The US government is considering building its embassy in Jerusalem on Palestinian land that Israel seized after the state was established.

The State Department is continuing implementation of former president Donald Trump’s controversial decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, seeking to build the diplomatic site on land that formerly held the Allenby Barracks on Hebron Road in West Jerusalem. The plot includes private Palestinian and waqf land illegally confiscated by Israel using the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, the main legal instrument Israel has used to confiscate land and other property belonging to displaced Palestinians. Israel applied this law retroactively to certain individuals who left their property as of November 29, 1947 (see How Israel Applies the Absentees’ Property Law to Confiscate Palestinian Property), classifying them as “absentees” and seizing their property.

The US has been leasing the property from the State of Israel since January 18, 1989, for $1 each year, renewable for 99 years and covering 31,250 square meters (7.7 acres).1

This month, the subcommittee for objections of the Jerusalem District Planning Committee convened to discuss multiple objections to the proposed plan—including one submitted in January by Adalah—The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Adalah found, and subsequently published in July 2022, Israeli state archival records proving the land belongs to several Palestinian families. The documents are the official lease agreements between the Palestinian landowners and British Mandate authorities, who rented the property from the landowners before Israel was established in 1948.

The aggrieved landowners in the embassy case include members of the Khalidi, al-Fitiani, El Khalili, Abu Soud, and Qleibo families, among others.

Adalah filed its objection on behalf of 12 of the landowners’ descendants. These include four US citizens, three Jordanian residents, and five residents of occupied East Jerusalem.2

“The approval [of the diplomatic compound] plan and the consequent relocation of the U.S. embassy to the proposed site will violate the property rights of the objectors—Palestinian refugees and internally-displaced persons—some of whom are U.S. citizens,” Adalah’s legal director Dr. Suhad Bishara wrote in the objection. “Such a move is absolutely prohibited under international law.”3

Bishara told Jerusalem Story that a final decision hasn’t been made on the embassy location nor a timeline established.4 A State Department spokesperson told Jerusalem Story that the US is considering the Allenby compound and a site in the Jerusalem district of Arnona in Talpiot and has not yet selected a location.5 The Trump administration temporarily moved the previous embassy from Tel Aviv to the existing US consulate site in Arnona in 2018. (A separate consulate serving Palestinians in East Jerusalem was closed with the embassy move.) Moving the embassy to Jerusalem was long considered a recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the city, which US policy previously considered a matter to be resolved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Adalah’s objection emphasizes that the embassy plan not only infringes on the property rights of Palestinians but that moving the embassy to Jerusalem is in itself a violation of international law.

Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem and family member of the landowners, reiterated how, in this regard, the embassy move is doubly unjust.

“What’s most injurious is the fact that, though Jerusalem is under occupation by Israelis, in international law, it remains a contested city and it has a separate status,” Qleibo said. He called the relocation “outrageous because it legitimizes the Israeli occupation on the one hand, and it breaks the international law regarding Jerusalem.”6

In 2017, Trump reversed decades of US foreign policy and challenged the international consensus when he announced the decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Despite his successor, President Joe Biden, voicing a commitment to Palestinian statehood and a rejection of Trump’s ideology, US insistence on completing the plan gives it a stamp of approval, says Qleibo.

“The USA has decided that they will favor Israel, that they will support them, and that they will not say no,” Qleibo said. “[The US] will change everything just to keep in favor with Israeli expansionist policies.”

According to Rashid Khalidi, a US citizen and descendant of landowners mentioned in the rental documents, “The fact that the US government is now participating actively with the Israeli government in this project means that it is actively infringing on the property rights of the legitimate owners of these properties, including many US citizens.”7

The proposed area for the embassy site is known as the Allenby Barracks. It was the site of British military headquarters under the British Mandate (see map). The massive barracks, named after British General Edmund Allenby, housed the largest garrison in Jerusalem and was integral to its economy.8 It might have become the site of the Jerusalem airport (instead of Qalandiya) were it not for local opposition.9 As archival documents show, the British military was renting the land from its Palestinian owners into the early 1950s. After Israel took control of the area, confiscating the land, the barracks was turned into an Israeli border police station. 10

A multiyear research effort by the Institute for Palestine Studies around the year 2000 determined that at least 70 percent of the proposed embassy plot is privately owned by Palestinians who were made refugees upon the state’s establishment; of that, more than a third is Islamic waqf land. On May 15, 1948, the date marking the formal end of the British Mandate, the land in question was owned outright by 76 Palestinians. Of these, 24 were beneficiaries of the waqf endowment on this land. Furthermore, at the time of the study, over 100 of their heirs had been located and were holders of US and Canadian citizenship, while hundreds more are believed to have Palestinian Jordanian, Lebanese, or other nationalities.11 At this writing, these numbers can only have increased.

Qleibo, whose family has been in Palestine for at least 2,000 years, recalled his father’s childhood memories on the land, which once served as the family’s summer house prior to the British Mandate.

“The endowment and the beneficiaries form a network of relation that objectifies the social structure and hierarchy of Jerusalem and establishes the aristocratic families in the city and their long historical background.”

"This is one of the properties that symbolizes not only an endowment, but also it embodies Palestinians’ social structure because most of the families of Jerusalem have one of the beneficiaries,” Qleibo said. “We know where we are from.”

Like the other beneficiaries, Qleibo’s ancestors were spiritual mystics and scholars from the upper echelons of Palestinian society. In particular, Qleibo’s relatives were once custodians of what is today the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

“This particular property is the social registry for the Jerusalem elite,” Qleibo said, remarking how appropriating the land obliterates the Palestinian historical presence in Jerusalem. “By removing it, you remove the connections.”

Salma El Khalidi, whose great-grandmother owned part of the Allenby Barracks, refutes the idea that this is a simple real estate dispute—an argument often heard from Israelis.

“It’s not a matter of property, it’s a matter of theft,” El Khalidi said. “This is ethnic cleansing.”12

El Khalidi noted her family is privileged to have preserved their ownership records, while other Palestinians may have lost such documents. Yet she underscored that the legal fight over this land is only one element in Palestinians’ ongoing struggle for liberation.

“It’s a continuous journey toward justice,” she said. “And this is just one part of it.”13