Abbas adviser: Guatemala’s announcement is ‘disappointing’
Guatemala’s announcement that it will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is “a disappointing decision that we must fight by the way of political and diplomatic measures,” Majdi al-Khalidi, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s adviser for diplomatic affairs, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
He did not specify which measures should be taken to push back against Guatemala’s announcement.
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales’s announcement in a Facebook post on Sunday that Guatemala will move its embassy to Jerusalem comes just weeks after US President Donald Trump decided to initiate a process to relocate the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Morales did not say when Guatemala’s embassy would be relocated to Jerusalem.
Khalidi said Morales’s announcement violates a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly last week, which calls on countries “to refrain from the establishment of diplomatic missions in the Holy City of Jerusalem.”
“According to the UN General Assembly’s decision, no country has the right to move its embassy to Jerusalem or recognize the city as Israel’s capital,” he said. “All decisions to move embassies to Jerusalem are null and void and illegal.”
Guatemala was one of nine countries to vote against the UN General Assembly’s resolution on Jerusalem last week, while 128 countries voted in favor and 35 abstained.
Guatemala and Israel have long had close ties that date back to Israel’s establishment in 1948. It was one of a handful of countries that had its embassy in Jerusalem before 1980.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital, while the Palestinians hope east Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
According to Palestinian officials, countries that move their embassies to Jerusalem before a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians are basically recognizing Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem.
When Trump announced his plan to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem, he said it would be up to Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate the final status of Jerusalem.
Later on Monday, PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki also rebuked the Guatemalan president for his announcement regarding his country’s embassy in Israel.
“This is a step that embodies the insistence of President Morales to drag his country on to the wrong side of history,” he said in statement published on the official PA news site Wafa.