US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited the Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya in the occupied West Bank, where he condemned the surging settler violence against Palestinians as "terror" and called for "severe consequences." Yet his visit was a study in contradiction, a performance of concern from a lifelong champion of the settlement enterprise, delivered in language that simultaneously denounced the settlers and endorsed the ideology driving their attacks. For Palestinians, who have watched such gestures come and go, there is little expectation that anything will change on the ground.
Speaking in Turmus Ayya, a town where roughly 80 percent of the some 3,000 residents are Palestinian Americans and which is surrounded by settlements and subjected to repeated settler attacks, Huckabee declared that "crime is crime, terror is terror," and that those responsible should expect severe consequences. He said the Israeli government bore a responsibility to ensure the safety of the targeted Palestinians, and argued it was in Israel's own interest to act, claiming that a violent minority of "a few hundred" settlers was tarnishing the reputation of the wider settler population, which he defended.
The contradictions ran through his every word. In the same appearance in which he branded settlers terrorists, Huckabee insisted on calling the occupied West Bank "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name that Israel and the settler movement use precisely to assert a divine Jewish claim to the land and to erase its Palestinian identity.
"The reason I use the terms Judea and Samaria is because they are the ancient biblical terms of this land," he said, dismissing "the West Bank" as "a nebulous term." A Baptist minister who has long cited his faith as the basis for his support of Israel and the settlers, Huckabee condemned settler theft by quoting scripture, "Thou shalt not steal," while endorsing the very worldview under which settlers claim the entire land as their God-given inheritance.
His erasure of Palestinian identity went further still. Throughout his remarks to journalists, Huckabee avoided the word "Palestinians" entirely, never once naming the people whose safety he claimed to be championing. Instead, he referred to them only as "people who live in the PA," reducing an entire nation to residents of an administrative body, stripping them of their national identity in the same appearance in which he posed as their defender. It was a telling omission from a diplomat who insists on the settlers' biblical name for the land but cannot bring himself to name the people being driven off it.
That worldview was on open display in Turmus Ayya itself. A day before Huckabee's visit, a settler was filmed standing atop a Palestinian family's home in the town, declaring in broken English: "This is my land. This is my country because Allah promised me." The settler wore a shirt bearing the logo of Kach, the banned extremist organization of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, the same movement that far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir once belonged to. The scene captured exactly the ideology Huckabee simultaneously condemns and legitimizes when he adopts the settlers' own name for the land.
Huckabee's professed support for Palestinians was similarly hollow. While presenting himself as a defender of Palestinian safety, he backs a vision tethered to the Oslo framework, an arrangement Israel has spent three decades hollowing out and burying, all while expanding the illegal settlements that have rendered a viable Palestinian state impossible. The settlements Huckabee has personally championed for years are the very instruments of the dispossession he now claims to lament, and the government he asks to protect Palestinians is the same one that arms, funds, and shields the settlers carrying out the attacks.
The emptiness of the visit was underscored by events unfolding around it. On the day Huckabee arrived preaching consequences, settlers attacked a convoy of Palestinians traveling to al-Mughayyir to offer condolences to the families of two teenagers shot dead by Israeli forces, beating passengers with clubs, pepper-spraying them, and stealing a vehicle, while an ambulance was blocked from reaching the wounded. The day before, settlers had torched Palestinian farmland in the same area.
Across the occupied West Bank, settler attacks occur daily and are almost never prosecuted, with critics accusing the Israeli government of condoning and even encouraging the violence. Days earlier, after Huckabee had called the settlers besieging Qusra "Israeli terrorists," settlers torched a mosque in the village of Bizzariya and sprayed on a nearby wall: "Regards to Huckabee from the terrorists," a taunt that laid bare how little his words frighten them.
Also during the visit, Huckabee denied that Israel was planning to force Palestinians out of Gaza, declaring "categorically" that there was no Israeli plan to displace people against their will, a statement made just days after War Minister Israel Katz said publicly that plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza had merely been "frozen" by Washington and that Israel was "prepared to remove them by sea, by air, and by every possible means," and after Ben-Gvir unveiled a detailed plan to expel 1.86 million Palestinians. Huckabee's denial, contradicted by Israel's own ministers, only deepened the impression of an envoy performing a role rather than describing reality.
