Eliana Passentin delights in her house, which sits nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, with a view from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast. The dining room looks out over ancient Shiloh, the IsraelitesтАЩ first capital in ancient times.
But Ms. Passentin would feel even better if the area was annexed by Israel.
Some of President-elect Donald J. TrumpтАЩs staffing choices have raised hopes among settlers that that could happen. Pete Hegseth, Mr. TrumpтАЩs contentious choice for defense secretary, went to ancient Shiloh for an episode of his тАЬBattle in the Holy LandтАЭ series on Fox Nation. Mike Huckabee, Mr. TrumpтАЩs pick as the next ambassador to Jerusalem, has visited several times over the years and has argued that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel.
Nearly half a million settlers and roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The Palestinians, and much of the world, have long envisioned the territory as part of a future independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and consider the Jewish settlements to be illegal. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza, and with the prospect of a more sympathetic administration in Washington, settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the agenda.
They also hope that Israel will extend its sovereignty over parts, or all, of the territory through annexation тАФ a step it has formally avoided since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war amid opposition from much of the world.
тАЬWe want to live our lives in Israel,тАЭ Ms. Passentin said, adding, тАЬI believe the new administration will support whatever Israel decides.тАЭ
The West Bank has grown increasingly volatile. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen sharply, while Israel has carried out a series of deadly raids and drone strikes targeting armed Palestinian militants that have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.
Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of 2023, according to the United Nations. The Israeli authorities say that most were armed fighters, but at least some were uninvolved civilians. About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinian assailants in the West Bank during the same period, 18 of them members of the security forces, according to U.N. data. Shin Bet, IsraelтАЩs internal security agency, said it had thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.
On Monday, gunmen shot at a civilian bus and cars passing the Palestinian village of Al-Funduq in the northern West Bank, killing at least three people in what the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack.
Some settlers express a wariness of Mr. Trump born of experience. He has not articulated clear plans for the region, other than a vague aim of bringing peace. But they nonetheless believe that the new administration will go along with the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuтАЩs government тАФ the most right-wing in IsraelтАЩs history.
тАЬTrumpтАЩs team was here, they saw the reality, and for me, thatтАЩs a total relief,тАЭ said Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs the settlements around ancient Shiloh, including the adjacent settlement of Shilo. He is also the chairman of the umbrella council representing the rest of the settlements.
Mr. Ganz recently took Doug Burgum, Mr. TrumpтАЩs nominee for interior secretary, on a tour in the area. тАЬI see the people he chose,тАЭ Mr. Ganz said of the president-elect.
Support for a two-state solution has been waning for years among IsraelтАЩs Jewish majority, and since the Oct. 7 attack, many Israelis fear that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis think Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.
But in his public statements, Mr. Ganz has avoided explicitly telling Mr. Trump what to do. To sound less provocative, instead of sovereignty, he uses vaguer terms like тАЬchanging the realityтАЭ in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory.
During his first term, Mr. Trump showered Israel with diplomatic gifts, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognizing the contested city as IsraelтАЩs capital. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, reversed four decades of U.S. policy by stating that settlements did not violate international law. (Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the traditional U.S. position in 2024, saying the American government considers settlements to be тАЬinconsistent with international law,тАЭ in line with most countries.)
Mr. TrumpтАЩs administration also floated a peace plan that strongly favored Israel, discarding the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a viable state with its capital in Jerusalem.
The proposal, which Mr. Trump called the тАЬdeal of the century,тАЭ called for Israeli annexation of about 30 percent of the West Bank, including its current settlements, and a disjointed Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders and many settlers, who preferred continued ambiguity over what they saw as a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian territory that would leave many settlements as isolated enclaves.
Adding to the settlersтАЩ wariness, the idea of Israeli annexation was abruptly dumped by both Mr. Trump and IsraelтАЩs leaders in favor of forging diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a process known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration is expected to try to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia, which would most likely require some kind of Israeli acceptance of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.
The settlers are far from homogenous. They include from secular, middle-class Israelis seeking affordable housing as well as religious ideologues who believe settling the land is part of a Messianic plan ordained by God.
But in the hills around Shilo and the neighboring settlement of Eli in the central West Bank, the mission of Jewish settlement expansion is clear. Alongside official government-approved settlements, outposts have been built in recent decades without official permits. Some have been retroactively authorized by Israel and have come to resemble the more established neighborhoods.
Ms. Passentin, a mother of eight, came to Israel as a child from San Francisco. She and her husband, David, lived for 10 years in a trailer, then in a tent, helping to establish outposts, before settling in Hayovel, a satellite of Eli, parts of which are still unauthorized after years of court battles over the ownership and status of the land.
As the Binyamin CouncilтАЩs international relations director, she has accompanied some of Mr. TrumpтАЩs close circle on tours and hosted Mr. Hegseth in her home.
One immediate request of the Trump administration from settler leaders is to cancel sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on more than 30 individuals and organizations accused of violence against Palestinians and destruction or seizure of Palestinian property.
Settler leaders like Mr. Ganz say they do not condone the violence, some of which is directed at Israeli forces who come to remove illegal settlement structures. But they say that it is a police matter and that it is a fraction of the anti-settler violence perpetrated by Palestinians.
For all of the enthusiasm in settler circles surrounding Mr. TrumpтАЩs election, expectations of what he will actually do once in office are tempered.
Citing an adage that marriage is often better the second time around, Aaron Katsof, a winemaker in Esh Kodesh, a hilltop outpost perched above Shilo, between the Palestinian villages of Qusra and Duma, said of a second Trump term: тАЬYou donтАЩt come with the lovey-dovey infatuation of high school sweethearts. But you come with a lot more experience and maturity.тАЭ Esh Kodesh still lacks Israeli government authorization and permits for permanent housing.
Rivka Amar, 19, who is nine months pregnant, moved in the fall to Alei Ayin, a tiny outpost between Esh Kodesh and Qusra. She and her husband live in a lone quick-build home there, accompanied only by some young men who sleep in a tent, in what was open land.
Ms. Amar had been lunching at the Merlot Cafe in Shilo with her friend Rina Kohen, 18, who lives on a settler farm in the northern West Bank with her brother and 150 head of cattle. The idea, she said, was for a few settlers to control as much land as possible, to keep territory away from Palestinians.
тАЬIf IтАЩm not there, my enemy will be there,тАЭ Ms. Amar said.
But, she said, she keeps her focus on the tasks at the hand, not on political shifts in Israel or the United States.
тАЬI donтАЩt wake up in the morning thinking of Biden or Trump,тАЭ she said, тАЬbut of where to graze the goats.тАЭ
