Husam Zomlot

Zomlot became political active while taking his undergraduate degree at Birzeit University outside Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. There he became a representative of Fatah’s student movement at the university during the First Intifada.

Said Zomlot at the time: “You didn’t take Jerusalem off the table. You took the table altogether. No one, no Palestinian, would ever be able to sit on that table. Good luck!”

In 2018, Zomlot was appointed Head of Mission to the United Kingdom.

In September 2018, the PLO's representative mission in Washington D.C was closed but by then Zomlot had already been recalled to Ramallah. As a result, what would eventually become the Trump Peace to Prosperity plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians was developed only with input from Benjamin Netanyahu's Israeli government.

Zomlot was appointed Head of Mission to the United Kingdom in October 2018. He arrived in the middle of Britain's process of leaving the EU and in his first year-and-a-half experienced two different conservative governments and two different opposition leaders.

In 2018, just before taking up his post in London, Zomlot was forced to defend himself against accusations that he was a Holocaust denier. The allegation was made by British tabloid newspapers in stories about then UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn's attendance at Zomlot's wedding.

In 2017, Zomlot was appointed as envoy to the United States, taking over from Maen Rashid Areikat.

His tenure there was cut short after the Trump administration decided to shutter the PLO mission in Washington DC and subsequently recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital. In December 2017 the White House announced its intention to move the US embassy to Israel to the city from Tel Aviv. The Palestinian leadership countered by boycotting ties with the US administration.

Zomlot was appointed Palestinian envoy to the US in March 2017 as the new Trump administration was bedding in. There followed a period of intense bilateral contacts, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump met four times in the period between May and September 2017.

But efforts came to a halt when the White House in November 2017 informed Zomlot of its intention to close the PLO mission in Washington DC and in December announced its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and plans to move the US embassy to Israel to Jerusalem.

He became strategic advisor to President of the State of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas in 2015 before being elected to Fatah's Revolutionary Council in 2016.

Before joining Birzeit as professor of public policy in 2012 he was Scholar in Residence at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government (2008–2010).  

Zomlot served as a spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation during the statehood campaign at the United Nations in New York in 2011.

Zomlot is cofounder of the Palestinian Strategy Group, which was established in 2008. A Palestinian think-tank, the PSG comprises more than 100 members selected from a wide range of key Palestinians from different political, professional and geographic backgrounds.

In 2000, he completed a master's degree in development studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He received his PhD in International Political Economy from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Department of Economics, University of London in 2007.

In 1999, while studying in London he was elected as president of the General Union of Palestine Students in the UK.

Husam Said Zomlot (b. 1973) is a Palestinian diplomat, academic and economist. He was appointed Head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom in October 2018. Before coming to the UK, he served as head of the PLO mission to the United States that was closed by the administration of President Donald Trump.

Zomlot was born in Shaburah refugee Camp, a United Nations Relief and Works Agency camp in Rafah in the occupied Gaza Strip in 1973. His parents were originally from the village of Simsim in what became Israel in 1948.

The move undermines a key Palestinian demand that the eastern part of the city, occupied by Israel in 1967, eventually serve as the capital of Palestine.

“In 1948, my father lost his home and his land and as a result I was born in a Rafah refugee camp," Zomlot told a conference on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Work and Refugee Agency, UNRWA. "Millions [of refugees] suffer the most precarious existence of them all. Nothing is more hurtful to a human being than forced exile."