TThe waiters in Ramallah’s cafes and those offering falafel stands all had more or less the same question: Is Donald Trump’s victory good or bad? It is a question reserved for outsiders. Palestinians in the West Bank’s largest city appear to have already reached a tentative consensus: that the US election results have no real impact here because things couldn’t possibly be worse.

“It won’t make a big difference,” said Eyad Barghouti, a retired university teacher, voicing a widely accepted view as the war in Gaza rages on. “What Biden previously did on the back burner, Trump will express more clearly.

“Biden would say publicly, ‘We’re not trying to starve Gaza, we’re trying to give them food aid,’ while at the same time supporting the Israeli army. (Trump) will say it in a clear way: 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 consequences of Trump’s victory – the loss of freedom, the erosion of justice, the economic collapse and, for US allies, the possible encroachment of an aggressive neighbor and devastating wars – are already a reality for most Palestinians, many of them argue.

Those in the West Bank point out that they only have to look at their social media feeds to see that today’s equivalent of Guernica, Dresden or Grozny is being streamed live from Gaza. They say that when it comes to the Strip, the liberal order being mourned in the West this week was no mere bystander. It supplied the bombs.

“What we have seen has made us believe that the entire Western ideology is a lie,” said a librarian in his 50s, who preferred that his name not be used. “They never cared about us. They care about the well-being of Israel. That’s the one thing they can all agree on.”

While the initial gut reaction in Ramallah is that Trump’s reinstatement will not significantly alter the region’s disastrous trajectory, many recognize that there is still room for the Palestinians’ already bleak prospects to darken even further.

Barghouti said the “violence could get worse” and that Trump in the White House could add unpredictability to the desperation. “It’s like a monkey holding a bomb,” he said. “You don’t know when he’s going to throw it or where he’s going to throw it.”

Lama Sheikha, who works in a printing house, said the US election results would “make Israel even stronger.” “More and more I think it is Israel that makes the decisions, and not the US. The US will go with them, ready to help,” Sheikha said.

It is far more likely that a Trump administration will agree to Israel’s planned destruction of the UN aid agency Unrwa, which provides basic services to 871,000 Palestinians in the West Bank and virtually all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. Trump suspended US funding of Unrwa in 2018.

While Gaza’s economy has been all but wiped out, GDP in the West Bank has fallen by more than 20% in the past year and the labor force participation rate now hovers around 35%. And it could be worse. It is likely only pressure from the Biden administration that has stopped far-right Treasury Secretary Bezalel Smotrich from permanently withholding all customs taxes Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Without these revenues and Unrwa, the West Bank would be anything but an economic wasteland.

Meanwhile, the wave of settler violence against Palestinians has increased exponentially over the past year. Many have been killed or injured by militant settlers while harvesting olive groves, which are often set on fire. In the early hours of Monday this week, a gang of masked militant settlers infiltrated as far as Al-Bireh, a suburb of Ramallah, throwing petrol bombs at cars and buildings and shooting at firefighters trying to reach the accident site.

One of the few punitive measures the Biden administration has taken in recent months has been to impose sanctions on some militant settler leaders. It is debatable what effect these measures had in practice, but they were labeled anti-Israel by Republicans anyway. It’s a reasonable guess that a Trump administration would drop them.

“People are already leaving. They are being forced to leave,” Sheikha said. “Now it will happen on a larger scale, it will be more difficult for us because of the economic situation, and people are being attacked on their land while they are harvesting olives.”

She said she understood those who chose to flee, but she vowed she would not be among them. “No matter what they do, they will not force me out of my country.”

The Palestinian aspiration for full nationhood, already at a low ebb, has suffered another devastating setback with Trump’s re-election, a fact celebrated by Israeli settlers.

“The threat of a Palestinian state is off the table,” Israel Ganz, the head of the Yesha Council, the settler umbrella organization, said in a statement on Wednesday welcoming the US outcome. “This is a historic moment and an opportunity for the settlement movement… Now, with the election of President Trump, it is time to also change the reality in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), to ensure that it is a forever will be part of Israel. and to guarantee the security of the Jewish state.”

Trump hasn’t picked his team yet, but it’s fair to say that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his former bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, will likely have the president-elect’s ear. Both are staunch supporters of the settlements, and Friedman has released a book advocating the full annexation of the West Bank.

Annexation is already happening in secret. Smotrich has begun a process of transferring parts of the West Bank from military to civilian control, a step toward incorporation into Israel.

Barghouti and his librarian friend agreed that a Trump White House, by enabling more open extremism for the Israeli right, would have the merit of lifting a veil from the brutal realities of the Middle East and perhaps prompt a response to provoke.

The librarian pointed to the rise of Hezbollah in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The Shia militia became a formidable force, contributing to the complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and 2006. He said: “We hope for the same. here – real resistance.”