Trump nominates hardliner Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, to be his ambassador to Israel, putting a figure who has denied the existence of the Palestinian people at the center of US diplomacy with Israel amid its wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

Huckabee is a prominent leader in the pro-Israel evangelical Christian movement.

He was governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007 and ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016.

“Mike has been a great public servant, governor and leader of faith for many years,” Trump said in a statement. “He loves Israel and the people of Israel, and in the same way the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring peace to the Middle East!”

It is unclear how Huckabee would advance Trump’s pledge to end the war in Gaza. “There is no valid reason to have a ceasefire with Hamas,” Huckabee said in June.

Huckabee has too advocates for for forced displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s war against Gaza.

“If the so-called Palestinians are so beloved by the Muslim nations of the world, why would any of those nations at least offer to give their brothers and sisters temporary refuge in Gaza,” Huckabee said in October 2023.

Adherents of Christian Zionism believe that the modern state of Israel is a manifestation of prophecies found in the Bible; America’s fate is implicitly linked to Israel’s.

Trump refuses to appoint a Jewish ambassador

Huckabee is the first non-Jewish American to be appointed ambassador to Israel in nearly twenty years.

The last was Ambassador James Cunningham, nominated by President George W Bush in 2008. Cunningham was a career diplomat, and the last non-Jewish political appointee named ambassador to Israel was in the 1970s.

Huckabee’s nomination underscores the growing influence of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party’s ties to Israel.

Huckabee has fallen somewhat from the political spotlight. In recent years, he has focused on offering all-inclusive evangelical Christian tours to Israel for $5,850 per trip. The tours, marketed towards senior citizens, combine travel with a dose of politics.

“You will learn about Israel’s heritage from both a biblical and a historical perspective. You will hear from top Israeli officials about the strategic place Israel holds today and why America is such a valuable ally to her,” the ad for the Huckabee-led tours says.

When running for the Republican presidential nomination, Huckabee claimed, “There really is no such thing as a Palestinian,” adding that the national identity had been created as “a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.”

Huckabee has been an outspoken advocate of Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. “I think Israel has title to Judea and Samaria,” he said Political in 2017 using the Hebrew language terms for the occupied West Bank.

“There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It is Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they are neighborhoods, they are cities. There is no such thing as an obsession.”

Huckabee was an evangelical pastor before rising to the top of Arkansas politics. However, his interest in Israel and the Middle East stemmed from a trip to the region when he was 17 years old, traveling across Greece, Syria and Israel.

In an interview, Huckabee fondly shared that he saw “beautiful Israeli girls in bikinis just showing off and flirting” when he arrived at the Jordan River.

He has outright rejected the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue, saying that to prevent Israeli Jews from being a minority in one state, there should be an “aggressive interest in bringing Jews from around the world to the homeland”.