After a record expansion of the Israeli settlement activity, some settler advocates in the occupied West Bank expect Donald Trump to fulfill their dream of imposing sovereignty over the area, considered by the Palestinians to be the heart of a future their country, writes "Reuters".
The West Bank has been transformed by the rapid growth of Jewish settlements since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to head a far-right nationalist coalition two years ago. During this time we witnessed an explosion in settler violence.
In recent weeks, Israeli flags have sprung up on hilltops erected by some settlers in the West Bank's Jordan River Valley, raising concerns among many local Palestinians. Some settlers prayed for Trump's victory before the election.
"We have high hopes. We are even cheerful to a certain extent,'' Israel Medad, an activist and writer who supports Israel's annexation of the West Bank, told Reuters. for Trump's victory in the house he has lived in for more than four decades in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh.
Settlers celebrated Trump's nomination of a group of officials known for their pro-Israel views, including Ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has said the West Bank is not under occupation and prefers the term "communities" in front of "settlements".
"There really is no such thing as a Palestinian," Huckabee stated during an interview in 2008: "There are Arabs and Persians", "It is a political tool to try to take land away from Israel" . In 2017 he told Politico: "There is no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they are neighborhoods, they are cities. There is no such thing as occupation."
And in the past month, Israeli government ministers and settler advocates who have cultivated ties to the Christian right in the US have increasingly pushed the once-unpopular idea of "restoring sovereignty" over the West Bank. Netanyahu's government has not announced an official decision on the matter. A spokesman in Netanyahu's office declined to comment for this story.
It is by no means certain that Trump will support a move that puts at risk Washington's strategic ambition for a broader deal under the Abrahamic Accords to normalize Israel's ties with Saudi Arabia, which, like most countries around the world , rejects Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.
"Trump's desire to expand the Abraham Accords will be a top priority," said Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for both Democrats and Republicans, based on his own assessment of Trump's foreign policy considerations.
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"There is no way the Saudis would seriously think about joining if Israel officially absorbed the West Bank," he said.
Annexation would bury any hope of a two-state solution that creates an independent Palestine, and would also complicate efforts to resolve the more than year-long war in Gaza, which has spilled over into neighboring Lebanon.
During his first term, Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ended Washington's longstanding position that the settlements were illegal. But in 2020 his plan to create part of a Palestinian state along existing borders has thwarted Netanyahu's push for Israeli sovereignty over the area.
The newly elected president has not revealed his plans for the region. Trump's transition spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt did not respond to questions about the policy, saying only that he would "restore peace through force around the world.
However, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the government's most prominent pro-settler ministers, said last week that he hoped Israel could absorb the West Bank as early as next year with the Trump administration's support.< /p>
Israel Gantz, the head of the Yesha Council, an unifying group of Jewish communities in the West Bank, said in an interview that he hopes the Trump administration will "let" the government of Israel to move forward.
Gantz led a prayer session for a Trump victory at the ruins of an old Byzantine basilica in Shiloh ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
"We prayed that God would bring better days for the people of the United States of America and for Israel," he said. Shiloh is a popular stop for visiting American politicians, including Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, Trump's nominee for secretary of defense.
Last week, Huckabee told Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news channel affiliated with Smotrich's Religious Zionist movement, that any decision to annex would be a matter for the Israeli government. Huckabee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A senior Palestine Liberation Organization official, Wassel Abu Youssef, said any such action by the Israeli government "would not change the truth that this is Palestinian land.
At the same time, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has spiraled, including around Shiloh, prompting international condemnation and US and European sanctions, as recently as this week, against individuals believed to have played an important role role.
Settler leaders, including Gantz, say violence has no place in their movement. The settler movement claims that they provide security for the rest of Israel with their presence in areas near Palestinian towns.
A number of steps have been taken to consolidate Israel's position in the West Bank since the Netanyahu government came to power with a coalition agreement stating that "the Jewish people have a natural right to the land of Israel.
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"We are changing many things on the ground to make it a fact that Israel is also in Judea and Samaria," said Ohad Tal, chairman of Smotrich's parliamentary faction, speaking next to Trump's iconic red hat on a shelf in his office of the Knesset.
An entire mechanism has been built "for the effective enforcement of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria to make irreversible the fact that the Jewish presence is there and remains".