Al Jazeera – Jan 21, 2025
President Donald Trump’s pick to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations has become the latest administration nominee to express the belief that Israel has “biblical” dominion over the occupied West Bank.
Elise Stefanik’s comment on Tuesday came during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where she also pledged to further Trump’s “America First” mission.
“If confirmed, I stand ready to implement President Trump’s mandate from the American people to deliver America First, peace-through-strength national security leadership on the world stage,” she said during her opening statements.
If confirmed as ambassador, Stefanik explained she would audit US funding for the UN and its constellation of agencies. She would also seek to counter China’s influence at the international organisation and bolster Washington’s staunch support for Israel.
But it was her views on the West Bank that signalled the starkest contrast between the Trump administration and that of his predecessor, President Joe Biden.
Stefanik was definitive when asked if she shared the view of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and former National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir that Israel has a “biblical right to the entire West Bank”.
“Yes,” she replied during the exchange with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen.
When pushed if she supported self-determination for Palestinians, Stefanik sidestepped the question.
“I believe the Palestinian people deserve so much better than the failures that they’ve had from terrorist leaders,” she said. “Of course, they deserve human rights.”
A wider shift
Over the last four years, the Biden administration provided resolute support for Israel at the UN. It repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire to stop Israel’s war in Gaza.
However, the administration had been willing to stand up to its “ironclad” ally on the issue of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Such settlements are considered illegal under international law.
Stefanik’s comments were the latest indication that the incoming Trump administration would take a very different tack.
Trump’s first term saw a surge in settlements, with his administration removing a four-decade-long US policy that recognised the expansion into the West Bank as illegal.
Upon taking office on Monday, Trump cancelled Biden-era sanctions on far-right Israeli settler groups and individuals accused of violence against Palestinians.
Trump’s pick to be the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has also supported Israeli settlements in the West Bank, citing the Bible as justification. In a 2017 interview with CNN, for instance, Huckabee argued that the Palestinian territory did not exist at all.
“There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he said, using a biblical name.
And in 2008, when he was campaigning for the presidency, Huckabee asserted that the Palestinian identity itself was a fiction.
“I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset. There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” Huckabee, who has not yet faced a confirmation hearing, said at the time.
‘Standing with Israel’
Stefanik has long been one of Trump’s most ardent defenders in the US House of Representatives.
In December 2023, however, she rose to a new level of prominence with her viral questioning of three university leaders from Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, pressing them over alleged “anti-Semitism” on campus. Two of the three presidents resigned in the aftermath.
Critics have said her accusations helped spur other university leaders to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests on campus, out of fear of public backlash.
In her opening address at Tuesday’s confirmation hearing, Stefanik hailed herself as “the leader in combating anti-Semitism in higher education”, citing her 2023 interaction with the university presidents.
“My oversight work led to the most-viewed testimony in the history of Congress,” she said. “This hearing with university presidents was heard around the world and viewed billions of times.”
Responding to questions from bipartisan lawmakers, Stefanik pledged to continue — and extend — the US legacy of support for Israel at the UN. The US is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council and therefore wields veto power.
She repeated the US position that Israel is unfairly targeted by the UN, decrying what she called “anti-Semitic rot” within the organisation.
The US currently pays about one-fifth of the UN’s regular budget, a regular point of ire for Trump.
On Tuesday, Stefanik promised “a full assessment of all the UN sub-agencies” to make sure “that every dollar [goes] to support our American interests”.
She added she would oppose any US funds going to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Legislation passed by the US Congress last year bans funding through March 2025 for the agency, which humanitarian groups say provides irreplaceable support to Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.
In her hearing, Stefanik also defended Israel, despite criticisms from UN experts that its methods in Gaza are “consistent with genocide”.
“It is a beacon of human rights in the region,” Stefanik said of Israel.
Stefanik’s hearing came just hours after former Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, became the first member of the incoming administration to be sworn in.
Israel has the right to exist because it says it does and is big enough to make its rights stick. As our available history proves, anyone else can do the same thing and use any reason he or she chooses. Make peace or make war or both simultaneously: lots of karma here. Choose wisely.
Trump deeply undermines the veracity of his whole administration by facilitating these criminals in and around Israel.
The Bible was written by men. It no more proves the existence of God than Peter Pan proves the existence of fairies and Dr Who proves the existence of Daleks.
Yup, there’s a new sheriff in town, and by the end of this year (in a nod to Orwell) the word ‘genocide’ WILL be declared ‘anti-semitic’. (remember, you heard it here first) No more beating around the bush in the beacon of biblical rights, the letter of the law is NOT the Spirit!
If you want to get affirmation for a government position, the first thing you do is kiss Israel’s ass. The rest falls in place.
Oh dear… yet another dumb b!tch promoted beyond – way beyond! – her ability.. 🙄
Only the ignorant fool or the political grifter pushes this BS. The land was taken from them by Rome and the people cast abroad, this was God’s will and nothing has happened to change this…
Only the utterly deranged or dangerously stupid would think that a horde of reprobate criminal degenerates from Eastern Europe and Jew Yawk would have a “biblical right” to anything other than the imprisonment or executions they so deserve. Foreign policy based on the Ol’ Festerment work of absurd fiction? What’s next, energy policy based on Harry Potter? Domestic policy is already drawn from Orwell, the Camp of the Saints, Planet of the Apes, A Sodomites Guide to Rape & Robbery, The Book of Bad Ideas, and How to Destroy Your Cuntry in 30 Days or Less by Shlomo Demonberg.
