After Pushback From Staff On Move To Dangerous Ramallah, Spain Also To Close DC Embassy

“Washington’s restaurant scene is laughable. Tel Aviv is so much better. We’re considering running our embassy to the US from there.”

Madrid, June 16 – The government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will reevaluate its maintenance of full diplomatic facilities in the American capital, a government representative disclosed today, following the refusal of diplomatic personnel in Israel to move to the de facto capital of the “State of Palestine” that the Sánchez government recognized several seeks ago, citing safety concerns in Palestinian-controlled areas, and the subsequent realization that the American capital’s high incidence of violent crime poses similar threat levels to personnel there.

The Spanish government announced in late May that it recognizes a state called Palestine in the areas that Israel captured from Jordan and Egypt in 1967. The move sparked immediate problems for Spain. One, in couching the recognition in terms of a “genocide” being perpetrated against Palestinians, Madrid risked triggering a law that requires Spain to grant asylum to anyone fleeing genocide – in this case, around two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, if the Spanish government believes its own rhetoric. The other, more germane to the diplomatic realm, Spain’s diplomatic personnel charged with Spanish-Palestinian relations on the ground all live in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and now cite security and safety concerns in refusing to move to Ramallah, where Palestinian Authority offices function.

The recognition cites East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, but that remains under Israeli sovereignty and Israel has no intention of relinquishing it. Israel has also since barred Spanish diplomatic personnel in Jerusalem from conducting business in Palestinian territories; the Spanish consular offices in Jerusalem had served as an unofficial embassy to the Palestinians.

Washington, D.C., has long suffered some of the nation’s highest violent crime rates. Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials in Madrid disclosed that the safety of staff in the US capital had seldom occurred to any senior personnel until the subject became relevant in the Palestine question. “When the consular staff in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv objected, we realized that personal safety could be an issue elsewhere,” explained a section chief in the North America Directorate. “So we did some research, looked at statistics, and found that we should be concerned about more than Ramallah.”

“New York, Chicago, San Francisco – a whole litany of US cities are more dangerous than Ramallah, though that may vary by neighborhood,” the section chief continued. “But it’s not only about crime per se. Washington’s restaurant scene is laughable. Tel Aviv is so much better. We’re considering running our embassy to the US from there.”

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