Trump Administration Has No Intention of Pressuring or Bullying Israel to Make Territorial Concessions

Mike Huckabee, America’s Ambassador to Israel, has warmly embraced the embattled state where he is serving: “Hands-off approach: Israel to make its own decisions regarding West Bank, Huckabee tells ‘Post,'” by Alex Winston and Amichai Stein, Jerusalem Post, August 21, 2025:

“In his [Trump’s] first term, the administration was very clear that it is not a violation of international law for Israelis to live in Judea and Samaria,” the ambassador told the Post. “That was a very clear doctrine of the first Trump term. But beyond that, the US has not taken a position on what Israel should do. It should make its own decisions.”

What a welcome statement: at long last, an American administration that has no intention of pressuring or bullying Israel to make territorial concessions, that recognizes the validity under international law of Israel’s claim to Judea and Samaria, but will leave it entirely up to Jerusalem to decide how much of the territory “from the river to the sea” it will retain, and how it will deal with the Palestinian Arabs both in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria. The Trump Administration is on record that in its view, Israeli Jews have a right under international law to move to, and live everywhere in, Judea and Samaria. That is a colossal change from the view of previous administrations that tried to claim that Judea and Samaria would necessarily become part of a “Palestinian state” whose creation was deemed necessary to bring peace between Arab and Jew. Its proponents call this the “two-state solution,” as if calling it a “solution” made it so, when many recognize such a state would not sate, but whet Arab appetites to conquer the rest of Israel, in order to replace it with a 23rd Arab state extending “from the river to the sea.”

When pressed about whether this view means there is no explicit “don’t” from the administration regarding annexation, Huckabee’s response was characteristically measured: “I’m not familiar with whether they [the Israelis] would or would not” [annex Judea and Samaria] It was a diplomatic answer that nevertheless suggested that the traditional American role as a restraining influence may be diminishing.

The ambassador’s language choices were deliberate and revealing. He consistently used the biblical terms “Judea” and “Samaria” rather than the more politically neutral “West Bank,” explaining that many in the administration prefer this terminology because of its historical and religious significance….

The place names “Judea” and “Samaria” have been in continuous use in the Western world for 3,500 years; the “West Bank” is not “politically neutral,” but rather, a loaded term that was deliberately created by Jordan to efface those Jewish place names, and hence erase the too-obvious Jewish connection to the land. The Romans did the same 2,000 years ago, when they renamed the Kingdom of Judah as “Syria Palaestina” (“Syria of the Philistines”), which then became shortened to “Palestine.”

Huckabee emphasized that American policy remains focused on protecting vulnerable communities while encouraging peaceful resolution of disputes….

Those “vulnerable communities” in Syria include the Druze, the Alawites, and the Kurds. The Americans want to make sure that there is no repetition of the attacks last March on the Alawites in their Idlib stronghold by Sunnis, some of whom were part of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main rebel group that was commanded by Ahmed al-Sharaa. The Americans are also worried about the renewal of attacks by Syrian army forces on the Druze, some half-million of whom live in Syria. The Druze are now relying for their safety on the IDF, that has promised to protect them should Sunni Arab attacks on them erupt again.

The Americans chose to look on the bright side with Ahmed al-Sharaa, hoping he had indeed shed his Al-Qaeda sympathies — he once had a $10-million bounty placed on his head by Washington — and become a pragmatist. To encourage him, the Trump administration lifted American sanctions on Damascus. The Israelis, however, remain deeply suspicious of al-Sharaa, considering him to have continued, despite having traded his military fatigues for a suit and tie, to be a jihadist. They were confirmed in this belief not only by the Syrian government troops who took part in the massacre of 1,400 Alawites in their heartland of Idlib Province, but by the series of massacres of the Druze in Sweida, carried out between April and May 2025 by Sunni government troops who had arrived in the town under the pretext that they would stop the fighting between Druze and Bedouin. Instead, they joined the Bedouin in slaughtering Druze; that slaughter only ended when the IDF bombed Sunni troops in Sweida and threatened to intervene on the ground; al-Sharaa got the message and the Sunni Arabs withdrew, bringing the killing to an end. Many of the Druze in Sweida, well aware that Israel is their only protector, have begun to agitate for an autonomous Druze territory within Syria, but allied with Israel.