On July 1, 2026, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion signed an agreement to build the US embassy on land Israel confiscated from Palestinians following the 1948 War.1

In 2017, during his first term, President Donald Trump announced his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, effectively recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the city. The provocative move reversed course on previous US policy deeming the status of Jerusalem as a matter to be resolved in negotiations (see Palestinians Campaign against Proposed US Embassy Site on Stolen West Jerusalem Land).

The site for the diplomatic US compound is located on roughly 52 dunams of land west of Jerusalem. During the Colonial British Mandate period, about 30 dunams of the land were leased to British authorities by Palestinian families to build the Allenby Barracks. After 1948, Israel used the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law—the main legal instrument Israel has used to seize land and other assets belonging to displaced Palestinians—to illegally confiscate the property, which also included Islamic waqf land (see How Israel Applies the Absentees’ Property Law to Confiscate Palestinian Property in Jerusalem). Israel applied this law retroactively to individuals who were not present on their property as of November 29, 1947, classifying them as “absentees,” and thereby taking over their property.

The land belongs to members of prominent Jerusalem families including the Khalidi, al-Fitiani, al-Khalili, Habib, Abu Soud, Razzaq, and Kleibo families.2 Jerusalem Story spoke with some of their descendants, including Rashid Khalidi and Aida and Mounir Kleibo.

“Jerusalem is supposed to be a corpus separatum under a resolution the United States voted for in 1947,” said Rashid Khalidi, professor of Palestinian history. “It is not Israeli territory. Israel’s presence there is illegal under international law. Moving the embassy there is illegal,” he explained.3

“This is stolen property, and it’s not just stolen property from ordinary run-of-the-mill Palestinians. It’s stolen property from, among others, US citizens.” Khalidi, who was born in the US a few months after the 1948 War, was referring to himself. “So, the US government is engaging in a violation of international law . . . and is planning to lease a property that does not belong to the Israeli state, but that belongs to US citizens.”

In January 2023, Adalah—The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel filed an objection to the plan with the Jerusalem District Planning Committee on behalf of 12 descendants of the original landowners (see Palestinians Campaign against Proposed US Embassy Site on Stolen West Jerusalem Land). The planning authorities rejected the objection in June 2023 and subsequently approved the plan in April 2024, paving the way for the official US-Israel agreement that was recently signed in 2026.4

While Trump made international headlines in 2017 when he decided to move the embassy to Jerusalem, the push to build it in Jerusalem goes as far back as the early 1970s, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s lobbying body in the US, began campaigning the US Congress to move the embassy to Jerusalem.5

With AIPAC pressure, Congress passed resolutions in support of moving the embassy, but it was not until the approval of the Helms Amendment in 1988 that the idea became a reality. The Helms Amendment allowed for the building of diplomatic compounds in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with either site to be used for the US embassy, depending upon the president’s decision. Following the law’s passing, on January 18, 1989, Israel and the US signed an agreement for the US to lease the Allenby Barracks site for $1 per year, renewable for 99 years.6

“Any American whose property is, in any way, infringed upon, the United States government acts, but not in this case. In fact, the United States government is the criminal in this case,” Khalidi said. “So, we brought this to the attention of administration after administration,” but rather than halt construction, Khalidi explains, they repeatedly dodged and claimed they would “figure out what to do,” including the Biden administration.

The Allenby Barracks, named after British General Edmund Allenby who captured Jerusalem from the Ottomans in December 1917 (see General Allenby’s Entry into Jerusalem in 1917), was the site of the British military headquarters during the British Mandate. As archival documents show, the British military rented the land from its Palestinian owners into the early 1950s. After Israel confiscated it, the barracks was turned into an Israeli border police station.

“The British were still paying us rent until after 1948,” Aida Kleibo, a decolonial feminist activist and researcher from Jerusalem, and another beneficiary of the land, told Jerusalem Story. “So, this means that they recognized that the land had lawful owners, and you could not just erase their rights.”7 After it was confiscated by Israel, she explains, “despite the existence of all the identifiable global beneficiaries and documented ownership, we stopped receiving rent.”

According to Kleibo, the property was leased for 100 Jordanian dinars annually. It is therefore estimated that Israel owes the beneficiaries at least 78,000 Jordanian dinars (roughly $110,000) in dues.

A multiyear research effort by the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) published in 2000 determined that at least 70 percent of the embassy plot is privately owned by Palestinians who were made refugees upon the state’s establishment.8 Of that, more than a third is waqf land. On May 15, 1948, the date marking the formal end of the British Mandate for Palestine, the land in question was owned outright by 76 Palestinians. Of those, 24 were beneficiaries of the waqf endowment on the land. Furthermore, at the time of the study, over 100 of the heirs lived outside Palestine and were holders of US or Canadian citizenship. Hundreds more have Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, or other nationalities, including those with permanent residency in Jerusalem.

Evidence from Adalah also corroborated the IPS study, with the human rights group uncovering archival documents indicating the land was owned by Palestinian families and includes a parcel belonging to the Sheikh Mohamad Khalili family endowment.9

“Sheikh Mohamad Khalili was a renowned Jerusalemite scholar and a merchant who had endowed many, many properties across Jerusalem and Palestine for the benefit of his descendants,” Kleibo said, noting how under Islamic law, charitable endowments cannot ever be sold or purchased, protecting them for generations.

“More than four centuries later, I am the 11th generation of his descendants, and I remain one of the beneficiaries of the waqf that he established,” Kleibo declared. “Over all these centuries, his descendants ended up marrying into several of Jerusalem’s historic families, which means that his inheritance belongs to a broad community of Jerusalemite families,” she clarified. “So, it’s not the story of one family alone. It actually reflects a much wider history of Palestinian presence and continuity in Jerusalem.”

Adalah and Palestinian American beneficiaries like Khalidi are weighing their options for recourse in response to the planned construction of the US embassy on their stolen property.

Other landowners like Kleibo feel legal efforts are futile at this point and resist in different ways. “How I resist is not only legal, political, or through court cases. It’s actually simply our continued presence in Jerusalem,” Kleibo told Jerusalem Story, “because just being here is a refusal of all the policies designed to make our life in Jerusalem impossible as Palestinians. No matter how much land is confiscated and how many restrictions are imposed or how systematically our existence is denied, we will not be erased, silenced, or forcibly displaced from Jerusalem.”

Kleibo elaborated on the US-Israeli scheme:

Mounir Kleibo, Aida’s relative and resident of Jerusalem, had more to say.

In July 2026, the former UN civil servant, blogger, photographer, and videographer wrote a position paper “on behalf of the [Kleibo] family and concerned rights holders.”10 

He opened his impassioned statement with the following words:

Mounir proceeded to outline his family’s claims and demands, insisting that: “We are not raising this issue in search of personal sympathy. Nor do we wish to reduce it to one family’s story. We speak because we have documents, memory, and a historical right, and because silence by rights holders allows power alone to define the narrative.”

In a list outlining several demands, he called “upon the Palestine Liberation Organization, as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the State of Palestine, represented by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, to formally and seriously adopt this file.”

He concluded by affirming the importance of the issue to Jerusalem, to its original inhabitants, and to collective Palestinian memory: “Land may be confiscated. Buildings may be constructed. Agreements may be signed. But documents remain. Memory remains. History does not begin at the moment of signature; it begins when land was owned, registered, and paid for.”