Where the high hills of the occupied West Bank tumble into the Jordan valley, half a dozen heavy Israeli diggers pound the ancient rocks around the Palestinian village of Bardala.
Low-scudding, rain-laden clouds threaten to soak a group of Palestinian farmers huddling around their ramshackle sheep sheds as the Israel Defense Forces troops drive up to serve them eviction notices.
Sixty-year-old farmer Khalid Sawafta, his head swaddled in a traditional red-and-white keffiyeh, has tears in his eyes. His Israeli orders state: Vacate the land by 9 a.m. on December 4 – just 16 days away – or lose everything.
Such evictions are common in the West Bank, according to the United Nations.
Similarly, according to activist group Peace Now, in the past year alone 227 Palestinian families in the territory have been evicted, as the Israeli government has authorized more than 8,600 new housing units for Israelis in the West Bank and increased funding for settler projects.
Since Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 250 others hostage, settler leaders in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have been pushing for the annexation of the whole West Bank.
The new worry for Palestinians is that Donald Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who has many fans among Israeli settlers, could accelerate their land losses.
During a visit to Israel in 2017, the former governor of Arkansas told reporters: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Israeli term for the land.
“There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Israeli settler leader and activist Yishai Fleisher, who met Huckabee during several of his visits to Israel, said: “Mike recognizes our claim, (he is) not an anti-Arab, but he does recognize Jewish claim to this land.”
Fleisher thinks Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, could do even more than Trump’s last ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who helped convince the then-president to declare Jerusalem Israel’s capital – a step that was hugely popular with Israelis.
Noting that Friedman is Jewish, Fleisher said: “David Friedman has legitimacy with Israelis and Jews. I think Huckabee will have legitimacy with millions of Bible-believing folks… He just knows their language and he knows how to talk to their heart. He’s a preacher.”
But Alon Pinkas – an Israeli diplomat and former adviser to Shimon Peres, the last Israeli prime minister to take significant steps towards peace with Palestinians – believes settlers are misguided and that Trump won’t sacrifice his interests in the broader region.
“If Israel unilaterally annexes large parts, large swath of the West Bank, this is not going to fly well in the Arab world.”
Pinkas believes Trump wants to secure what Biden failed to achieve: normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab countries, the holy grail of Middle East diplomacy.
“He’s going to want to build on the Abraham Accords,” Pinkas said, referring to an agreement that normalized Israel’s ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. “He’s going to be pressured by the Saudis, the Qataris and the Emiratis to strike a bigger deal.”
But Israel’s war in Gaza and the killing of so many Palestinians has driven up the price of that grand bargain. Trump’s friend, the powerful Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, has said normalization can only happen if Israel agrees to a Palestinian state.
Former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh thinks MBS will stick with this position. “Maybe there is an opportunity with Saudi Arabia for us, and that is why we’re closely coordinating with Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Ultimately, it’s Trump’s friends rather than Huckabee who’ll succeed in influencing the Israeli government, Shtayyeh believes. “This man is not the one who will be dictating the shots.”
Israel’s finance minister Belazel Smotrich, for his part, is hopeful that the West Bank will soon be part of his country. “The year 2025 will be, with God’s help, the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he said in November.
Back in Bardala, Israeli officials claim a recent security threat triggered them to build the new barrier that will almost entirely encircle Bardala and two other villages, population about 4,000, effectively cutting them off from their agricultural livelihoods.
He shows documents he says prove Palestinian ownership of Wadi Salman, the tiny dirt valley that’s refuge to farmer Khalid’s sheep sheds, dating back 100 years.
Ibrahim said they’d appealed to Israeli officials to move the barrier, “but they refused entirely, claiming the road was already planned.”
Around Bardala, annexation is all too familiar.
Khalid, who just got his eviction notice, says he was evicted seven years ago too. “They came and demolished everything, leaving me with nothing,” he said.
The hard reality in Bardala, as elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, is that even before Trump’s approaching inauguration, the Palestinian state had become a distant dream.
