The West Bank’s setting sun painted long shadows on the ground as Husam Zomlot, the de facto Palestinian ambassador to the United States, stood on the balcony of his family home in Ramallah and gazed over the undulating hills. The air was thick with the scent of blooming olive trees, and the distant echo of playing children offered a comforting backdrop for his thoughts after a long day of government meetings. An urgent ping on his phone jolted him back to reality, foretelling a message that would shatter the calm of his world. Zomlot’s diplomatic status had been revoked by the Trump Administration. The Palestinian mission in Washington D.C. was ordered to close within a month — effective October 2018 — and the Zomlot family’s American visas were made invalid. Zomlot, his wife, and his two young children were to be expelled — along with a slew of career diplomats from his office.
A veteran diplomat who was born in a U.N. refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Zomlot had long envisioned a life punctuated by the predictable ceremonies of embassy events, delicate negotiations, and cultural exchanges. As a student at Birzeit University in the West Bank, Zomlot found his voice in political activism. Following his studies, he taught as a fellow at Harvard before taking up a professorship at Birzeit. He then returned to the world of politics as the spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the U.N. during the Palestinian statehood campaign in 2011.
In 2017, Zomlot realized his yearslong political ambition when he was appointed as envoy to the U.S. — the equivalent of an ambassador for Palestine, a country that is not recognized by the U.S.. Zomlot and his family moved to Washington D.C. in April of that year. The weight of representing Palestine in the U.S., heavy though it was, was one he proudly embraced. Now, the country that once welcomed him — that empowered him to articulate the cause of Palestinian self-determination — was slamming its doors shut.
“My kids really enjoyed living in Washington,” Zomlot told me of his children, who were five and six years old. “They were forming their first real friendships with people, so to have to withdraw them in the middle of the school year left a psychological impact,” he said. “I even feel it when I leave for a couple of days and my kids become a little bit anxious… I feel it in their questions: Are you coming back? Are we staying here?”
In the days following Zomlot’s expulsion, The Economist described it as “symbolic,” noting that prior to the expulsion, “the Palestinian Embassy in Washington did not provide consular services, and its lobbying and public-relations work fell on deaf ears.” The State Department cited a failure to “advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel” as the Trump administration’s reason for the expulsion. It urged the Palestinians not to let such a peripheral decision “distract from the imperative of reaching a peace agreement.”
The narrative of the ambassador’s expulsion in the U.S. media and from government officials was riddled with rhetoric that defines the way much of us, as consumers of political media, are accustomed to viewing political banishment: while unfortunate, expulsions are emblematic of the spirit of the time, not effective drivers of that spirit.
I feel it in their questions: Are you coming back? Are we staying here?
When I spoke to Zomlot, who has now landed on his feet as the Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, he told me that Trump’s edict transcended symbolism. “It’s not just symbolic,” Zomlot lamented. “It is practical. An embassy sustains the relationship on a daily basis.” Zomlot described how the closure of the mission meant that tens of thousands of Palestinian-Americans were left without a central hub to celebrate their culture, heritage, and achievements. Many found it increasingly challenging to find spaces where they could express their Palestinian identity, let alone coordinate travel to and from Palestine.
Beyond administrative tasks, Zomlot explained that the embassy played a vital role in fostering diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Palestine. He recalled being instrumental in facilitating Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to Washington and then-President Donald Trump’s subsequent trip to the West Bank in 2017. These trips, Zomlot emphasized, were not just ceremonial, but crucial diplomatic endeavors that strengthened ties between the U.S. and Palestine and laid the groundwork for the potential peace plan Trump had promised. Zomlot has a point: every American president since Bill Clinton has indulged Palestinian leadership by visiting the West Bank, and both Palestinian presidents during that time have reciprocated with trips to Washington. Since the closure of the Palestinian embassy, neither country’s president has undertaken such a visit, which Zomlot said has deprived them of the opportunity to “really engage, understand, and initiate.”
As I listened to Zomlot explain the effects of being kicked out of the U.S., something more subtle than the loss of diplomacy struck me as un-symbolic: by expelling Zomlot, the U.S. had very tangibly eroded its trustworthiness as a broker in any potential peace negotiations in the eyes of the Palestinians. At the time, media coverage of Zomlot’s expulsion opted not to explore its practical ramifications, stopping its analysis at the symbolic affront to the Palestinian people as a whole.
