West Bank Things can't get worse, Palestinians say, but they fear being wrong

The waiters at Ramallah's cafes and the tenders of its falafel stands all had more or less the same question for outsiders: is Donald Trump's win good or bad? The Palestinians in the biggest city on the West Bank seem to have already come to a provisional consensus: that the US election result has no real impact here because things could not possibly be worse.

- Julian Borger

"It will not make a big difference," said Eyad Barghouti, a retired university teacher, expressing a common view as the Gaza war rages on. "What Biden was doing before with a low profile, Trump will be more vocal about.

"Biden would say in public: 'We're not trying to starve Gaza, we're trying to give them food aid,' all the while supporting Israel's army. [Trump] will say it in a clear way, that we are trying to get rid of such-and-such people. He will not play the game of trying to make himself sound like a humanitarian."

All the worst-case consequences of Trump's victory - the loss of freedom, the corrosion of justice, economic collapse and, for US allies, the possibility of devastating wars - are already a reality for most Palestinians, many of them argue. Those in the West Bank point out they only have to look at their social media feeds to see today's equivalent of Guernica, Dresden or Grozny being streamed live from Gaza. They say that the liberal order being mourned this week across the west was not a bystander - it supplied the bombs.

"What we have seen has made us believe that the whole of western ideology is a lie," said a librarian in his 50s, preferring that his name not be used. "They never cared about us. What they care about is the good of Israel. That is the one thing they can all agree on."

But many in Ramallah say there is still room for the already dismal prospects of Palestinians to darken further. Barghouti said the "violence could get worse" and that Trump in the White House would add unpredictability to despair.

"It is like a monkey holding a bomb," he said. "You don't know when he will throw it or where he will throw it."