It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Attendees holding a flag made from the American and Israeli flags during the 2024 Republican National Convention recently. Israeli settlers are working to convince Donald Trump and the Republican Party to drop longstanding US support for a Palestinian state. AFP PIC
Ruth Lieberman, a Jewish settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is determined to thwart international pressure for a sovereign Palestinian state.
And her friendships with prominent United States Republicans from the party's religious right are helping, she says.
Weeks after the Oct 7 attack by Hamas, Lieberman hosted pro-Israel, conservative Senator Mike Lee, a Mormon, for a Shabbat meal in her family home, Senate records show.
The conversation turned to Palestinian statehood, and Lieberman told Lee the attack had hardened Israeli opposition to the idea, she said in an interview from her home near Bethlehem, in Alon Shvut, within one of the West Bank's largest clusters of settlements, known as Gush Etzion.
Such visits are helping align the views of senior Republican Party officials with settlers and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu post-Oct 7, said Lieberman, a political consultant who often hosts US delegations visiting settlements.
"Having friends and voices like that in very high places in the US helps us," she said of Lee and US House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who visited her family in February 2020 during the presidency of Donald Trump, long before becoming speaker.
Ever since Oct 7, Lieberman and others have intensified their efforts, hoping to influence the Republican Party's position ahead of the November US election that could return Trump to office.
Reuters visited two Gush Etzion settlements and spoke to two dozen Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel, three current and former Trump aides and three evangelical leaders between March and July.
They are working to convince Trump and the Republican Party to drop longstanding US support for a Palestinian state, arguing it rewarded the Oct 7 violence.
While Trump has suggested US policy could change, neither he nor the party has been explicit about the position towards a Palestinian state if they win the election.
On Friday, the top United Nations court ruled the settlements were illegal.
Within Israel itself, two states remain the most popular way to peace, a May poll by Tel Aviv University showed, though support fell to only 33 per cent of respondents, from 43 per cent before Oct 7.
However, annexation of the West Bank by Israel and limiting rights for Palestinians living there had the support of 32 per cent of Israelis, from 27 per cent before Oct 7.
Ohad Tal, a lawmaker with the hardline Religious Zionism party who lives in Gush Etzion, said settler leaders who seek to annex West Bank lands permanently were increasingly looking to Trump and his evangelical allies for support.
Israeli Rabbi Pesach Wolicki has long advocated for cooperation between Israel's religious right and what he calls America's Christian Zionists.
From the night of Oct 7, Wolicki began gathering similar-minded leaders together in a campaign they called "Keep God's Land" that aims to influence Trump and the Republican Party to reject a two-state solution.
Keep God's Land says it has grown into a coalition of more than 1,000 Jewish and Christian faith leaders.
The conservatism and size of the US evangelical community, which numbers in the tens of millions, makes it an appealing ally for the Israeli right, said Rachel Moore, who has also received delegations of US Congress members and lives in the Gush Etzion settlement of Neve Daniel.
Israel's subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians, according to figures from Gaza's Health Ministry.
A Pew survey in February found 33 per cent of US white evangelical Protestants supported the idea of a single state under Israeli control, up by four percentage points from 2022.
Keep God's Land gathered on April 15 at the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative think-tank on Washington's Capitol Hill.
Speakers included senator and former Florida governor Rick Scott, Israeli lawmaker Tal and Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who in March introduced a bill to the House of Representatives to use the biblical name Judea and Samaria in official US documents instead of the West Bank, right-wing Israeli's preferred term.
Since Oct 7, Netanyahu's government has accelerated to the fastest pace in 30 years plans to build on West Bank land.
This expansion has "one goal, which is displacing Palestinian from their lands", said Juliette Banoura, a Bethlehem resident who researches settlements.
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