Despite Israeli objections, the White House appears committed to opening a special diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital that would take over certain functions heretofore handled by the embassy. This is not, as Richard Kemp explains, a mere bureaucratic reshuffling but an attempt to “undermine Israel’s sovereignty in its own capital city.” He explains:
The new consulate, exclusively to manage diplomatic relations with Palestinians, is designed to give hope that one day Jerusalem will be the capital of a putative Palestinian state. Israel can, and rightly should, never allow that. As well as betraying Israel, President Biden’s irresponsible diplomatic signaling—which also appeases his hard-left supporters—is a betrayal of the Palestinian people. They have suffered too long and too greatly under their leadership, which has consistently refused to entertain all proposals for peace with Israel that could lead to the establishment of their own state.
Successive Palestinian leaders have been encouraged in their intransigence by the U.S. and Europe, who have for decades extracted concession after concession from Israel while Palestinians make none. The impossible aspirations of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership—which seeks not a two-state solution but the destruction of the Jewish state—were dealt a severe blow by the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab nations, and by the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 with the opening of an embassy there the following year.
If an independent consulate were really needed for the Palestinians, it would make sense to put it in Ramallah, where virtually all PA government buildings are located.
Read more on Gatestone: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17872/us-consulate-jerusalem