Secretary of State Antony Blinken will reopen the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, an overture to Palestinian society offered as part of a broader effort to prevent additional conflict between Israel and militant groups in Gaza.
“It’s important to have that platform to be able to more effectively engage, not just the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinians from different walks of life — the NGO community, the business community, and others,” Blinken told reporters at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. “And so we look forward to doing that, but I can’t put a timeline on it.”
Blinken is trying to seal a ceasefire adopted last week after 11 days of the worst conflict between the two sides since 2014, which erupted when an Israeli effort to evict Palestinians from an East Jerusalem neighborhood gave Hamas the opportunity to upstage the Palestinian Authority as a putative defender of Palestinian interests. Blinken’s team wants to allay the Palestinian suspicions that accumulated during former President Donald Trump’s tenure while attempting to minimize the risk of empowering Hamas.
“The conditions that we’ve all seen have been heartbreaking, and I know that you want change, and we do too,” deputy assistant secretary Hady Amr, the State Department’s lead official for Israeli and Palestinian affairs, said while introducing Blinken to Palestinian civil society leaders earlier Tuesday. “He’s not just the secretary of state. He’s a good man. He’s a father, and he’s got a heart.”
HAMAS: ISRAEL ‘WILL HAVE TO SUBMIT’
Palestinian officials condemned then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision in 2018 to shutter the consulate, which functioned as an unofficial embassy to the Palestinians, distinct from the embassy. State Department officials at the time justified the decision as a way to improve the efficiency of the diplomatic mission, but Amr argued at the time that the United States had lost a necessary information-gathering outpost and sent a negative signal about the prospect for a future two-state solution to the enduring fight over the Holy Land.
“Having subsumed the role of Washington’s primary interlocutor with the Palestinians to that of the ambassador to the Israelis sends a clear message: The United States is no longer truly pursuing a two-state solution and will treat the Israelis and Palestinians as a single political entity instead of two,” Amr and Center for a New American Security senior fellow Ilan Goldenberg wrote in 2018. “This change will further damage the United States’s ability to influence events on the ground and will harm U.S. relations with the Palestinians.”
Blinken alerted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the change prior to a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
“We’re also working in partnership with the United Nations, the international community, the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian people, the government of Israel to assist in the relief and recovery efforts in Gaza,” he said earlier Tuesday.
That effort is complicated by the fact that the Palestinian Authority does not control Gaza, where designated terrorist organization Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 and then drove out Abbas’s Fatah faction by force in 2007.
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“In total, we are in the process of providing more than $360 million of urgent support for the Palestinian people, and across these efforts, we will work with partners to ensure that Hamas does not benefit from these reconstruction efforts,” Blinken said alongside Abbas. “Asking the international community, asking all of us to help rebuild Gaza, only makes sense if there is confidence that what is rebuilt is not lost again because Hamas decides to launch more rocket attacks in the future.”
