On the outskirts of Turmus Ayya, where the town thins out and homes become more exposed, stands the house of Palestinian American Samir Hamza.
Its location, some distance from the center of town, has made it a target in the past for attacks by groups of Israeli settlers. Hamza described those incidents in detail in an earlier report for Alhurra.
But on Saturday, the home whose residents had lived under the threat of further attacks became an unlikely venue for American diplomacy.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee arrived with embassy officials and staff to hear from Palestinian Americans living in Turmus Ayya, a West Bank town where a large share of the population holds U.S. citizenship.
Inside the crowded home, packed with residents and journalists, Huckabee praised his host’s “beautiful” house and joked that Hamza had agreed to let it serve, for a few hours, as an “official office of the United States.”
Rather than asking American citizens to come to the embassy, he said, the embassy had brought its services to them.
The light opening quickly gave way to a more serious discussion of the fear gripping families in the town and repeated attacks on homes and property.
Huckabee said he had not come to lecture residents but to listen to them. Everyone he met during the visit, he noted, was an American citizen.
“My message to them was that I work for them,” Huckabee said. “The embassy’s job is to represent the American people and American policy. If they have grievances, we want to hear them, and today we heard them.”
The visit carried particular significance in Turmus Ayya. Mayor Nawaf Zaghloul said about 80 percent of the town’s roughly 3,000 residents hold U.S. citizenship.
Huckabee also met relatives of Palestinian Americans killed in attacks in the West Bank.
Among them was Hadeel Jabara, a mother of two whose husband, Omar, an American citizen, was killed by settlers in 2023.
Jabara described the meeting as positive and said she hoped the U.S. government could help protect residents of the town. She also spoke of fears for the safety of her two children.
During the meeting, residents described attacks on property, cars set on fire, assaults on places of worship, vandalized homes and uprooted olive trees. They also spoke about the fear that has become part of daily life for families and children.
Huckabee used unusually strong language to describe such attacks, saying they were not simply crimes but amounted to “terrorism.”
“When you try to create an atmosphere where people are uncomfortable in their own homes, where their children are afraid to play in their yards, where they don’t feel safe because of the behavior and intimidation of others, that’s terrorism by any definition, whether it’s a legal definition or a dictionary definition,” he told reporters after the meeting.
Palestinian Americans in Turmus Ayya, he said, “have a right to live safely in the homes that they built and paid for.”
Israeli officials, including the prime minister, president and foreign minister, as well as Yesha Council chairman Israel Gantz, had condemned the violence.
But he said allowing even a small group to carry out such crimes harms both Palestinians and Israelis and damages the reputation of the broader community with which the attackers may be associated.
Yasser Alqam, a lawyer and spokesman for the Turmus Ayya municipality, disputed Huckabee’s assessment of the scale of the problem. He said the number of settlers involved in attacks was “in the thousands, not the hundreds.”
At a news conference following the meeting, Huckabee was asked whether Israeli authorities were doing everything they could to confront what he himself has described as settler terrorism.
“I don’t know,” Huckabee said.
He said he hoped Israeli authorities would take American concerns seriously. Holding attackers accountable, he said, was also in Israel’s interest because its image suffers when a “small band of marauders” appears to represent a much larger population.
Asked why the United States was not using its extensive military, political and financial support for Israel to stop the attacks, Huckabee responded: “How do you know that I’m not?”
He said he had taken a firm public position against the violence and that the United States was urging Israeli authorities to act. The embassy, he added, would continue delivering that message.
“I don’t have the right to demand something,” he said. “But I certainly ask that there be a growing awareness of how important this is to Israel, to the people who live under the Palestinian Authority and to a world that wants to see accountability.”
Huckabee was also asked about his earlier invocation of one of the Ten Commandments — “You shall not steal” — in condemning the seizure of Palestinian property, and whether he believed the commandment applied to land as well as homes and livestock.
“It applies to anything that does not belong to the person taking it,” he replied.
A Baptist minister and prominent evangelical Christian, Huckabee has long been a supporter of Israeli settlements. He routinely uses the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” when referring to the West Bank, terminology also used by the Israeli government but not formally adopted by the U.S. government.
Huckabee said his demands for accountability did not represent a change in his views on Israeli settlements.
“Crime is crime, and terrorism is terrorism,” he said.
Most of the international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law, a position Israel rejects.
Huckabee’s visit came more than a year and a half after President Donald Trump lifted sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on individuals and groups of extremist settlers accused of violence against Palestinians.
Huckabee said Washington has other tools, including using its influence to press for action and relaying details of alleged abuses to the Israeli government and the U.S. administration.
Palestinians who hold American passports, Huckabee said, fall within the responsibilities of the United States.
“You are Americans, and you carry an American passport, and you are our responsibility,” he told residents. “That’s why we’re here.”