More pertinent than its symbolism is that many Palestinians viewed the humiliation of Zomlot and his family as a form of deep-rooted contempt for the Palestinian cause. Hanan Ashrawi, one of Palestine’s eminent activists and political leaders, accused the U.S. of extortion: “The U.S. has taken its attempts to pressure and blackmail the Palestinians to a new level,” Ashrawi said. Saeb Erakat, Palestine’s chief negotiator for decades, was less sparing: “[The expulsion] is yet another affirmation of the Trump administration’s policy to collectively punish the Palestinian people,” he said in the media in response to the expulsion.
Zomlot agreed, claiming that his expulsion served as yet more evidence to the Palestinian people that the Trump administration was conspiring against them. When Trump unveiled his infamous “two-state” peace plan two years later in 2020, it was dead on arrival: the Palestinians, who were being asked to come to the negotiating table, were not going to reward American bad faith. Palestinians, Zomlot argued, felt as if “taking out the Palestinian voice [via his expulsion] was a key part of the plan.”
The tale of Husam Zomlot tells a very different story than the narrative of symbolism The Economist depicted at the time. Perhaps because diplomatic expulsions are instantaneously covered by the media and rarely revisited retrospectively, we often fail to appreciate how consequential they can be. The Economist painted the embassy closure as illustrative of the frailty of the Palestinian cause in the U.S.: “Far from winning a state, it could not even keep an office in Georgetown,” it quipped. But for the Palestinians, the expulsion of their ambassador instigated — in very real terms — a further breakdown in the US-Palestinian relationship and the end of direct, good-faith communication.
At the very end of our conversation, Zomlot outlined his hopes for the potential Israel-Saudi normalization deal, which the U.S. is brokering to reconcile the demands of both sides: trade for Israel and security guarantees, nuclear power, and an improvement of the Palestinian condition for Saudi Arabia. Zomlot, optimistic about the deal, noted that the Saudis are responsible for negotiating on the Palestinians’ behalf as to what the last condition entails. Had he kept his post in Washington, he hypothesized, he might have been involved in direct talks with the State Department. “The lack of our presence [in Washington] has made [Israel-Saudi negotiations] more difficult,” he admitted. This deal is yet another example of how different significant international negotiations might have been had Zomlot not been expelled.
“I was nothing more than the involuntary symbol of a very strong political movement.”
A French ambassador I spoke with who was recently expelled — and who requested anonymity — offered a different perspective on his own expulsion. He was adamant that there was nothing the French government could have done to prevent it: his banishment, he argued, was truly symbolic.
“The first symbol a country will turn to when it wants to mark its dissonance with the French is obviously to get rid of the [French] ambassador,” the ambassador explained. “The regime had already adopted an anti-French stance… so I was nothing more than the involuntary symbol of a very strong political movement.”
Beyond blaming an antagonistic host government, the ambassador traced his expulsion to “post-colonial malaise.” Recalling the generations of people who had massed frustration against and resentment towards the French following the host country’s independence, he argued that a political retreat was inevitable.
To admit that an expulsion is partially un-symbolic is to accept that acting to prevent it might have been worthwhile. The French ambassador’s attitude, which suggests that the hands of his country were tied, contradicts the official account of the government that ordered his withdrawal. It clarified that it was seeking the withdrawal of this specific ambassador because of actions he took that eroded their trust in him, not because of a recalibration of the country’s relationship with the French entirely. Of course, singling out an ambassador for expulsion doesn’t speak well of those bilateral relations. In fact, it materially hurts them in the short term. Along with the ambassador, the French government was forced to withdraw its troops from the host country as well.
But adopting a lens of symbolism potentially aggravates the diplomatic relationship at hand. Rather than appointing a new ambassador as was asked of him, French President Emmanuel Macron refused, keeping the ambassador I spoke with on the payroll for “consultations” in Paris. Those consultations have done little to rebuild trust with the host country’s government: even the ambassador conceded that he does not expect to return anytime soon. Had the French accepted a sense of agency and dispatched a new ambassador, would their interests be better served? While the ambassador answered that question with a resounding no, it is difficult to justify that the situation on the ground would not have been different with an ambassador living in the host country. It might be unproductive, then, to paint the French ambassador’s expulsion with a purely symbolic brush.
