The theatre of the absurd and American ‘opposition’ to West Bank annexation

There’s an old saying that a diplomat is someone who is sent abroad to lie for his country. Thanks to the location of the United Nations headquarters on American soil, American diplomats can lie for their country on a titanic scale without ever leaving home. 

On May 8, Jeff Bartos, the US Ambassador to the UN for Management and Reform, told the Security Council that the US opposes Israeli annexation of the West Bank: 

“As President Trump has made clear, the United States opposes Israeli annexation of the West Bank…We are in regular dialogue with partners about improving stability and security in the West Bank…We condemn terrorism or criminal violence by any party against any resident in the West Bank…Furthermore, the United States will continue to work toward a future in which the people in the West Bank and Gaza live in freedom and prosperity and at peace with Israel.”

That such blatant codswallop would escape the lips of a grown man is pitiful.

Does Bartos actually believe what he said? Does he believe that anyone at the UN believes it? Surely no one but hard-core Zionists living in adamant denial of daily reality, or persons completely unacquainted with world news, could credit such arrant twaddle.

You might not call it annexation, sir, but most of the world has at least some grasp of what is occurring, and at an ever-accelerating rate under the indulgent eye of an American administration that claims not to approve it.

The settlers have devoured forty percent of the West Bank so far and now number approximately three quarters of a million, in about 400 communities, some of which are cities with tens of thousands of residents, all of which are illegal under international agreements to which Israel is a signatory. In April, the Israeli government secretly approved 34 new settlements at one blow, a record. Settler violence, a longstanding problem, has metastasized alarmingly in recent months. The Israeli government is increasingly reassigning authority in settlement administration from military to civilian entities and has been registering West Bank land as the state property of Israel. The goal clearly is to create irreversible “facts on the ground,” a de facto annexation. (For additional detail, see “West Bank Settlers: Who Are These People?” 1 April 2026.)

Does the US government seriously believe that the entire world is so misdirected from reality by contemporary officialdom’s passion for spin control and disdain for plain speech that no one will notice the annexation of the West Bank as long as the word “annexation” isn’t used?

American presidents throughout the settlement era have almost all expressed varying degrees of disapproval of the settlements–Jimmy Carter having been particularly critical–but no American administration has actually taken significant action to forestall the Israeli takeover of the West Bank. An executive order from Joe Biden imposed sanctions on certain individuals and organizations associated with the settlement movement, but he stopped well short of tying future aid to Israel with cessation of conduct that implicates the United States, as Israel’s ally and bountiful donor, in the flagrant violation of international law. 

I remember a town in the United States that became notorious because of a lurid criminal trial that resulted from a woman being gang-raped on the billiards table in a tavern while a roomful of non-participants did nothing to help her. If you had asked them whether they were against rape, most likely they all would have said they thought it was a bad thing, but that didn’t help the woman much, and it didn’t prevent their town from becoming infamous as a place where someone could be gang-raped in public without anyone bothering to intervene. 

I also am thinking of Mick Jagger crying, “Brothers and sisters! Brothers and sisters!” from the stage at the Altamont Free Concert while the Hells Angels–whom the Rolling Stones had engaged to provide security–killed a man right in front of him. 

Mick Jagger for President. We already have the Hells Angels handling security in the West Bank.

And so the question: Do Jeff Bartos and his bosses actually believe that the US opposes the annexation of the West Bank? I think they do, but not in the sense that a mentally healthy adult in a sane culture would believe it.

In today’s America, everything is theatre. Everything is about the symbolic gesture, which now is mistaken for reality. This modus operandi began with the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, when the careful management of image elevated to the presidency a sickly, undistinguished Senator and former Congressman of slightly more than average intelligence who came to be regarded as a demigod despite his administration’s failure to achieve the passage of most of its legislative program. 

His successor, Lyndon Johnson, put the finishing touches on the new pattern: He did achieve the passage of legislation–multitudinous reams of the stuff–but the weakness of the follow-through left enduring disappointments and resentments among those the legislation was supposed to help. Americans love to pass laws and issue statements, because this makes public officials look like they care, but Americans hate to enforce laws or act on statements, because doing so is inconvenient. After multiple generations of this dereliction of duty, the regulations and declarations themselves are now considered magically efficacious.

This is how Americans operate nearly every type of organization, how they raise their children, how they manage their personal lives. What matters is saying the right word, thinking up exciting names for things, getting in the good books of an imaginary recording angel who never stays around to watch what happens after he ticks the “OK” box. 

So yes, Mr. Bartos and the administration believe the US is against the annexation of the West Bank, in the sense that being against it is conducive to peace and justice, which is the right thing, so one expresses support for the right thing and the angel pastes a little tinfoil gold star on one’s report card.

With hypocrisy, one knowingly says one thing while doing another. What we have now is something far worse than hypocrisy: people actually believing their own theatrical illusions.

Most likely, Donald Trump really believes that the US is winning the war with Iran and has believed several times that it was over. Joe Biden probably believed that the Inflation Reduction Act, a $370 billion spending bill now estimated to have an eventual cost of nearly $5 trillion, really would reduce inflation–because it had the right name. 

And the United States government will still “oppose” annexation of the West Bank when that annexation is 100 percent complete, achieved with copious US aid, and the US government will be in favor of “freedom, prosperity, and peace” for the Palestinians when the Palestinians no longer have any land to live on. 

Jeff Bartos has sounded the triumphant trumpet blast of righteousness in an echo chamber that he mistakes for the wider world–where it cannot begin to compete with the roar of the bulldozers and the cries of the dispossessed. God help Palestine, and God help us all.

Lot Hildegard is a freelance policy analyst and Christian theologian who spent two years at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and has taught in a Palestinian university and in an American Muslim school. His social commentary and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of print and online publications.