Trump Must Act Quickly on the West Bank
Netanyahu is testing the 47th president with a fresh round of illegal actions in the West Bank.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday launched a major military operation in the occupied West Bank, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians and emboldening foreign settler groups that have already “rampaged through two Palestinian towns,” the Associated Press reported early Wednesday morning.
Israel’s military and police have set up hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints, keeping children from their schools, families and friends from one another, and even patients from medical care. One heart-attack victim reportedly died yesterday when Israeli soldiers refused to let his ambulance pass on its way to a hospital.
The news came barely three days after a ceasefire deal brokered by President Donald Trump’s team took effect.
Trump must act quickly and decisively on the situation in the West Bank. These actions amount to Netanyahu directly confronting Trump—as if he were only bluffing when he campaigned for peace and sent his envoy to achieve the ceasefire agreement just days earlier.
In the past few weeks, I’ve visited Palestinian communities in the West Bank, where it was my privilege to talk with the Christians in the region about their hopes and fears regarding the incoming Trump administration.
Take my friend Alice Kisiya, a young Christian Palestinian from a village just outside of Bethlehem who advocates for her community through the organization Save al-Makhrour. Alice and her family have spent years defending their deeply-rooted community’s right simply to live and thrive where they have been for centuries.
Alice says the Israeli Civil Administration and local courts have again and again forced her and her family and friends through costly and convoluted legal cases, failing to acknowledge legitimate property deeds and honoring the fraudulent claims of settlers. Adding to those persecutions is the pressure of foreign settlers—backed by organizations like the Jewish National Fund—seeking always to expand their footprint illegally.
Alice’s family restaurant has been torn down four times, and the last time—in 2019—their home was demolished as well.
But while Alice and her allies engage in public debates, peaceful protests, and legal actions, the settlers increasingly engage in violence.
Since Israel began its campaign against Gaza in 2023, she told me, the Israeli military and Civil Administration have used the war as an “excuse” to even more aggressively undermine Palestinians’ rightful claims to their own homes, businesses, and farmlands.
In July of last year, Alice and her mother were attacked by a member of a local settler youth organization. Wearing an Israeli military uniform, the attacker rushed them, forced himself into their car, and beat and choked Alice. When she called the police, they arrested Alice and her mother—and not the attacker.
She was released after producing footage and eyewitnesses proving she had done nothing wrong. “I recovered,” she said of her physical wounds, but she felt local Israeli authorities “took the side of the settlers” like “always,” and the fact that the government with direct power over her “doesn’t care” that she suffered violence because they see her as just “an Arab” still hurts her “psychologically.”
After telling me her story, Alice pointed to the reelection of Trump as a sign of hope. “I know that he’s a peacemaker and a businessman,” she said, “so I have faith.” In the meantime, she added, “we need to wake up more people about what’s happening to Christians in Bethlehem.”
Alice is far from the only Palestinian who expressed that mixture of hope and apprehension during my weeks in Gaza and the West Bank. And it’s no wonder: Throughout Trump’s campaign, he spoke out courageously for these vulnerable communities and made clear he would take on the task of putting a stop to Israel’s aggressions.
And, moved by that promise, American expats from across the Middle East turned out in droves to vote for Trump in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania, helping to ensure his historic victory and return to the White House.
It’s because of that inspiring story that I wrote after Election Day that Gaza had “saved America.” And when Trump arranged the ceasefire deal just weeks later, I wrote that Trump had saved Gaza right back.
“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Trump said in his inauguration speech this week. “That’s what I wanna be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
Trump’s victorious return to the White House represents a radical movement of solidarity. And that makes it all the more outrageous that Netanyahu is now showing a total disregard for Trump and his voters, for peace itself, and for any hope of a unified and stable future in the region.
But Netanyahu and his goons are trying to run roughshod over something even more fundamental: not only the lives of Palestinians, and not just Trump’s legacy, but the beating heart of the free world.
There is no overstating the importance of the West Bank to the common interests of the nations surrounding it, and Netanyahu clearly knows that. But the West Bank is actually central to the broader world as well, and in a way especially to the Western world that the U.S. has a responsibility to represent and lead.
As a Christian, I won’t shy from professing my own understanding of the significance of the ancient Christian community there in the West Bank—the community in which Christ was born.
Families like the ones Alice fights for in the West Bank descend directly from those who were in the upper room when the Holy Spirit first knit the Church together. And it was that Church which, through centuries of courageous and costly preaching about the dignity of every human being as made in the image and likeness of God, gave us the world we have today.
It was this ancient Christian community’s world-reforming ethic of radical solidarity between all peoples that would give rise to Christendom, and then to the humanizing political principles by which we would govern ourselves.
The Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, the abolition of slavery in Europe and then the United States, the United Nations Charter of Human Rights—all of these stem from God’s presentation of Himself as our fellow man in the arms of His Mother in Bethlehem.
It was the Gospel of the West Bank, in other words, that created the West. And in securing his legacy as a peacemaker and unifier and fulfilling his role as leader of the free world, Trump cannot allow that heritage and all it signifies to be trampled under the feet of a single corrupt and unpopular politician like Benjamin Netanyahu.
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