Which US president will be better for the Palestinians?

As the American presidential race heats up, Palestinians are weighing up its likely impact on their hopes to see an end to carnage in Gaza and rising annexationist pressures in the occupied West Bank.

While there is a sense in the West Bank that Kamala Harris’s replacing Joe Biden at the head of the democratic ticket could be positive news, many see looming disaster if Donald Trump wins, based on his actions during his first term and what they view as his flawed personal values.

“Business people don’t care about things except for money and profit and loss,” leading Palestinian businessman Samir Hulileh, CEO of the West Bank conglomerate Palestine Development and Investment Ltd (PADICO) told The Jewish Independent.

“They don’t care about history and nationality or what it means to be a citizen. Trump doesn’t care about all these values. He sees everything as a deal. We saw during his term that he was very careless and lacked any deep thought about this conflict and ending the occupation.”

“He is not the kind of person who can sort out this kind of conflict,” Hulileh said. “It’s not a deal about gas. It’s about land and people’s relationship to land.”

Issa Amr, a non-violent activist who works with left-wing Israeli opponents of the occupation in Hebron, adds: “For sure if Trump wins, it will be disaster for the Palestinian cause and people. He will do everything to please Netanyahu and his government and extremist settlers.”

By contrast, he says, “Harris won’t give the fanatic extremists what they want. She won’t give the Palestinians what they want in terms of a two-state solution, but at least she won’t give a green light for annexation of the West Bank.”

Trump seemed to signal last week, before meeting visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that policy during his second term, which he has implied would be indefinite, would again be tilted toward the Israeli side.

“I was very good to Israel, better than any president’s ever been,” he asserted, citing his recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights, his moving of the US embassy to Jerusalem, and his backing away from the Iran nuclear deal that was adamantly opposed by Netanyahu.

Trump also suggested it would be “very simple” to end the Gaza conflict, which he framed as a public relations failure for Israel. But he did not explain how he would do that.

Harris, meanwhile, staked out a more pro-Palestinian tone even while reaffirming “ironclad support” for Israeli security. Possibly eyeing democratic party voters alienated by Joe Biden’s largely uncritical backing of Israel in the face of the high Palestinian civilian fatality rate and what even he himself at one point termed “indiscriminate” bombing, the vice president vowed “not to be silent” about suffering in Gaza.

She angered Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan by speaking of “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for their safety sometimes for the 2^nd, 3^rd or 4^th time.”

Palestinians also have bad memories of Trump for his 2020 peace plan, which was spun as setting up a Palestinian state in the West Bank but in fact lopped off about a third of its territory. At the same time, he brokered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which bypassed the Palestinian issue. Palestinians fear he will try to do the same with Saudi Arabia. “What he’s offering is completely against our rights and it won’t work,” Hulileh says.

But the Palestinian CEO thinks that with Harris’s influence and pressing, political imperatives for the Democrats, things are likely to move toward a US-imposed ceasefire in Gaza overriding Netanyahu’s reluctance even before the election. “I already feel that the Americans are becoming more aggressive to end this war.  Now they are preparing for the elections, they have to consider Muslim and Arab (Americans) - and they need to act.”

Not all West Bank residents are convinced a Harris presidency will bring positive change to their increasingly dangerous situation, which they tend to see as part of the same Israeli onslaught that is raging in the Gaza war and has killed more than 39,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The Israeli offensive, which has drawn worldwide condemnation and a recommendation that Israeli leaders be arrested so they can be tried for war crimes, was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 shock incursion that massacred about 1200 people, mostly civilians, many in gruesome fashion.

Israel says a proactive military posture is necessary in the West Bank to thwart armed groups bent on striking Israeli targets. But the Palestinians, pointing to surging illegal settlement activity, spiralling casualties and heightened army use of drone strikes, say it is Israel that is constantly escalating the confrontation.

This was before Hezbollah’s weekend attack on a football field in the Golan that killed 12 children, severely inflaming tensions in the north.

Speaking hours after a deadly Israeli drone strike in nearby Balata refugee camp, Said Hemayel, a retired Palestinian Authority employee who lives in the hilltop town of Beita, predicted that if all-out war breaks out between Israel and Hezbollah, embittered Palestinians will join the fighting and Israel will proceed to destroy large swaths of the West Bank, whether it is Trump or Harris in power,

“Israel will bomb the civilians too, with America saying it has the right to defend itself even though what Israel does will be terrorism and a violation of all international law,” he says.

“My estimation is that it will only make a small difference who wins the election. Every US administration supports Israel and gives complete cover to the Israelis, supporting them with arms, money and decisions in the security council. There may be a difference but only a little because at the end of the day, all presidents provide cover to Israel.”

Hemayel’s 16-year-old son Mohammed died after being fatally shot in the chest by a soldier three years ago while the IDF suppressed protests by Beita residents over the confiscation of land for an illegal settlement outpost.

As reported at the time in the Jewish Independent, Said said his son had been throwing stones, but not from a distance that endangered soldiers. Earlier this month, the Netanyahu government heightened tensions by giving formal recognition to the outpost as a fully-fledged settlement, named Evyatar by the settlers, The land’s seizure and transfer to settlers amounted to “institutionalised land theft”, according to Israeli settlement watchdog Dror Etkes.

Hemayel says he is not impressed by Harris’s statements of sympathy for the suffering of Gazans. “In my assessment it’s election campaign propaganda,” he says. “She was Biden’s deputy and it was Biden who gave full support to Israel. He is the one who provided bombs of many tons and missiles that killed children and innocents. What was her position? She was part of the Biden administration.

“Now she wants to court those Americans who oppose supplying weapons. Harris just wants to play on the emotions of the voters because not all of them support Biden’s policies. This is something we saw during the demonstrations at the universities. It was the first time something like that has happened since the Vietnam war.”

Meanwhile, pro-settler Israelis have no doubts that a Trump victory is preferable. “It’s clear that the Republicans and Trump are connected to Israel,” says Yonatan Yosef, a former member of the Jerusalem city council who favours demolishing the Palestinian al-Bustan neighbourhood in East Jerusalem to enable establishment of a settler run biblical park.

“Trump understands the world better than Harris, he’s done a few deals in his life, he succeeded and he failed, but he’s got the experience and he’s at the right age.”

“We remember Trump for moving the embassy. “Everyone said Jerusalem would burn but he did it and nothing happened,” Yosef said.

Echoing Trump, Yosef implies that the Biden administration’s alleged weakness enabled the October 7 Hamas massacre.” Harris is a danger to the future of Israel just as Biden was. When Hamas crossed the border, they knew they were dealing with a failed and weak administration.

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