America’s ambassador stands in Turmus Ayya and calls violent settlers terrorists

Speaking on Saturday in Turmus Ayya, a West Bank town with a large Palestinian-American population, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee said: “Our clear message is that crime is crime, terror is terror. When people do it, they should have an expectation that they will have severe consequences.” UPI reported him acknowledging he has been “criticized a little bit for calling that terror,” and defining the term: “terror is when a person is forced to change his or her behavior because of the behavior of someone else who is trying to use intimidation to make them afraid to live in their own homes, to make their children afraid to play in their own yards.” He told The Hill the visit was for US citizens “who live in Turmusayya and other communities across this region” who are “disturbed by people who have created extraordinary challenges that are unfair and illegal.” The Associated Press noted the significance plainly: Huckabee applied to settlers a word US officials usually reserve for Palestinian militants.

The context is a fortnight of escalation. ToI reported that Huckabee has grown more vocal amid a settler siege on Palestinian homes in Qusra, near Nablus, including the home of a Palestinian-American; he has called those settlers “Israeli terrorists” while insisting they are a small minority, and has said a “few hundred” violent settlers are “too many” and that acting against them is in Israel’s own interest. Last week settlers set fire to a mosque in the Nablus-area village variously transliterated as Bizzariya or Bazariya; an AP photograph published by the Washington Times shows residents inspecting the damage on Tuesday, 1 September, with Hebrew graffiti on the wall addressing the ambassador by name. On Saturday itself, ToI’s liveblog reported settlers torching Palestinian fields and attacking a convoy on a condolence visit, and carried an unattributed item saying the IDF is angry at the Shin Bet for “doing the minimum” on settler violence.

Assessment: Rhetoric from a US ambassador is cheap; the test is whether anything follows — visa bans, sanctions, prosecutions. None were announced. What makes Saturday more than a speech is the graffiti: settlers in Bazariya wrote to Huckabee on the wall of a burned mosque, which means the constituency he is addressing has already decided he is an adversary and is unafraid of him. Watch the reported IDF–Shin Bet friction most closely. If the army really is briefing against the security service over enforcement, that is an Israeli institution using an American complaint as leverage in a domestic fight — and it lands three days before slates close.