Donald Trump’s nomination of former Arkansas governor and two-time presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel during a particularly fraught moment in Middle Eastern politics is a clear signal that Trump bamboozled voters who believed he’d be less sympathetic to the current Israeli government than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Right off the bat, observers noted that Huckabee’s nomination broke the recent pattern of U.S. envoys to Israel being either career diplomats or Jewish. Huck’s background as a conservative Evangelical minister and culture-war enthusiast indicated that Trump understood the largest constituency (particularly within his voting coalition) for a hard-line position on Israel’s war in Gaza and its continued occupation of Palestinian land is Christian, not Jewish. But it’s more slowly emerging that Huckabee’s views on Israel and its neighbors are truly radical and unbending.
Huckabee has been quoted as denying there is any such people as “Palestinians,” whom he regards simply as Arabs living on land that properly belongs to Israel. Unsurprisingly, Huckabee also has refused to use the word occupation. In his many years in public life, he has stridently and repeatedly opposed the idea of a “two-state solution” if it involves any Arab-governed state within the biblical “Judea and Samaria” (a term used by the current Israeli governing coalition and also by settler activists), which includes the entire West Bank (he’s fine with a Palestinian state carved out of the land of Israel’s other Arab neighbors).
Yes, it’s true that Trump, not Huckabee, will set the policies his ambassador will be charged with advancing. But it’s hard to imagine Trump choosing so unambiguous a partisan of Israeli extremism as his envoy if he planned anything short of total support for Bibi Netanyahu and his settler clientele going forward. Huckabee is not some novice whose only views on the Middle East are based on scriptural texts. He has actually made a living leading dozens of Christian-themed tours of the “Holy Land,” and has for years been a recognized leader of the Christian Zionist movement, which proclaims a religion-based solidarity with Israeli expansionist aspirations.
Many Christian Zionists believe a definitive Israeli-Arab conflict is a condition precedent to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, giving them an intense rooting interest in Israeli aggressiveness as representing God’s team in the end-times events that will bring human history as we have known it to a close. Some observers assume Huckabee shares that point of view, though the Arkansan is actually from a background that de-emphasizes Israel’s role in the “end times.” In conjunction with John Hagee, who does believe Israel is part of the Second Coming plan, Huckabee has worked to unite Christian Zionists across such contested theological ground, as Liam Adams recently explained:
Huckabee’s nomination also points to a solidarity within the Christian Zionist movement between Christians who support Israel because they believe it helps usher End Times prophecy and those who see Israel as a fulfillment of God’s promises in the past. Huckabee falls into the latter and Hagee within the former, a belief known as dispensationalism.
Huckabee’s strong belief in Israel’s claim to all of Palestine as central to an irrevocable covenant with God came through clearly in an interview he recently granted to an Israeli news outlet:
According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, he said, the Jewish people have been the rightful owners of Israel “for the past 3,500 years, when Abraham was handed this deed by God himself,” he said.
“So, there are some things that for me as a person of the Book – who believes the Bible to be authoritative — that I don’t have an option” to discuss in different ways, he said.
“I have to stick to the Biblical language because that’s the language that has survived history, and it really is the language that ought to be the framework for our understanding of this unique little piece of real estate.”
So while Huckabee may not be excited about Israel’s immediate future as opening the door to Jesus’s return, he is adamant about Israel’s ancient past as giving Jews an exclusive “deed” (a term he regularly uses in this context) to all the disputed land. In his mind, it’s God almighty who rejected the “two state solution” about 4,000 years ago, and because this decision was recorded in Hebrew scriptures that Southern Baptists like Huck consider infallible, it cannot be challenged. As a popular conservative evangelical bumper sticker reads, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it!”
Too bad if you are an Arab, an Israeli who wants peace with the country’s neighbors, or an American whose views will be ignored by Ambassador Huckabee. To be sure, Huckabee has this image as a charming “populist” left over from his first presidential campaign, in 2008. But his nomination should be viewed as alarming as any of those Trump has made.
