"Is the Biden Administration at War with Israel?"

by Guy Millière

• "The US does not want to open a consulate merely to have a place for diplomatic connections with the PA [Palestinian Authority]. If that is all they wanted, they could easily do this by opening a mission in Abu Dis or Ramallah -- where most other countries conduct their relations with the PA... the purpose of opening the consulate is to recognize Palestinian claims to Jerusalem." — Eugene Kontorovitch, professor, George Mason University, Antonin Scalia School of Law, Israel Hayom, December 5, 2021.
• The 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations states that "a consular post may be established in the territory of the receiving State only with that State's consent". In other words, reopening the consulate may be done only with the consent of the Israeli government.
• All this cannot be dissociated from the general hostile attitude of the Biden administration towards Israel from the moment it came to power.
• Earlier in March, an internal memo from the US State Department was leaked to The National, a daily newspaper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The National reported that "The Biden administration memo recommends voicing US principles on achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace under a two-state solution framework 'based on the 1967 lines'".
• The author of the memo is Hady Amr, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs and Press and Public Diplomacy in the Biden administration, and also in charge of US negotiations with Israel and Palestinian organizations. It is hard to imagine that Amr was chosen as an "honest broker". Amr has a long history of anti-Israeli activities.
• Amr also is the lead author of a report published by the Brookings Institution in December 2018 in which some proposals are made that could be regarded as disturbing. The report says that the United States must "reconnect" with Hamas, a fundamentalist terrorist group; seek "to create a Palestinian unity government integrating Hamas", and "compel Israel to make major concessions", even if it may "endanger Israel". The report never defines Hamas as a terrorist group, and never says that Hamas's goal is to destroy Israel. The report adds, "should Israel prove uncooperative with American efforts, the United States could signal it will move ahead anyway."
• The behavior of the Biden administration towards Israel is all the more worrying in that at the same time, it places itself in a weak position regarding negotiations with Iran and seems ready to make a deal with the mullahs' regime at any price, in a resolution that has already been called "less for less", or, worse, "less for more".
• An Israeli diplomatic service briefing recently announced the Biden administration is ready to accept a deal with Iran that includes only two elements: the removal of all international sanctions still imposed on Iran, and Iran's pledge to stop enriching uranium, which would mean that Iran's nuclear program would remain intact and that Iran's regional destabilization actions, including its threats against Israel, could continue.
• Two days before the current negotiations began, chief Iranian Army spokesman Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi said to the Iran Students News Agency (ISNA) that Israel's annihilation is his country's "greatest ideal before us and the greatest goal we pursue."
• Iran claims, truthfully or not, that it already has enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear warhead on short notice. On November 8, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh, announced that Iran will only agree to sign a deal with the US if all sanctions are unconditionally lifted. "Either we agree on everything, or we agree on nothing," he said.
• The US Biden Administration seems.... at a time finally of peace, deliberately acting to destabilize not only Israel's new coalition government but, more importantly, the entire region. The United States seems once again to be igniting, on the heels of its failure in Afghanistan, yet a second, unnecessary disruption, with all the carnage, global damage and pandemonium that will result. Those two historic upheavals will be the legacies of the Biden Administration. If Biden is looking for yet another disaster to notch on his belt, this is it.

"The US does not want to open a consulate merely to have a place for diplomatic connections with the PA [Palestinian Authority]... the purpose of opening the consulate is to recognize Palestinian claims to Jerusalem." — Professor Eugene Kontorovitch, Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason University. According to Dore Gold, formerly both Israel's Ambassador to the UN and Foreign Ministry Director-General, "The opening of the consulate on Agron Road in the west of the city will not only undermine Israeli sovereignty in the capital, it will also result in a serious withdrawal from the status Israel achieved in West Jerusalem prior to 1967." Pictured: The former US Consulate on Agron Road in Jerusalem, Israel, photographed in 2009. (Image source: Magister/Wikimedia Commons)

On May 2018, when the United States Embassy in Jerusalem was inaugurated on the 70th anniversary of the State of Israel's founding, the US consulate in Jerusalem became useless and quickly shut its gates. Now, in 2021, the current US Biden administration wants to reopen the consulate, "for the Palestinians", Arabs ruled by the Palestinian Authority.

Seeing this proposal as a threat to Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declined the request.

"A U.S. consulate in Jerusalem to a foreign body", wrote the noted attorney and former US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and "clearly runs afoul of American law" because of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, passed overwhelmingly by both the U.S. House and Senate.

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