U.S. Continues To Advance Trump-Era Jerusalem Embassy Plans

The U.S. still plans to build the Jerusalem embassy on Palestinian land.

Former President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was met with widespread international condemnation. Yet, despite rejecting Trump’s extremist politics, President Joe Biden is pushing forward with the embassy move and constructing a compound atop stolen Palestinian land.

This month, human rights groups called on Biden’s administration to end plans to build the U.S. Jerusalem Embassy on private Palestinian property. Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Center for Constitutional Rights sent a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides. The organizations argued that continuing with Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem violates international law, specifically given Jerusalem’s special status as a city whose sovereignty is undetermined. The letter was written on behalf of several Palestinian families who would have inherited the land where the U.S. Embassy would be constructed if Israel had not illegally confiscated it.

Signs celebrating Trump's decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem

According to records found in the Israeli State Archives and published by Adalah in July, the land in question was owned by Palestinian families and leased to British Mandate authorities before Israel’s establishment in 1948.

Israel seized the land using its 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, which stipulates that property abandoned — even due to expulsion — during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War now belongs to Israel. This legislation is one of Israel’s primary tools in stripping land from Palestinian refugees, including being used in infamous cases such as ongoing dispossession efforts in Sheikh Jarrah.