Huckabee Discovers Settler Terror Is Bad After Years of Cheering It On

An American family is locked inside their own house in the West Bank village of Qusra. No water. No power. No food. Settlers outside throwing stones, tearing down walls, daring anyone to stop them. And the man Donald Trump sent to Jerusalem to represent American interests finally found his voice on Thursday, five days after the siege began.

Mike Huckabee called it a “horrific act of terror.” Called the settlers “Israeli terrorists.” Said their behavior was “disgusting” and “thuggish.” Strong words from a man who spent years championing the very settlement movement that produced these thugs.

Funny how that works. Huckabee built his entire public persona around unconditional support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank. He toured them, praised them, insisted the entire territory belongs to Israel for biblical reasons. Now a Palestinian-American family gets held hostage in their own home and suddenly he’s shocked to find that the movement he championed produces people who terrorize civilians.

Qusay Abu Ridi and his teenage son were trapped since Sunday. Sunday. Five days of no water, no electricity, settlers throwing stones at the walls. The family’s American brother, Lou Ridi, sat in Ohio calling every number he could find while his relatives described themselves as “prisoners in our own house, hostages in our own house.” His words, not mine.

Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

And here is the detail nobody in the establishment press wants to linger on: when Israeli soldiers first arrived at the scene, they prayed with the settlers. Prayed with them. The military later said those soldiers would be disciplined. Ask yourself what kind of system sends soldiers to rescue trapped civilians and the soldiers start by joining the besiegers in prayer.

On Wednesday, Israeli security forces actually tried to dislodge the settlers. They failed. Tear gas, stun grenades, and they still couldn’t move a crowd of civilians blocking a family’s front gate. The military dismantled two outposts and detained one person. One. Dozens of men laying siege to three homes, and they grabbed one guy.

This is not a new pattern. Last month, settlers burned a mosque in Qusra. In July, settlers surrounded a Palestinian home in the nearby village of Jalud for two weeks until the owners fled and the settlers took over the property. They are still there. The UN says 127 Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been fully or partially displaced since January 2023. Nearly 3,800 Palestinians displaced this year alone, almost half of them children.

But sure, let’s all act surprised when the movement that has been steadily driving people off their land for years finally traps an American family and the system can’t figure out how to stop it.

abu adel / Pexels

Huckabee’s condemnation is better than silence. I’ll give him that. But ask yourself who benefits from a system where the strongest statement an American ambassador can make is a social media post while a family with American citizenship waits days for someone, anyone, to open their front gate.

Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon stood up at the Security Council and said “we are not going anywhere.” He’s right about that. Nobody is going anywhere. The settlers aren’t leaving. The families aren’t being protected. And the officials who spent years enabling this are now posting on X about how disgusted they are.

The little guy always gets played. The only question is whether anyone notices before the next family gets locked inside their own home.