Is the USA backing away further from the protection of Palestinian rights?

Two members of the US Congress—Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Sean Casten—have been in the forefront of drawing attention to the violations of rights of the people of the West Bank. During a visit to the West Bank in February 2026, they found that in a village in the West Bank they were scheduled to visit, named Ras Ein al-Auja, all the nearly 700 Palestinian residents had already fled due to violence by nearby (Israeli) settlers. During their visit, the Congress members could only see some Israelis who had come there for a picnic. The members found that a strategy being followed was to split the Palestinian population so that they could not form a government. The conclusion of these members is that the “annexation of the West Bank is happening before our very eyes” and that the Israeli government is “quietly pursuing full-scale annexation.”

The Congress members have noted that there is not a single supporter of the two-state solutionTwo-State SolutionA proposed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing two separate, sovereign states for the two peoples. in Israel’s current governing coalition. In 2025, the first year of Trump’s second presidency, Israel approved 54 new settlements in the West Bank, compared to 14 approved in Joe Biden’s four years. Eighty-six new settlement outposts have been set up, illegal even under Israeli laws, and these were used for attacks on Palestinians. In the year 2025, there were over 1,800 attacks, the highest for any single year (based on the report written by these Congress members in Responsible Statecraft or RS, May 29, 2026).

Over 1,800 — The number of attacks recorded in 2025, the highest for any single year.

While this shows that aggression has been increasing very substantially in the West Bank during the Trump presidency, at the same time, another report published in RS on the same day, written by Ben Freeman and titled ‘Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries,’ informs us in the context of section 224 of the National Defense Authorization ActNational Defense Authorization ActAn annual series of United States federal laws specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense. entitled ‘US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative’, “This provision would arguably do more to intertwine the US military with the Israeli military than the more than $200 billion (inflation-adjusted) in military assistance Israel has received from the USA since 1948… If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the USA has with any other country in the world.”

Recently, President Trump has suddenly brought in the issue of the Abraham AccordsAbraham AccordsA series of joint normalization statements initially signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain, mediated by the United States. to be reached with several more Arab and Muslim-majority countries in the course of the several proposals being discussed in the context of the various versions of the Iran-US deal. However, this was not accompanied by wider agreement regarding the two-state proposal and for a sovereign Palestinian state to coexist alongside Israel, despite the known fact that several Arab countries in the past have mentioned this, or something very similar, as a precondition for recognizing Israel and establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

All this indicates that while the USA under the previous administration had also neglected the rights of the Palestinian people, under the present administration of President Trump, this disregard of the rights of Palestinians has worsened further. However, there is some hope from those activists as well as senior leaders who are still keeping alive the justice-based Palestinian cause in the USA. Their hands should be strengthened, and support for such efforts should grow. The two Congress members mentioned above are receiving good support from several of their colleagues in the Democratic Party for taking forward the West Bank Violence Protection ActWest Bank Violence Protection ActA proposed legislative measure in the US Congress aimed at addressing and curbing settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank..

While support for the Palestinian cause has grown in recent times among the youth, the highly resourceful and influential Israeli lobby continues to have a powerful grip on US policy. On the one hand, Israel and its lobby within the USA try to influence USA policy in ways that many critics argue bring many distortions in policy and preclude the emergence of a solutions-based policy for the Middle East region. On the other hand, others argue that Israel also continues to play an important role of serving some crucial US interests of maintaining dominance in this region, and realizing its importance to the USA, in turn, Israeli leaders, particularly the likes of Netanyahu, strive to use US support for their highly aggressive policies of expanding their territory and dominance.

Caught in the middle of all this, the rights of Palestinians have been frequently violated in very unjust ways by Israel, and Israel has managed to get continuing support of the USA despite this. It is good that at least some voices are speaking up for Palestinian rights in the USA, but this needs to increase much more to have a significant policy impact.