Palestinians’ hopes and fears as Trump heads back to the White House

Tel Aviv — After more than a year of bombing and homelessness, Gazans are looking to a new administration in Washington for help. President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory has raised hopes and fears among the five million residents of the Palestinian territories — the warn-torn Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Gaza resident Rakan Abdul Ahman told CBS News he wants the new U.S. president to make Israel end the war.

“We’ve witnessed enough killing of women and children,” he said. “I’m looking for Trump to end the suffering in the Gaza Strip.”

In the eyes of Ahmed Harb, a Gazan journalist, the incoming Trump administration faces a real test. In his victory speech, Trump said he’d end wars. Harb hopes that means the one in Gaza.

“I hope he was telling the truth,” he told CBS News, adding: “But he shouldn’t stop the war at the expense of the Palestinian people.”

That is the big worry for Palestinian politicians, too, including Mustafa Bargouti. Still a practicing physician, he leads the Palestinian National Initiative, a party that champions democratic government for all Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

The question, Bargouti said, is “how you stop the war? Do you stop it by annexing occupied territories? By ethnically cleansing Palestinians? Or do you stop the war by forcing Israel to end its illegal policy of settling Israelis on our land?”

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, sparked by the U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group’s massacre of some 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, has diverted international attention away from growing violence in the West Bank by Israeli settlers determined to encroach on what has been Palestinian land.

In 2023, there were a record number of so-called outposts — makeshift Jewish encampments set up by settlers in what has been Palestinian land. They can be as simple as a couple of shipping containers that function as a de-facto Jewish real estate claim. The settler groups then lobby Israel’s courts and government to retroactively make the outposts official Jewish settlements.

Right-wingers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet support Jewish expansion, including the outposts, in the West Bank. They openly advocate driving the Palestinians out, and annexing the whole area for Israel. Not only would that be illegal under international law, Bargouti warns that it would also lead to even more conflict.

“We will struggle for our rights,” he said. “It will take time. We will suffer. We know that. But what’s the alternative? To cease to exist? It’s ethnic cleansing. We cannot accept that.”

Palestinians everywhere are watching Trump’s choosing of pro-Israeli officials for key positions with dismay, especially Mike Huckabee, the president-elect’s pick to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is on the record as saying, “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“When you hear a person like Huckabee saying there is no occupation, and there are no settlements, they are just Israeli communities…. he might as well say there is no international law,” said Bargouti.

During Trump’s first term, he opposed the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and, in 2020, proposed what he called “the deal of the century” — a template for a long-sought Palestinian state.

Under his proposal, the new state would have been a scattering of isolated Palestinian lands, each surrounded by Israel. The plan was rejected by both the Palestinians and by Jewish settlers and, since then, both sides have dug in.

Even if the new Trump administration revives some version of its proposal for a Palestinian state, it will face Palestinians and their Arab allies whose resolve has only been hardened by a devastating year of war in Gaza that has killed almost 44,000 people.

On the Israeli side, hardliners in Netanyahu’s government oppose any form of Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu himself has flatly rejected the prospect repeatedly.

Bargouti, however, sounded ready for the fight.

“I’m sure it will be a rough year for everybody,” he told CBS News. “But whatever happens, we, the Palestinian people, will never give up our right to struggle for our freedom.”