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Israeli settlers court Republican religious right after Hamas attacks

[July 20, 2024] By Jonathan Saul and Simon Lewis

ALON SHVUT, West Bank (Reuters) - 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 U.S. Republicans from the party's religious right are helping, she says.

Weeks after the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist group 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. Lee did not respond to requests for comment.

Such visits are helping align the views of senior Republican Party officials with settlers and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of Oct. 7, said Lieberman, a political consultant who often hosts U.S. delegations visiting settlements.

"Having friends and voices like that in very high places in the U.S. helps us,” she said of Lee and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who visited her family in February 2020 during the presidency of Donald Trump, long before becoming speaker. Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

Ever since Oct. 7, Lieberman and others have intensified their efforts, hoping to influence the Republican Party's position ahead of the November U.S. election that could return Trump to office.

Lieberman and a delegation of settler officials pressed the case at meetings with Johnson and Lee, among others, in Washington last month, according to a statement from the delegation.

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. The people Reuters spoke to described grassroots groups of settlers, members of Israel's religious right and conservative Christians working to convince Trump and the Republican Party to drop longstanding U.S. support for a Palestinian state, arguing it rewarded the Oct. 7 violence.

While Trump has suggested U.S. policy could change, neither he nor the party have been explicit about their position towards a Palestinian state if they win the election.

Campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt did not reply to questions about Trump’s views on settlements and the future for Palestinians. She said Israel had never had a better friend in the White House than Trump.

The United States backed the Oslo Accords that charted a pathway to Palestinian statehood 30 years ago and supports what is known as the two-state solution. Palestinians and most countries, including the United States, say Israel’s West Bank settlements violate international law about occupied territory and mark an ongoing encroachment that blocks aspirations of statehood. On Friday, the top U.N. court ruled the settlements were illegal. Israel called the ruling "fundamentally wrong"

The Gaza war has revived pressure, including publicly from U.S. President Joe Biden, for a negotiated Palestinian nation neighbouring Israel, which Palestinians foresee including the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

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% of respondents, from 43% before Oct. 7.

However, annexation of the West Bank by Israel and limiting rights for Palestinians living there, an option favoured by some settlers, had the support of 32% of Israelis, from 27% before Oct. 7. It is seen as an increasingly likely outcome, the poll showed.

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.

"It's one of our main goals right now to strengthen connections with these groups," Tal said of evangelical Christians. "We are fighting the same battle."

'KEEP GOD'S LAND'

Israeli Rabbi Pesach Wolicki has long advocated for cooperation between Israel's religious right and what he calls America's Christian Zionists, evangelicals who see prophecy being fulfilled with the return of Jews to the biblical Judea and Samaria, much of which lies in the West Bank and was captured and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

Starting on the night of Oct. 7, Wolicki said, he 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, using U.S. religious media outlets and conferences to lobby against Biden's argument for a Palestinian state.

Keep God's Land says it has grown into a coalition of more than 1,000 Jewish and Christian faith leaders.

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A view shows mobile homes in the Jewish settlement of Givat Haroeh in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, February 21, 2023. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun/File Photo

The conservatism and size of the U.S. 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 U.S. Congress members and lives in the Gush Etzion settlement of Neve Daniel.

"There's a perception that only the Christian community gets it," said Moore, referring to the political distance some right-wing Israelis feel from the liberal stance of many U.S. Jews, especially over the ongoing settlement of the West Bank.

Fears of Christians trying to convert Jews make such engagement contentious in Israel.

Southern Baptist pastor Tony Perkins, president of evangelical advocacy group the Family Research Council, has been another important figure in aligning Christian and Israeli conservatives and has featured at Keep God's Land events. As a Republican National Committee delegate, Perkins is pushing to keep Israel a priority in the campaign.

He said support for settlers among evangelicals rose after the Hamas attack, which killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 150 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. 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% of U.S. white evangelical Protestants supported the idea of a single state under Israeli control, up by four percentage points from 2022 and twice as high as the average respondent.

Perkins, who visited Gush Etzion in March and also met Netanyahu, was an early advocate for bringing U.S. Congress members to West Bank settlements, said Heather Johnston, a specialist on Israel in biblical prophecy and CEO of the U.S. Israel Education Association.

In recent years, groups including Lieberman's foundation and USIEA have organised privately financed trips by dozens of mostly Republican members of Congress to the settlements, which were previously rarely visited by U.S. officials.

'JUDEA AND SAMARIA'

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 U.S. documents instead of the West Bank.

The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Judea and Samaria is right-wing Israeli’s preferred term.

Scott's office did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Tenney declined to comment.

Since Oct. 7, Netanyahu's government has accelerated to the fastest pace in 30 years plans to build on West Bank land, including in Gush Etzion, according to Israeli NGO Peace Now, an Israeli NGO that tracks and opposes West Bank settlements.

This expansion has "one goal, which is displacing Palestinian from their lands," said Juliette Banoura, a Bethlehem resident who researches settlements.

The number of Israelis in the West Bank has grown by a third to 700,000 in the past decade, the U.N. says, about 10% of Israel's Jewish population.

Settler violence has exploded over the past year, prompting U.S. and EU sanctions on people and entities they blame for the escalation. All the people Reuters spoke to denounced such violence.

David Friedman, who as ambassador to Israel in 2020 developed Trump’s plan for a limited Palestinian state, now advocates for a single, expanded Israel without full citizenship for Palestinians, an arrangement he likened in an interview to Puerto Rico. He said he had not discussed the plan with Trump.

Residents of Puerto Rico, a poor U.S. territory, are considered U.S. citizens but cannot vote in presidential elections.

Denying Palestinians statehood leads to more conflict, said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

"To live peacefully in the area, they have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians," he said.

(Reporting by Jonathan Saul in the West Bank and Simon Lewis in Washington; Additional reporting by James Mackenzie in Jerusalem; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)

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