The day before the US presidential election, several leaders of Israel’s settlement movement held a special prayer service for a Donald Trump win. The place chosen for the event was the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, traditionally believed to be the burial place of the biblical patriarchs — Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — and one of the holiest sites in all of Judaism.

Any onlookers would have thought that the event was bizarre. It involved a few men in yarmulkes and the requisite coronavirus masks gathered in one of the most contentious sites in the Middle East to pray and blow the shofar against a backdrop of Trump photos and American flags. They were pleading with God for the success of the man they believed had shown more support for Israel than any other US president.

In the next few days it became clear that their prayers had not been answered. The person who they so admired has to leave the White House in 2½ months, and a Democratic Party’s president-elect Joe Biden will move in.

The organizer of the prayer service was Yochai Damari, head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council. Damari now has to get used to the idea that the person occupying the White House for the next four years will be a president who wants to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table. This would mean halting the settlement enterprise in the West Bank, or worse — for the Israeli right — evacuating existing settlements.