Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Does America First Really Mean Israel First?

Mike Huckabee’s aide shows how an extremist agenda dominates Trump’s Middle East policy.

Mike Huckabee delivers a press statement during his visit to the town of Turmus Ayya, northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, Palestine, on September 5, 2026.

In February, Israeli settlers in the West Bank shot and killed a 19-year-old American named Nasrallah Abu Siyam. The youth had been trying to stop the settlers from stealing livestock.

Abu Siyam’s killing wasn’t an isolated incident. In the last four years, at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, sometimes by settlers but more commonly by the IDF (which acts as a de facto ally of the settler movement). Nine of those killed have been American citizens.

After Abu Siyam’s killing, 30 members of Congress, headed by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio decrying “the impunity afforded to extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces” and demanding accountability.

It’s unlikely that the Israeli government will have to answer for its lawlessness, at least as long as Donald Trump is in office. While Trump ran on an America First platform, in practice his politics have aligned remarkably well with the Greater Israel project of hard-line Zionists, who believe that Israel has a biblical mandate to annex the West Bank (and perhaps also large chunks of neighboring countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia). The Greater Israel agenda has made remarkable headway, even though Trump himself still pays lip service to the idea of a two-state solution and has said he won’t allow Israel to formally annex the West Bank.

Trump himself might shy away from explicitly endorsing a Greater Israel program, but important figures in his government clearly believe in it. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled a key policy shaper, David Milstein, an aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The newspaper reports that “when members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, [Milstein] suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to gain information, according to multiple officials briefed on the matter.”

Milstein’s actions here are part of a larger pattern. According to the Times, Milstein “has repeatedly suppressed or significantly........

© The Nation