the fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new e-book, The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it). His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.