The sharpest words in the West Bank this week came from the man least expected to say them. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, a longtime friend of the settler movement who has spent decades defending Israeli claims to the occupied territory, looked at a group of Jewish settlers laying siege to an American Palestinian family’s house in Qusra village and called it a horrific act of terror. The message on X was a remarkable rebuke to come from an American ambassador. From Huckabee, it was a crack in the wall.
The family at the center of it is American. Lou Ridi, the owner of the house, is a Palestinian American living in Ohio. For months, he said, settlers have harassed the home, cutting its water and electricity and throwing stones. In recent days the siege tightened: since Sunday, groups of settlers, sometimes dozens of men, gathered at the house, threw stones, tried to pull down a nearby stone wall, and prevented anyone inside from leaving. His brother and teenage nephew were holed up inside to defend it, with no food or water for days. Ridi described the family as prisoners in their own house. On Thursday morning the Israeli military evacuated the brother and his son. At least one other house in the area had been targeted the same way.
The soldiers and the settlers
The Israeli army’s role in the standoff was the story inside the story. Soldiers stood guard in front of the blockaded homes, photographed next to the settlers who were besieging them. The military said it had torn down two illegal outposts at the edge of Qusra and a village nearby, detained one Israeli, and surged additional soldiers to the area for what it called defensive missions and patrols. The approaches to the village were shut. The picture the army presented was of an institution trying to restore order against lawbreakers it is also protecting: soldiers guarding settlers in the morning, dismantling settler outposts at night, and the families in the houses in between, waiting to see which side would win.
The siege did not come from nowhere. A month ago the village mosque was set on fire in an attack widely attributed to settlers. The arson came after an Israeli settler was killed, and the killing was followed by clashes that killed two Israeli soldiers and four villagers. Settlers have been building new outposts across the West Bank at a pace that has alarmed even the Israeli military, and Palestinians and the Israeli opposition say Netanyahu’s government looks away from settler attacks as the clashes have surged. The New York Times described two families trapped for days, with the military visibly unable to rein the settlers in.
What Huckabee’s words mean
Huckabee’s rebuke is significant precisely because of who he is. He is not a critic of the occupation. He has argued that the West Bank should stay under Israeli control, that the territory belongs to Israel for historical and religious reasons, and he was chosen as ambassador in part because of those views. When a man like that uses the word terror about settlers, it means the situation has moved beyond the categories his own politics normally use. Even while condemning the settlers, he stood by the army’s handling of the siege, which is the other half of the message: the ambassador who called settlers terrorists still trusts the soldiers who stand guard next to them.
The word itself matters. Terror is the term Israel’s government applies to Palestinians, and Washington applies to armed groups; it is almost never applied to Israeli civilians by an American ambassador. Huckabee’s choice of language acknowledged what the families in Qusra have been saying for months: that a siege by armed men, cutting off food and water, holding people hostage in their homes, is terror by any definition that would be used anywhere else in the world. The fact that the ambassador’s own side supplied the definition makes it harder for anyone to argue it away.
The occupation has produced this situation by design and by drift: settlers who believe the land is theirs, an army that is supposed to police them, a government that benefits from their presence, and a population of Palestinians, some of them American citizens, whose homes have become the front line. Huckabee’s statement does not change the balance of power in Qusra. It changes something else: the vocabulary. When the settler movement’s most powerful friend in Washington calls a settler siege an act of terror, the movement can no longer claim its critics are inventing the word.
Sources: AP, Al Jazeera, NPR, The New York Times