İsrailli Yerleşimciler Batı Şeria'da NBC Ekibine Saldırdı

Is Huckabee doing anything about dead Americans in West Bank?

Israeli settlers attacked an NBC News crew in the village of Jalud over the weekend, injuring the network’s correspondent, Matt Bradley, as well as two other crew members and Aida Ahmed Abdullah, the Palestinian woman they were interviewing. “They jumped out, beat us, then jumped back in the car,” Bradley, who was treated at a clinic, said of the incident. Abdullah was hospitalized following the attack. This is the latest episode in a surge of settler violence throughout the occupied West Bank, where assaults on Palestinians and attacks on their homes and property have risen sharply in recent years. Among the victims have been a number of Americans and Palestinian Americans, at least 14 of whom have been killed since 2003. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of Israeli settlements who has even previously signaled support for an Israeli annexation of the West Bank, has nevertheless condemned some of those attacks in unusually strong terms. After 20-year-old Palestinian American Saifullah Kamel Musallet was beaten to death while visiting family in the West Bank last summer, Huckabee called his killing a “criminal and terrorist act.” More recently, he denounced settlers who laid siege to three homes in the village of Qusra, including one belonging to a Palestinian American family, as “Israeli terrorists,” saying there was “no excuse for such thuggish behavior.” But the persistence of such attacks has raised questions about whether Huckabee — and, by extension, Washington — is doing enough to protect its own citizens, and what pressure the Trump administration is prepared to exert against Israeli authorities and settlers to protect them, and curb violence it claims to oppose. “It's good to see Mike Huckabee using the word terrorism,” former State Department career diplomat Josh Paul told Responsible Statecraft. “It would be nice to see actual terrorism designations following through on that, because that's where you give the word actual meaning rather than simply throwing it around.” Todd Deatherage, a former State Department official under President George W. Bush and co-founder of the Telos Group, a nonprofit focused on Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, Huckabee’s response reflects the basic responsibilities of an American ambassador. “At a minimum the U.S. ambassador’s job in any country is to promote U.S. values, defend U.S. interests, and protect U.S. citizens,” Deatherage told RS. With settler violence harming Americans and undermining U.S. interests, he added, “you can just say he’s doing his job.” Musallet’s death is one of nine killings of American citizens by Jewish settlers or Israeli security forces in the West Bank between January 2022 and August 2026. Trump’s response to these violent deaths is now drawing scrutiny from Congress. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) recently introduced a resolution seeking information about those deaths, as well as a broader examination of the human rights implications of Israeli actions in the West Bank. “The violence committed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank is reaching an unprecedented level, and as a result more and more Americans and Palestinians are being killed and injured,” Kaine said in a press release announcing the legislation. “These actions – and the Israeli government’s lack of response to this violence – are unacceptable and threaten the long-term safety and security of the entire region.” The list of killings also includes Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the head while wearing a press vest in 2022. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eventually acknowledged that there was “high possibility” that Abu Akleh was killed by IDF gunfire, though no criminal charges were ever pursued. Despite the added attention that American citizenship can bring to such cases, it has historically done little to ensure accountability, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat who worked at the now-defunct Palestinian Affairs Unit (PAU), renamed the Office of Palestinian Affairs when President Joe Biden took office, at the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem from 2020 to 2024. “It didn't really make much of a difference, unfortunately. We would try to use that angle to get engagement on certain topics” Casey, who resigned over Washington’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza, told RS. “When you look at the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, which was probably the most high-pressure, high-focus [incident] and investigation of any Palestinian who's been killed, it still didn't amount to anything.” Huckabee is known as one of Israel’s strongest advocates in the Trump administration. He recently described Israel as “the 436th congressional district of the U.S.” and once told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson that it would be “fine” if Israel took control of nearly the entire Middle East. But inaction by American representatives in Israel stretches back to well before Huckabee’s tenure as ambassador, Casey said. During the first Trump term, then-Ambassador David Friedman — who recently tweeted that “Qusra is not under siege, and Palestinian attacks against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria far outweigh Israeli attacks against Palestinians” — showed no interest in reports of settler violence coming from the PAU. “Most things didn't even make it to him because his chief of staff would gatekeep things, but then if they did get to him, they just wouldn't go out” to Washington, Casey said. After the 2022 election of the current, far-right Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Biden administration took a more punitive approach, imposing sanctions on violent settlers and organizations that were part of the settlement movement. But Casey says that effort, which he initially considered promising, was ultimately limited and short-lived because U.S. officials were not willing to go beyond sanctioning individual groups and follow the ties between the sanctioned entities and the Israeli businesses and government officials supporting them, nor were they a part of a broader strategy to address expanding settlements. Trump eliminated the sanctions program shortly after returning to office. Huckabee has drawn a clear distinction between what he sees as violent extremists and the settlement movement itself. He has described the perpetrators as “unsettlers” who are “hurting the very people they claim to be fighting for.” For critics of U.S. policy, that distinction gets at the limits of Washington’s approach. “I would say that violent settlers in the West Bank have been a low-hanging fruit” for Western governments seeking to criticize Israel, said Paul, who also quit his State Department post at the bureau responsible for overseeing arms transfers to foreign countries after more than a decade of service, because of U.S. policy during the war on Gaza. Because these settlers can be portrayed as individuals acting independently of the Israeli government, he told RS, officials can condemn their violence without confronting the broader issue. “I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding — and an intentional one — of what the settlement movement represents,” Paul said. “I think [Huckabee’s] concerns are ultimately not some fundamental opposition to settlement expansion by Israel in the West Bank (...) but just that the settler violence attracts too much attention and is therefore unhelpful to the longer-term objective on Israeli annexation.” The line between private settler violence and state action has become increasingly difficult to draw. The Biden-era ban on sending rifles to Israeli extremist groups fell short in part because after the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel the Netanyahu government expanded regional defense units on the West Bank that are composed largely of settlers operating under the IDF’s authority, and are thus not subject to the ban. “They operate with large degrees of autonomy and are essentially just advancing settler objectives while wearing the uniform of the IDF,” Sarah Sanbar, acting Israel and Palestine researcher at Human Rights Watch, told RS. That broader context is part of what the Van Hollen-Kaine-Sanders resolution, one of a handful of legislative efforts to investigate violence in the West Bank, could require the State Department to examine. The statute under which the senators plan to introduce the privileged resolution is a rarely used but potentially potent tool. Section 502b(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act allows members of Congress to request a report from the State Department regarding the human rights practices of any recipient of U.S. security assistance. If successful, the secretary of state would be required to produce the report within 30 days, or further assistance to Israel would be suspended. The law, however, has not been successfully invoked to obtain a report since 1976. Sanders introduced a resolution under the law to get information on the use of U.S. weapons in Gaza in 2023, but the bill did not pass the Senate. Experts who spoke to RS also listed other steps the U.S. government could take if it is serious about curbing settler violence, including reinstating targeted sanctions against specific individuals or groups, restricting U.S. assistance, or sanctioning banks or companies that support or finance settlement building. “They're just tools that we use everywhere else” that get rejected when it comes to holding Israel accountable, Casey said. “ It's not anything outrageous to suggest.”