Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who was chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to be ambassador to Israel, has long opposed a Palestinian state on lands previously captured by Israel and has repeatedly signaled his powerful support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Huckabee, a former television host and Baptist minister, visits Israel frequently and once said he wanted to buy a vacation home there. He has claimed over the years that the West Bank belongs to Israel, recently saying: “The title deed was given by God to Abraham and his heirs.”
His argument for a so-called “one-state solution” contradicts longstanding official U.S. support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.
He described Hamas’ October 7 attack as “horrifying” 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 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years.
He is firmly against a two-state solution
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 in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians want these areas for a future state and view them as parts of a single country now under military occupation.
The United States, along with most of the international community, has supported the establishment 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 but rejected 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, then running for the GOP presidential nomination, said that recognizing the West Bank as Israeli was his administration’s “formal position.” He criticized Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, describing settlers evacuated by Israeli forces as having “marched at gunpoint.”
“I feel like we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that historically belonged to the Jews,” he said.
He once compared the Iran nuclear deal to the Holocaust
In 2015, Huckabee compared the Iran nuclear deal to a march by Israelis “to the door of the oven,” a reference to the crematorium at a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Huckabee criticized then-President Barack Obama for his role in the agreement that the United States and other world powers reached with Tehran. Republicans at the time were united in their opposition to the deal, arguing that it did not address Iran’s support for terrorism. Trump withdrew from the deal during his first term in office, in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
The comment was rejected by Democrats, but Huckabee stood by it.
He does not accept the term “Palestinian” and criticizes “radical Muslims”
In a recent interview with a podcaster, Huckabee said he doesn’t believe in calling the Arab descendants of the people who lived in British-controlled Palestine “Palestinians.”
“There really is no such thing,” he said on “Think Twice” with Jonathan Tobin earlier this year. “It is a term adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1962,” referring to one of the early leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In the same podcast, Huckabee described himself as “an uncompromising, unreformed Zionist.”
In defending Israel, Huckabee said he wished people would understand 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.”
He expressed outrage at the Hamas attack on October 7th
Huckabee described the attack on October 7, 2023 as “horrifying” and “beyond anything I’ve ever seen in my life.” He was outraged by how Hamas shared images of the killings on social media.
“As terrible as the Nazis were, they didn’t post their atrocities on social media or try to broadcast to the world what they were doing,” he said at an appearance with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. “That makes this terrible thing that Hamas did even worse for me because they want everyone to see what they did.”
Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 people hostage. Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in up-to-date history, killing more than 43,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
