A top aide to Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is being called a “traitor” following revelations that he manipulated embassy reports to portray the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a positive light, including covering up a report about nine US citizens killed by Israeli settlers and security forces in the West Bank.
Previous reporting by Responsible Statecraft has exposed how the aide, David Milstein—the stepson of right-wing radio host Mark Levin, a close friend of both President Donald Trump and Netanyahu—had instilled what State Department officials described as a culture of fear surrounding any information that portrays Israel negatively.
This included suppressing reports of massacres of Palestinian aid-seekers by Israeli soldiers at sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, removing content critical of Israel from official press statements, confronting and pushing for the firing of colleagues he viewed as insufficiently pro-Israel, and advocating for the State Department to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” a name preferred by Israelis seeking to annex the territory.
Based on discussions with 15 people who work with Milstein in Washington and Jerusalem and several internal cables and memos, The New York Times revealed on Thursday that the senior aide has gone even further than previously known.
In March, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and 30 other senators requested that the State Department press Israel to provide details on the cases of nine Palestinian Americans killed in the West Bank since 2022 by Israeli settlers and security forces.
One of them, 19-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam, had been fatally shot the previous month while trying to stop settlers from stealing livestock from his West Bank village.
Embassy officials compiled a report on the status of Israel’s investigations into Siyam’s killing and the eight others. According to the Times:
Its central findings suggested that, in most cases, investigations had made little progress, that some cases had been closed, and that no one had been charged in any of the killings, these officials said.
Instead of forwarding the report, Mr. Milstein argued that the embassy should send a letter saying that Israel was properly handling the investigations, two officials briefed on the discussions said.
On May 4, Paul D. Guaglianone, a State Department official, sent a letter responding to Mr. Van Hollen, saying that the embassy, which had reduced staff because of the Iran War, was focused on security cooperation with Israel and protecting Americans against Iranian attacks. (The intense fighting had wound down nearly a month earlier, after a ceasefire was struck on April 8.)
The letter, provided to the Times by Mr. Van Hollen’s office, said the embassy was working with Israel to “ensure accountability for these deaths.”
The response did not reassure Mr. Van Hollen.
"If you don’t get accountability, you endanger more American citizens,” he said in a phone interview.
The Times report comes as violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which is often backed by Israel’s military and security forces, is at a historic high, according to the United Nations, and is drawing condemnation and sanctions from around the world.
As of September 18, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had recorded more than 1,600 settler attacks causing Palestinian casualties or property damage this year—an average of nearly seven per day.
Just nine days before the Times investigation was published, the Senate narrowly voted down a resolution, introduced by Van Hollen, which would have compelled the State Department to produce an unclassified report on Israeli abuses in the West Bank, including the killings of the nine Palestinian Americans.
The resolution specifically requested that the department turn over all credible information it possessed on these killings within 30 days.
Palestinians attend the funeral of Nasrallah Abu Siyam, who was killed after Israeli settlers opened fire during a raid on the town of Mukhmas, northeast of East Jerusalem, on February 19, 2026. (Photo by Issam Rimawi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The Times also showed that Milstein had actively undermined Trump’s own policy. In March, as Israel approved a record number of new settlements at a time, staff members at the US Embassy in Jerusalem prepared an urgent report warning that it could be a prelude to Israel’s full annexation of the West Bank. This would fly in the face of not just international law, but also Trump’s own public position opposing a formal Israeli takeover of the occupied territory.
The Times reported that Milstein stopped the report from ever making it to Washington.
He also reportedly prevented the drafting of another report in April warning that the dramatic expansion of settlements could spark a Palestinian uprising. In another cable, Milstein praised Netanyahu for his “unprecedented new initiatives to combat” rising violence in the West Bank.
This characterization starkly diverges from a UN Human Rights Office report written in February, which found that the Israeli government and military had played a central role in facilitating settler violence—including by arming settlers, providing equipment and policing powers, participating in attacks alongside them, and routinely failing to hold perpetrators accountable.
Huckabee—an evangelical Zionist who believes Israel has a biblical right to the West Bank and openly supports Israeli settlement expansion—vehemently defended Milstein and lambasted The New York Times’ reporting.
“The NY Slimes w/ cowardly ‘anonymous sources’ did a hit piece on David Milstein,” he wrote on social media. “I personally and categorically refute the elements of your proposed ‘story’ and I’m surprised that you expect to be taken seriously with such nonsense without even one named source.”
The State Department responded to the report by telling the Times that “the entire team at State remains focused on advancing President Trump’s America First agenda.”
But critics have described Milstein’s actions as anything but “America First.”
“NYT reports that a Huckabee top aide is a literal traitor, actively covering up Israeli killings of American citizens and falsifying embassy reports about Israel’s role in settler violence,” said Jasper Nathaniel, an independent American journalist who has reported extensively on attacks against Palestinians from the West Bank.
Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that if a Democratic Congress is elected in November, it “should investigate further how Milstein suppressed information and stonewalled congressional inquiries into the murder of American citizens, if he’s not fired by then, which obviously he should be.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.