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The Biden administration sent a request to Israel to allow reopening a US consulate for citizens of Palestinian territories in Jerusalem. But the Israeli government has rejected the US request and marked a blow to the White House’s efforts to mend ties with Palestinian leaders. The Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett said at a press conference that there was no room for a second US consulate in Jerusalem. Point to be noted that the US closed its consulate serving Palestinian citizens in 2019 as the Trump administration moved to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. However, the move enraged Palestinian officials, as the city is also claimed by the Palestinian National Authority. Bennett said, “There’s no room for another American consulate in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the capital of one state and that’s the state of Israel”.

It is noteworthy that consulate services for Palestinians continue to a limited degree at the US embassy in Jerusalem. The embassy primarily served as the headquarters for US-Israeli relations but also contains the Palestinian Affairs Unit of the US. The Israeli government has proposed that the US open a consulate in the West Bank. But the idea was opposed by Palestinian leaders who have resisted the US’s recognition of Jerusalem as solely Israel’s capital and sought the city’s eastern half as part of their claimed territory. The Trump administration strongly aligned itself with Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the years former President Donald Trump was in office. The US oversaw the official recognition of Israel’s sovereignty by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates during Trump’s term.

However, US relations with the Palestinian territories deteriorated at the same time and the White House’s efforts to engineer a deal between Israeli and Palestinian leaders never came to a solution. The experience mirrored Trump’s similarly failed attempts to reach a major deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un despite months of diplomacy including becoming the first-ever US President to cross the border into North Korea. Last month, the US State Department criticized the announcements of plans to continue the construction of settlements for Israelis in lands claimed by the Palestinian Authority. A spokesperson for the Department, Ned Price said, “Such a plan damages the prospects for a two-state solution. We strongly oppose the expansion of settlements, which is completely inconsistent with efforts to lower tensions and to ensure calm”.