Jason Burke
The Observer / November 17, 2024
Palestinian groups shocked by US president-elect’s favouring of outspoken supporters of far-right activists in the region.
Jerusalem – Right-wing Jewish settlers and extremist nationalist Zionists in Israel have described top officials in Donald Trump’s new administration as a “dream team” which will offer a “unique and special opportunity” to expand Israel’s hold on occupied territory and permanently end any prospect of a Palestinian state.
Palestinian groups and leftwing NGOs in Israel have been shocked by Trump’s appointment of outspoken supporters of the projects of far-right Israeli activists and say the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been emboldened by Trump’s victory.
“The series of appointments announced by US president-elect Donald Trump should worry everyone who cares about Israel’s future,” an editorial in the leftwing newspaper Haaretz warned.
Since the US election, authorities have pushed ahead with demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which were occupied in 1967.
Last week, Palestinian residents of al-Bustan in East Jerusalem were sifting through debris caused by the recent demolition of nine houses by municipal authorities after an Israeli court ruled their construction illegal.
Fakhri Abu Diab, a veteran activist who for years has led resistance to efforts to demolish the homes of Palestinian families in al-Bustan, said bulldozers had returned on the day of the US elections to destroy the part of his house left standing by municipal demolition teams earlier this year.
Abu Diab, 62, said 40 people, including children, had been left homeless and that 115 homes were now threatened.
“Israel has wanted to demolish here for 20 years and are now seizing the opportunity. This is just a way to punish us and make us leave. I am here, where my parents and grandparents were, and will stay here,” Abu Diab said. His wife, Amina, said that with Trump in power there was “nothing to restrain Israel”.
The Jerusalem municipality said the buildings were located on land designated as an open public area.
The Israeli rights group Ir Amim argued that the true aim of the demolitions was to connect Israeli settler pockets implanted in Palestinian neighbourhoods to west Jerusalem and said local authorities had been emboldened by Trump’s win. The demolitions in al-Bustan “could serve as a portent of what is to come”, Ir Amim said.
Also last week, a Bedouin village in the Negev desert was demolished to make way for a new Orthodox Jewish community on the orders of Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right national security minister, and 25 Palestinian structures in the West Bank were knocked down, according to the UN.
Trump’s picks have surprised even hardliners. The nominee for secretary of state, Republican senator Marco Rubio, has said he opposes a ceasefire in Gaza and believes Israel should destroy “every element” of Hamas, whom he described as “vicious animals”, while Elise Stefanik, proposed as ambassador to the United Nations, has called the UN a “cesspool of antisemitism” for its condemnation of deaths in Gaza.
The new US ambassador to Israel is set to be Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who backs the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and has called a two-state solution in Palestine “unworkable”. During a visit to Israel in 2017, Huckabee said: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. There’s no such thing as a settlement – they are communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Pete Hegseth, the likely defence secretary, is another evangelical Christian who has tattoos of Christian symbols and slogans often associated with the Crusades and the far right.
“Israel could never have asked for anything more than this,” said Daniel Luria, a director who speaks for Ateret Cohanim – an NGO which describes its aims as reclaiming and rebuilding a united Jerusalem for the Jewish people, and is behind a number of controversial projects in the city, including the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes to make way for Jewish families or religious students.
“There’s no such thing as an Arab country on the land of Israel. The fact that there’s been many attempts over the years to do something different is irrelevant,” Luria said. “So we’ve got a very unique situation now … to really have literally a new Middle East, and readjust everything.”
Some right-wing radicals have compared Trump to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon in 539BC, allowing exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem.
Pro-settler parties hold key posts in Israel’s coalition government, the most right-wing the country has known. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and an outspoken advocate of expanded settlements, last week said that 2025 would be “the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria”, referring to the West Bank in the biblical terms used by right-wing Israelis and their US supporters, and signalling a hope of annexing the occupied territories.
Expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem has surged throughout the war that followed the Hamas attacks into Israel on 7 October, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. More than 43,000 have died in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, also mostly civilians.
Several Israeli ministers, including Smotrich, were present at a conference last month which called for the return of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Huckabee, who has refused to use any terms other than Judea and Samaria to describe the West Bank, is an enthusiastic supporter of the City of David Foundation, a government-funded archaeological park in a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem. It is run by Elad, an Israeli settler group accused of displacing Palestinian families from Jerusalem by buying Palestinian houses and using controversial laws that let the state take over Palestinian property.
An EU report in 2018 said Elad’s projects in parts of East Jerusalem were being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.
The foundation refused to discuss the projects’ support from the Israeli government and overseas.
Last week, tourists sat under the olive trees and heard lectures at the City of David information centre, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.
Jack Holford, a 62-year-old retired software engineer visiting Jerusalem with his wife, Debbie, said: “We believe that … God has a plan for Israel and that God said they own the land. We consider ourselves believers and we are part of God’s plan revealed through Israel for the whole world. There are Arabs, Palestinians and Jews and they are all Israelis.”
Trump’s first term saw unprecedented steps to support Israel’s territorial claims, including recognising Jerusalem as its capital and moving the US embassy there, and recognising Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights.
Pro-settlement activists believe Trump’s picks mean the new administration will go much further.
“They’ve spoken about Jews having the right to live everywhere, that it’s impossible to divide [Jerusalem] into two, that you can’t allow hatred and evil on your back doorstep and terror … and that comes from a biblical background … Just like I see King David and Abraham, they see them also,” Luria said.
Jason Burke is the International security correspondent of The Guardian