Please people remember that the babylonian talmudic cult, that is the so called jews who started to call themselves jews around year 1776 – are Khazars originated f mostly from tribes of Turkey and some from surrounding countries. They did not originate in the Levant areas. They are not from Samaria or Judea but the Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine. Moreover, the old bible has many false translations and inserts. The new bible some volumes have been rewritten, the scofield one was all made up in the early 1900s by no other than the rothschild clan. so this woman is just a chihuahua to her masters – all lack basic principles of integrity. They are imposters and occupiers of Palestine.
“Politics is simply Jews advancing/implementing their eschatological/religious scriptures. The Bible was written by mongrel Jews to brainwash the rest of ‘humanity’ that they’ve been selected by ‘God’ to rule the world. Of course, its all Jewish propaganda, but try telling that to the billions of Bibletards.” –Nico X
How much of the Bible is fraudulent and re written ? And who mis- translated most of it ? re inventing their names , recording one massacre after another, this middle eastern book is just a collection of home invasions, tribal raids, massacres to be used in justifying further pleasantries among the semites.
your typical repulsive jewess
The problem remains that the Israelis are NOT the biblical Israelites; they do not even claim to be. Thinking that they are is the simple-minded ignorance of the woefully under-educated.
“Trump’s UN ambassador pick says Israel has ‘biblical right’ to West Bank”
Why isn’t this ignorant nutjob in an insane asylum for believers in “Holy” Book Bullshit for intellectually lazy desperados?!!
Trumpenstein is as ever utterly full of bullshit!
A Biblical right only if you are Jewish but no real rights for anyone else. Does that sound like the true God for all of creation and human kind? Does that sound like a God of truth, justice, love and trust? The Jews in their entitlement mentality and the Old Testament god complex want to dominate everything and make everything over in their own image. Their religious leaders only interpret biblical scriptures according to their own interests, and in fact most Jews do not even believe in them. Not just Zionists, but now all Jews are being painted with the same Israeli brush, and when we scratch the surface of Judaism we find a hodgepodge of faiths more varied than in the Christian fold, with the only thing really uniting the people is being part of the Jewish tribe and claiming to share a very myopic view of their history, which appears to give them a unity in which they have no real neighbor principle or sense of duty to anyone outside of their fold, except for camouflage to those they consider goyim and for self-promotion purposes.
The reason they became so developed in the field of psychology is clearly because they need it without being connected to the true God, and the fact is they are now acting like they are in places like Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria bank, with genocide and gratuitous killing, is that they are acting out all of their unresolved internal imbalances to make the external world conform to them, rather than reforming the true roots of their own religion to the actual nature of God. The internal contradictions between their God-intended natures and their with mammon-oriented desires with a hidden agenda to dominate virtually everyone and everything, in which the tribe is really at war with the world, undermining and destroying all in their way, became so great they could no longer contain it, and it is the Zionists who are saying for all Jews and the rest of the world, “See this is the way we really are. We control the US and the West. We even control China. If you do not like our methods then you are our enemies and we will use whatever means we have to destroy you.”
The question now is exactly how many unjust wars, evils and atrocities can be laid at the door of international Jewry? Is it the case they are the head or the tail of the beast causing most of the evils we complain about on this site. If only the tail, then they most certainly want to appear to be wagging the entire beast around to suit their own interests, and especially when we consider all of the “cui bono” issues arising in such things as the war in the Ukraine and Syria. Perhaps that with such overt acts as in Gaza they want to psychologically fix in the minds of the morally relativistic populations they have helped to create, that they are entitled and exceptional people and can do whatever they please. They can do all in their power to reduce our own birth rates and survival rates while increasing their own, but if we expose such stealth then it is us they condemn as evil.
I know this is dangerous stuff to comment on, but Gaza exposes all. The solution is. of course, not tooth for tooth, and it does contain with proper exposure elements of self defence. However, until Christians start again to pray for the conversion of the Jews and realize that the most “anti-Semitic” thing they can do is not to lead them to the true Messiah, Yeshua, (Jesus of Nazareth). Without that happening the entire tribe will remain on its same dishonest, selfish, and destructive trajectory.
put this whore on some porno site
Trumps on a Mission from Yahweh…
or those Crown Hts Chabadniks will release all those Epstein pics….
This woman is correct that the Jews have a Biblical right to the West Bank. They are not occupying it; it is already theirs. They are settling it. God made the world and HE gave Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It doesn’t matter how many people that offends. God can do what He wants to do. I am a Gentile of German descent, but I know what the Bible says.
It’s reassuring to see that most of the commenters here have removed the standard-issue American ‘Alas, the holocaust!’ blinders from their eyes and understand Judaism, especially Zionism, as the history-denying, delusional and genocidal cults they actually are.
Trump’s good acts don’t cancel out his bad ones, his support for Israel being his #1 evil choice of action.
@Ann Blue
& then they will come for Germany.
sorry mein liebling but the bible is total bollox
Netanyahu is born to Benzion Mileikowsky, a squatter from Poland, and Tzila Segal of Lithuanian descent. Ben Gurion is Polish, Golda Meir is Ukrainian, Moshe Dayan is Ukrainian, Shimon Peres and Mechanem Begin are from Belarus, Theodore Herzl is from Pest, Hungary. They say they are Jews but are without Semitic lineage. They’re descended from Khazars who converted en masse to Judaism, to avoid taking sides between the Ottoman and Byzantine empires.
These who say they are Jews but are without Semitic lineage were transplanted to Palestine starting from the early 1900’s to 1948 by the British empire and Rothschilds (who funded Scofield to distort the New Testament and brainwash evangelicals like Hagee and Huckabee), from places like Kiev, Bucharest, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and Moscow, to displace and commit atrocities against Palestinian Jews, Christians, and Muslims who had lived in peace for centuries.
I suggest people go to Wikipedia and read the Balfour Declaration to see the birth of the current Israel.