Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, has long called himself a Zionist
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, chosen by President-elect Donald Trump as ambassador to Israel, has long rejected a Palestinian state in territory previously occupied by Israel and has repeatedly expressed his staunch support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Huckabee, a former TV host and Baptist minister, regularly visits Israel and once said he wanted to buy a vacation home there. He has maintained over the years that the West Bank belongs to Israel, recently saying that “the deed of ownership was given by God to Abraham and his heirs.”
His argument for a so-called “one-state solution” contradicts long-standing official US support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.
He has described the October 7 Hamas attack as “horrific” and “more than anything I have ever seen in my life” and argued that the US must stand firmly behind Israel.
Here are some things Huckabee has said over the years about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Huckabee has never supported a two-state compromise, even when Netanyahu endorsed the idea in 2009.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians want these areas for a future state and see them as parts of a single country now under military occupation.
The US, along with most of the international community, has supported the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines as the cornerstone of a peace agreement. Even Israel’s hardline prime minister once supported a two-state solution while rejecting a return to Israel’s pre-1967 lines. Netanyahu now rejects the creation of a Palestinian state.
Huckabee has never supported a solution that would require uprooting Israeli settlers.
In a 2015 interview with The Associated Press, Huckabee, who was then running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, said that recognizing the West Bank as Israeli would be his administration’s “formal position.” He criticized Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and described settlers evacuated by Israeli forces as “marched at gunpoint.”
“I think we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that historically belonged to the Jews,” he said.
In 2015, Huckabee compared the Iran nuclear deal to Israelis marching “to the oven door,” a reference to the crematorium at a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Huckabee criticized then-President Barack Obama for his role in the deal the US and other world powers reached with Tehran. Republicans at the time were united in opposing the deal, arguing that it did not address Iranian support for terrorism. Trump withdrew from the deal during his first administration, in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
The comment was denounced by Democrats, but Huckabee stood by it.
In a recent interview with a podcaster, Huckabee said he did not believe in calling the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine “Palestinians.”
“There really is no such thing,” he said earlier this year on “Think Twice” with Jonathan Tobin. “It is a term adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1962,” referring to one of the first leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
During the same podcast, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.”
In defending Israel, Huckabee said he wished people understood that “this is an extraordinary oasis in a country of totalitarianism, surrounded by tyranny.”
The former governor also said that many “radical Muslims want to take us back to the seventh century.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” he said. “I like modernity.”
Huckabee has described the attack on October 7, 2023, as “horrific” and “more than anything I have ever seen in my life.” He was outraged by the way Hamas spread images of the killings on social media.
“As terrible as the Nazis were, they did not post their atrocities on social media or try to announce to the world what they were doing,” he said in an appearance at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. “That makes this terrible thing that Hamas has done to me even worse, because they want everyone to see what they have done.”
Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage. Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, killing more than 43,000 people, Palestinian health officials say.