Trump win means ‘more Israeli settlements, fewer rights for Palestinians’

Palestinians are bracing themselves for Israel to take advantage of a US administration that is likely to put less pressure on the Israelis to make concessions for peace, reports Ben Lynfield.

An Israeli jogger passes a pro-Trump placard in Tel Aviv on November 12, 2016. Jim Hollander/EPA

Jerusalem // Increased settlement activity, more home demolitions, and annexation of parts of the West Bank.

These are some of the steps that Palestinians are bracing themselves for Israel to take once a Trump administration is in place, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government senses it has an even freer hand than during the tenure of Barack Obama.

Officially, the Palestinian Authority is taking a wait-and-see approach and its leaders are stressing the positions taken by Donald Trump during the election campaign – which reflected robust support for Israel and scant sympathy for the Arab side – are not predictors of how he will behave in office.

"We know that Trump was one thing during the election campaign and that he will become something else once he becomes president," Ahmad Majdalani, an adviser to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, told Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post on Thursday. "We don't believe we will see changes to US policy."

Palestinian and Israeli analysts disagree, however, while Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council's politics committee, told The National the Israeli government would likely "try to exploit this situation".

It came as Mr Netanyahu – who has been cautious in his comments since Mr Trump’s win on Wednesday – called on Sunday for his ministers to refrain from commenting on a Trump presidency.

This followed remarks by hardliner education minister Naftali Bennett, who said the US election result meant that “the era of a Palestinian state is over”.

But despite Mr Netanyahu’s relative silence on the issue, Mkheimar Abu Saada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City, said Mr Trump’s victory “will be giving Israel the green light to go on with settlement in the West Bank that is hurting the Palestinian cause”.

This “green light” appeared evident on Thursday when Mr Trump’s top adviser on Israel, Jason Greenblatt, told Israeli army radio that the US president-elect “does not view the settlements as an obstacle to peace”. This position would be a reversal of that taken by the Obama administration, which condemned settlement building despite taking no practical action to stop it.

Mr Greenblatt also said Mr Trump would follow through on a promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, although Walid Fares, a Trump foreign policy adviser told the BBC the same day that this would only take place with a “consensus”. He later clarified on Twitter that he had meant a consensus “at home”.

During the campaign, Mr Trump blamed the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic impasse on what he said were Arab refusals to accept generous Israeli peace offers. “When I become president, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on day one,” he said.

Mr Abbas, who has based his hopes for achieving a Palestinian state largely on the prospect of the United States delivering Israeli concessions, will lose a great deal from Mr Trump’s victory, Mr Abu Saada said.

The Palestinian leader “will feel much more isolated internationally and more frustrated and any hopes of a revival of the stalled negotiations with Israel will evaporate or he will have to go to the negotiating table without any good cards in his hands,” he said.

Mr Abu Saada was unimpressed by remarks Mr Trump made to the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he wants to orchestrate a deal between Israelis and Palestinians "for humanity's sake".

“I’m sure he isn’t the one to employ pressure on the Israeli leadership to make concessions for peace. If there is any pressure or any concessions, from what I’ve heard from Donald Trump, it will come from the Palestinian side,” Mr Abu Saada said.

Israeli political scientist Galia Golan, who teaches at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, said Mr Trump’s election “means that from Netanyahu’s point of view, the American pressure is off regarding settlement building and he doesn’t have to worry about the US changing its policy of vetoing anything opposed to Israel in the UN Security Council”.

Mr Netanyahu may be emboldened to annex area C, the majority of the West Bank that is under Israeli security control, added Ms Golan, a founder of Israel’s dovish Peace Now movement that supports a two state solution to the conflict.

“The situation doesn’t look good if you believe we need outside help to get a peace agreement and to make a change,” she said, referring to “outside help” in the form of foreign pressure on Israel to make concessions for peace.

Basel Ghattas, an Arab member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, anticipates more demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and more legalisations of West Bank settlement outposts whose establishment violated not only international but also Israeli law. He also expects to see possible construction of settler homes at the sensitive E1 site which lies between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement in the central West Bank. Israel approved construction on the 12,000-hectare site in 1999, but the US had pressured the Israeli government not to build there as doing so would cut the West Bank in half, undermining the viability of a future Palestinian state.

“Sometimes they (the Israelis) took into consideration human rights organisations, but now they will feel that they really don’t have to give a damn about it,” Mr Ghattas added.

* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse