The United States ambassador to Israel condemned Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, calling the behavior an “act of terror” as he visited with Palestinian American residents shaken by months of attacks. Ambassador Mike Huckabee referred to such settlers as “terrorists,” a word that U.S. officials usually reserve for Palestinian militants.

“If there are squatters that come in and put up their own flags and take possession of something that does not belong to them, if they burn a car, if they torch a mosque, if they go into someone’s home and vandalize it, paint graffiti on the walls, that’s a criminal act. But it extends beyond a criminal act. It’s an act of terror,” Huckabee said during his visit to the village of Turmus Ayya, which has reported frequent attacks by settlers over the last year.

Huckabee also used the term “terrorists” last month after weeks of unrest in the West Bank town of Qusra, where settlers surrounded homes, including one owned by a Palestinian American. Days later, residents of the West Bank village of Bazariya said settlers burned a mosque and left a message on a wall in graffiti reading “Huckabee regards from the terrorists” in Hebrew.

Recently, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been besieged for days on end, unable to leave their homes because of the threat posed by Israeli settlers. The Israeli military has yet to fully remove the settlers from Palestinian villages.

The United States, which provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, has issued a scathing rebuke, perhaps because one of the homeowners is a Palestinian American living in Ohio whose relatives are living on his property.

Even U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee. a Christian Zionist who fully supports Zionist expansionism, referred to the settlers as “terrorists.”

In reality, they are the tip of the spear for a much larger movement, supported by successive Israeli governments and supercharged under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that is aimed at cementing Israeli rule over the territory and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

On his visit to Turmus Ayya, the US Ambassador Mike Huckabee began his remarks by making clear he was addressing U.S. citizens, who make up a small percentage of the roughly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank but a significant part of the village’s population.

“I’m very aware that a lot of the American people who live in Turmus Ayya and other communities across this region are not enjoying the life they deserve to live, not enjoying it in a peaceful way,” Huckabee said. “It’s a life that is disturbed by people who have created extraordinary challenges that are unfair and illegal.”

The U.S. Embassy can’t investigate criminal activity, he said, but it can tell its host government that “there are needs that need to be addressed, there are issues that cannot go unnoticed, and specific crimes and acts of terror that cannot continue without that country doing the investigation and adjudication that every person has a right to expect.”

Huckabee met with about 10 Palestinian American residents who described the effect of the violence on their lives and properties.

The Israeli government has built nearly 150 settlements that are home to well over 500,000 Jewish settlers. Many of the settlements resemble fully developed suburbs, with apartment blocks, shopping malls, parks and industrial zones.

Radical settlers have established hundreds of additional outposts without government authorization, while still enjoying protection from the Israeli military and often other public services.

Netanyahu’s government, the most nationalist and religious in Israel’s history, has boasted of establishing over 100 new settlements.

Israel’s current government and much of its political class view the West Bank as the biblical and historical homeland of the Jewish people and see the settlements as key to maintaining security.

On my lst visit to Israel more than half a century ago I traveled with a group of chaperoned high school teenagers and spent the summer touring all parts of that area including the recently acquired Palestinian territories in the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip.

My belief at that time was that Israel, with a few minor adjustments, would withdraw completely from all occupied Palestinian territories in exchange for full diplomatic recognition and normalization of its relationships with neighboring countries, specifically Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

During that same summer my group traveled to the West Bank and visited several Palestinian communities that had come under Zionist occupation. I noticed that new housing was being built in open areas surrounding the Palestinians.

Even more than a half century ago on my last visit to Israel, just a few years after the 1967 war, the Zionist regime in power at that time had already begun a massive building campaign on the West Bank, strategically placing Jewish settlements in open areas surrounding Palestinian communities.

Our guide was a Zionazi bigot who had no qualms about expressing his hatred and loathing against Palestinians who he regarded as mostly subhuman, Üntermenschen”, savages. He lived in one of the Zionist settlements that had already been built, and assured us that under no circumstances would they ever leave.

To prove his point he kept waving his gun around, and several times he pointed it at small kids he thought were getting to close to our group.

The streets in this village were extremely narrow, and it was difficult for our bus to get through. Total disregard for the village residents, as we were leaving our bus struck the side of a Palestinian home and caused some damage, but we did not stop.

My visit to Israel that year caused me to renounce Zionism as I became convinced it was nothing more than an ultra-nationalist political movement in the same way that Nazism became an ultra-nationalist political movemnt in Germany.

I realized more than half of a century ago that Zionism could never co-exist peacefully with the Palestinian people. What is happening to Palestinians today in the West Bank and Gaza is the inevitable result of the predatory Zionism which I personally witnessed more than fifty years ago.

This article also appears in Medium.

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