The waiters at Ramallah’s cafes and the tenders of its falafel stands all had more or less the same question: is Donald Trump’s win good or bad? It is a question reserved for outsiders. The Palestinians in the biggest city on the West Bank seem to have already come to a provisional consensus: that the US election result has no real impact here because things could not possibly be worse.
“It will not make a big difference,” said Eyad Barghouti, a retired university teacher, expressing a commonly held view as the Gaza war rages on. “What Biden was doing before with a low profile, Trump will be more vocal about.
“Biden would say in public: ‘We’re not trying to starve Gaza, we’re trying to give them food aid,’ all the while supporting Israel’s army. [Trump] will say it in a clear way, that we are trying to get rid of such-and-such people. He will not play the game of trying to make himself sound like a humanitarian.”
All the worst-case consequences of Trump’s victory – the loss of freedom, the corrosion of justice, economic collapse and, for US allies, the possible encroachment of an aggressive neighbour and devastating wars – are already a reality for most Palestinians, many of them argue.
Those in the West Bank point out they only have to look at their social media feeds to see today’s equivalent of Guernica, Dresden or Grozny being streamed live from Gaza. They say that when it comes to the strip, the liberal order being mourned this week across the west was not just a bystander. It supplied the bombs.
“What we have seen has made us believe that the whole of western ideology is a lie,” a librarian in his 50s said, preferring that his name not be used. “They never cared about us. What they care about is the good of Israel. That is the one thing they can all agree on.”
While the first gut response in Ramallah is that Trump’s restoration will not significantly change the region’s disastrous trajectory, many acknowledge there is still room for the already dismal prospects of Palestinians to darken further.
Barghouti said the “violence could get worse” and that Trump in the White House could add unpredictability to despair. “It is like a monkey holding a bomb,” he said. “You don’t know when he will throw it or where he will throw it.”
Lama Sheikha, who works in a printing shop, said the US election result would “make Israel even stronger”. “More and more, I think it is Israel that makes the decisions, not the US. The US goes along with them, ready to help,” Sheikha said.
A Trump administration is far more likely than the current US government to go along with Israel’s intended destruction of the UN relief agency Unrwa, which provides basic services to 871,000 Palestinians on the West Bank as well as virtually the entire 2.3 million population of Gaza. Trump suspended US funding of Unrwa in 2018.
While Gaza’s economy has been almost completely wiped out, GDP on the West Bank has fallen by more than 20% over the past year and the employment rate now hovers around 35%. And it could be worse still. It is probably only pressure from the Biden administration that has prevented the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, from permanently withholding all the customs tax that Israel collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf. Without those revenues and Unrwa, the West Bank would be all but an economic wasteland.
Meanwhile, the wave of settler violence against Palestinians has risen exponentially in the past year. Many have been killed or injured by militant settlers while harvesting olive groves, which are frequently torched. In the early hours of Monday this week, a gang of masked militant settlers infiltrated as far as Al-Bireh, a Ramallah suburb, threw petrol bombs at cars and buildings, and shot at firefighters trying to reach the scene.
One of the few punitive measures the Biden administration has taken in the past few months has been to impose sanctions on some of the militant settler leaders. It is debatable what effect those measures have had on the ground, but they were anyway lambasted by Republicans as anti-Israeli. It is a reasonable bet that a Trump administration would drop them.
“People are leaving already. They are being forced to leave,” Sheikha said. “Now it will happen on a bigger scale, it will be harder on us, with the economic situation, and people are being attacked on their land as they harvest olives.”
She said she understood those who chose to flee, but she swore she would not be among them. “Whatever they do, they will not force me out of my country.”
Palestinian aspirations for full nationhood, already at a low ebb, have received another devastating setback with Trump’s re-election, a fact celebrated by Israeli settlers.
“The threat of a Palestinian state is off the table,” Israel Ganz, the head of the Yesha Council, the umbrella settler organisation, declared on Wednesday in a statement welcoming the US result. “This is a historical moment and opportunity for the settlement movement … Now, with the election of President Trump, it is time to change reality in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] as well, to ensure it will forever be a part of Israel and to ensure the security of the Jewish state.”
Trump has not yet picked his team but it is fair to say that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former bankruptcy lawyer turned ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, are likely to have the president-elect’s ear. Both are steadfast supporters of the settlements and Friedman has produced a book advocating complete annexation of the West Bank.
Annexation is already happening by stealth. Smotrich has begun a process of transferring parts of the West Bank from military to civilian control, a move towards absorption into Israel.
Barghouti and his librarian friend agreed that by enabling more overt extremism for the Israeli right, a Trump White House would have the virtue of removing a veil from the brutal realities of the Middle East and perhaps would galvanise a response.
The librarian pointed to the emergence of Hezbollah in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Shia militia became a formidable force, contributing to full Israeli withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and 2006. He said: “We are hoping for the same thing here – real resistance.”
