In Ramallah, Palestinians split over a Trump presidency

On the Palestinian streets of Ramallah in the West Bank, local residents on Wednesday found themselves trying to come to terms with the unexpected success of President-elect Donald Trump in the US elections.

While some expressed disappointment that the “man who detests Muslims” was elected, others said they suspect he won’t make any difference to them.

At a small restaurant, a man who identified himself only as Abu Anas and his son Muhammad Ma’ale served NIS 10 ($2.60) bowls of creamy, olive-oil filled hummus.

Across the street, worshipers stood around the Jamal Abdul Nasser Mosque, the oldest in city.

“If Clinton won the election, it would have been better because [Trump] is a bad guy. He detests Muslims,” said Abu Anas.

“But what can we do,” he added, shrugging his shoulders.

Ma’ale put down a steamy plate of falafel balls. “He wants to destroy us [Muslims],” he piped up.

On top of Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the US, he has also indicated he will break with longstanding US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling Jerusalem Israel’s undivided capital and promising to move the US Embassy there.

His Israel adviser David Friedman has also defended Israeli building in the West Bank, considered illegal under international law.

In the seat of power in Ramallah, Palestinian officials reacted to the win with cautious optimism Wednesday.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas congratulated Trump and said he hoped the president-elect would realize a “just peace” during his term in office, according to the official PA news outlet Wafa.

Abbas’s spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh said the PA would work with any American president who strives to realize a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That statement, issued immediately after Trump’s victory was announced, omitted the president-elect’s name.

Nadi, a hostel manager in Ramallah, the PA’s seat of government, said he was happy that Trump had won the presidency.

“It will get rid of the two-facedness of American policy toward the Palestinians. Trump will be one-faced with immense racism towards Muslim, and this is clear.”

This would lead Arab people to support the Palestinian cause more, he argued.

The hostel manager, who had grown up in Tunis, Lebanon and Algeria because his father was in the Palestine Liberation Organization, said he wasn’t happy about the American people suffering.

“They are humans like we are, he added. “We just don’t like the political establishment,” which he had said earlier he thought was controlled by the “Zionist lobby.”

Fatme Faqih, an employee in the Palestinian education ministry, said it didn’t really matter whether Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump was commander-in-chief.

“They are all the same and won’t bring anything new,” she said.

At a downtown barbershop, 60-year-old Eskandar Hinn watched Sky News in Arabic while waiting for customers. Donald Trump’s victory speech was playing on the screen.

Like Faqih, Hinn was skeptical that it made a difference whether Clinton or Trump had won the presidency.

It wasn’t the barber’s lack of faith in the politicians, but rather his deep faith in the institution of the US government to keep things straight that made him feel this way.

“America is a great country. It can’t be affected that much by the ideas of one man,” he said. “It also doesn’t matter what he said before the election, [the government] will set him straight,” he added.

Hinn also said: “May God bless Trump and help him to bring world peace, and to let the Israelis live in peace so we as Palestinians can live in peace.”

“We have to think about our grandchildren, both the Palestinians and Israelis,” Hinn added.

“Because what we sow now, they will reap.”