The French ambassador denies that paradigm entirely and contends that the host country’s “distrust” in him was an excuse for a conscious and inevitable shift away from France. “They had already chosen us as a political alien,” he said. “They had already decided to attack us and had already considered France as an enemy.” In other words, even if France were to appoint a new ambassador, the host government would undoubtedly conjure an excuse to shun them, too.
To further press the ambassador, I put forward the case of the attempted expulsion of French ambassador to Niger Sylvain Itté, who, at the time of our interview, was being held captive by the military junta after President Macron refused the new government’s request for his withdrawal. The ambassador conceded that the delicacy of the matter—and Macron’s attention to it—suggested that something more than symbolism was at play. Indeed, Macron’s refusal to withdraw the ambassador suggests a belief that he could have affected the outcome of the withdrawal request, undermining the narrative of diplomatic expulsions as purely symbolic. Macron was forced to eventually withdraw the ambassador, resigning himself to a new reality of diminished French influence in Niger.
***
Matthew Fuhrmann is a visiting professor of political science at Yale and an expert on international security issues relating to diplomacy and bargaining. When I recounted the stark differences in Zomlot and the French ambassadors’ postures towards symbolism to Fuhrmann, he proposed a conceptual framework that could accommodate both. “Expulsions serve three main functions,” he explained: a symbolic function, a coercive function, and a deterrence function.
The symbolic classification very much echoes the French ambassador’s description of his expulsion. Whereas symbolism concerns signaling without tangible outcomes, coercive expulsions serve to materially weaken the other side’s position during negotiations. Deterrence expulsions, meanwhile, manifest as nonbelligerent warnings not to repeat an unwanted action.
While Fuhrmann acknowledged that expulsions can fall into the symbolic category in theory, he pointed out that, in practice, misperceptions can complicate intended symbolism. “In international politics, messages are misinterpreted all the time,” he said. “It’s totally plausible to me that you might expel a diplomat for one reason, but the country where the diplomat is coming from might see a totally different motivation for your behavior.”
It is conceivable, therefore, that an expulsion seen domestically as symbolic could be compellent in effect. The Trump administration might have sincerely believed that it was shuttering a token cultural attaché, but it would come to realize years later, upon the repudiation of its peace plan, that its calculus eclipsed a mere rejection of ceremonial diplomacy.
***
Through the conversations with Zomlot and the French ambassador, it becomes clear that the threads of symbolism and reality are interwoven so tightly in the tapestry of diplomacy that it can be impossible to discern one from the other. When viewed merely as a form of political theater, expulsions are often unjustly overlooked. Indeed, their portrayal as symbolic gestures provides a comfortable veil for nations to hide behind, absolving them from any genuine introspection or accountability.
Husam Zomlot’s story is a poignant reminder of this. The implications of his expulsion from the U.S. extended far beyond symbolism. For him and the Palestinian community, it was an intentional tear to the fabric of a diplomatic relationship they had sewn over many decades. Zomlot’s chronicle reveals that the chasm between intent and perception is a breeding ground for misunderstanding, further complicating the delicate dance of diplomacy. That very chronicle, Furhmann posited, was likely nothing more for the White House than an impulsive decision made by President Trump.
Similarly, the French ambassador’s rhetoric compels us to confront some unsettling realities: Does conveniently labeling expulsions as symbolic allow nations to sidestep responsibility for what comes from them? Does such a mindset not only breed complacency but also a cycle of diplomatic missteps?
Husam Zomlot and the French ambassador were not the first diplomats to be expelled from their host countries, nor will they be the last. Each expulsion adopts a unique and particular form––generalizing their characteristics is unproductive, unless you reject the prospect of symbolism outright.
That being said, the next time you encounter an expulsion, ask yourself if the symbolic lens through which it is displayed captures the true resolution of the diplomatic situation at hand. Perhaps you will find that it blurs the image, proffering a plea for a lack of accountability. You might even find that the intended symbolism rarely seeps through. Indeed, the human tendency to exaggerate potential threats challenges the plausibility of purely symbolic expulsions at all.
Diplomacy—the art of political discussion—begets very real consequences by nature, and the whereabouts of bumptious diplomats should be no exception. By recognizing this, we can become ever-so-slightly more effective diplomatic practitioners. In a world where one misperception can spark a devastating war, that upgrade matters. So, should you ever contemplate expelling an ambassador after launching a military coup, remember that the quiet whispers of an expulsion can quickly become the loud gestures of aggression.
Cover image: Original Graphic (Malik Figaro/The Yale Politic)