Rubio Orders Palestinian Affairs Office to Fold Into Israel’s Jerusalem Embassy

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is shuttering the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs, which was opened under the Biden administration as an alternative to the United States Embassy in Jerusalem.

The office worked directly with the Palestinian Authority and Palestinians in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank.

“Secretary Rubio has decided to merge the responsibilities of the Office of Palestinian Affairs office fully into other sections of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem,” State Department Press Secretary Tammy Bruce said on Tuesday during a press briefing. “This decision will restore the first Trump term framework of a unified U.S. diplomatic mission in Israel’s capital that reports to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel.”

After Trump opened the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem — which had handled Palestinian affairs — was merged into the new embassy as the Palestinian Affairs Unit. In 2022, the Biden administration created the Office of Palestinian Affairs, which operated within the Jerusalem embassy but reports directly to the State Department instead of to the embassy.

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The Office of Palestinian Affairs was embroiled in controversy when it urged Israel to “refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks” in a now-deleted tweet following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in which terrorists raped, murdered, and kidnapped Israeli civilians. 

Trump’s newly named pick for United Nations ambassador, Mike Waltz, condemned the tweet at the time as “despicable” and said it “shows some of our bureaucrats’ true colors.”

While in the Senate, Rubio and a coalition of 80 other members of Congress released a statement calling it “alarming” that the Biden administration opened the Office of Palestinian Affairs, which “amounts to be a separate U.S. diplomatic office to the Palestinians in Israel’s capital.”

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The letter called for the Office of Palestinian Affairs to be merged into the United States Embassy under the authority of the Ambassador to Israel instead of acting as a “de facto embassy.”

“The Biden Administration’s decision is wrong and not how America should treat Israel, one of our closest allies in the world,” the letter stated.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee will oversee implementing the merger over the coming weeks, according to Bruce.

“The United States remains committed to its historic relationship with Israel, bolstering Israel’s security and securing peace to create a better life for the entire region,” Bruce said.

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Trump fulfilled the mandate of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which required the United States Embassy in Israel to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by 1999. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama repeatedly invoked a provision in the law allowing them to sign six-month waivers, delaying the relocation.

It wasn’t until President Trump that the law was fulfilled, with the embassy officially relocated to Jerusalem on May 14, 2018, a date that coincided with the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.