The Biden administration has initiated steps that undermine former President Donald Trump’s decision to establish the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, media reports suggest.
The Biden State Department has set up a separate diplomatic office for the Palestinians in Jerusalem. With this move, “Washington is reversing a Trump administration policy on U.S.-Palestinian relations ahead of President Joe Biden’s possible visit to Israel” set to take place in July, The Associated Press reported Thursday.
The Biden administration’s decision seeks to rollback President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel. The Washington Free Beacon, citing former U.S. diplomats, described the Biden administration’s move as “the first step to walking back the United States’ historic recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”
In a January 2020 speech, President Trump assured that “Jerusalem will remain Israel’s undivided, very important, undivided capital.”
The Associated Press reported the Biden administration’s:
The [U.S. State D]epartment has changed the name of the Palestinian Affairs Unit to the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs. In a statement, the newly renamed office said the move was meant to “strengthen our diplomatic reporting and public diplomacy engagement.”“We felt that it was important to reintroduce separate reporting lines to Washington on Israeli and Palestinian issues, by our respective teams on the ground that focus on these issues,” according to the statement, which also said the U.S. was reinstating a system in place for decades before President Donald Trump’s decision.The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said it views the reopening of the consulate as part of the international community’s commitments to ending Israel’s decadeslong occupation of territories the Palestinians seek for their future state.Dan Shapiro, a former [Obama-appointee] U.S. ambassador to Israel who is now a distinguished fellow with the Atlantic Council, called Thursday’s move “an interim step by the Biden administration toward reestablishing a consulate in Jerusalem.”The Biden administration has already moved to improve ties with the Palestinians, in part by restoring U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority and funding to the U.N. agency that deals with Palestinian refugees.
President Biden’s decision could be in violation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, Adam Kredo’s report in the Free Beacon suggested. “The establishment of a U.S. diplomatic mission could violate the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which allow for only U.S. embassy in Jerusalem,” he wrote.
Since President Biden took office in early 2021, he has reversed several important Trump-era policies impacting Israel and the Middle East.
In April 2021, he overturned President Trump’s decision to cut funding for the corruption-ridden UN Palestinian aid agency (UNRWA). The Biden administration pledged $235 million for the UNRWA, an agency repeatedly accused of allowing its facilities and resources to be misused for the indoctrination of Palestinian children in the ideologies of jihad terrorism and Antisemitism.
Abandoning President Trump’s policy of ‘Maximum Pressure’ on Iran, the Biden administration is working to restore the 2015 nuclear deal. Instead of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapons, President Biden’s appeasement has brought the regime to the threshold of building an atomic bomb. According to the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, “Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium has grown to roughly enough material for a nuclear bomb,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
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