US Diplomats Speak Out Against Closure of Palestine Mission

• The real reason is because the Palestinians (REAL JEWS) will be forcibly expelled into the Sinai desert by the Israeli war machine. Since there won’t be any Palestinians, it is no longer necessary to have a Palestinian mission in Jerusalem.
  –
• US Diplomats Speak Out Against Closure of Palestine Mission
  by Daoud Kuttab, https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/home.html
  The decision of the Donald Trump administration to close the US Consulate in Jerusalem that served the Palestinian population and merge it with the US Embassy has prompted strong reactions from former US diplomats. The Americans, many of whom served in the mission, made strong public statements critical of the move. Some anticipated its reversal if a Democratic candidate wins the next US presidential elections.
  –
  Daniel Shapiro, US ambassador to Israel from 2011-2017, took to Twitter, writing a series of posts outlying why the Trump administration’s decision was wrong. “The closure of the US consulate in Jerusalem & its merger with the US embassy to Israel is a big mistake. It undercuts what should be our strategic objective (…) by depriving us of a diplomatic structure that points toward that goal.”
  –
  Shapiro, who also sat on the US National Security Council during the Barack Obama administration, revealed that Israel had not asked for such a thing before. “Israel didn’t care for the mission, but literally never raised it (at least in my years in gov’t) as something they wanted to see changed. They wanted us talking to the Palestinians,” he added.
  –
  Lara Friedman, director of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, was a diplomat at the consulate from 1992 to 1994. She told Al-Monitor that the move, coupled with the closure of the Palestinian mission in Washington, signified the United States’ “formal de-recognition” of the Palestinians as a people.
  –
  “It relegates them — for the first time in history — to the status of an internal Israeli issue, to be reported and understood exclusively through the lens of the US-Israel relationship. In so doing, this move will make the situation on the ground worse, will make the possibility of peace more remote and will further isolate the US in its self-imposed bubble of bad policies shaped not by the facts or expert, apolitical analysis, or even by US interests, but instead by the agenda of a handful of messianic ideologues,” she added.
  –
  US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first announced the merger in October 2018, some five months after Trump moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
  –
  Angered by Trump’s embassy move, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rejected mediation by the US administration, saying Washington was no longer qualified to serve as the sole mediator in the decades-long conflict with Israel and that an international mechanism should be devised to replace the United States in the peace process.
  –
  US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman closed the consulate March 4, praising the “service and professionalism” of Consul General Karen Sasahara. No specific new position has been announced for her yet. “This decision was driven by our global efforts to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our diplomatic engagements and operations,” read a US State Department statement.
  –
  But Israeli lawyer Daniel Seidmann rejects such a simplistic explanation of what he sees as a highly political move. “The consulate will not merge, but it will be subsumed into the embassy to Israel,” Seidmann told Arab News. “This is no mere technicality, it precisely reflects current US policies: All things Palestinian are subservient to Israeli interests.”
  –
  Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state and now a Harvard Kennedy School professor, called the closure a “mistake,” tweeting that all US presidents prior to Trump had “understood its importance as our bridge to the Palestinian people. I was proud to serve there in the 1980s.”
  –
  read more.

end