A Christian Zionist will be US new ambassador to Israel

(RNS) — Mike Huckabee’s theology about the end times may be unclear, but his views on today’s Israel aren’t.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee takes questions from the media, prior to laying a brick at a new housing complex in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, Aug. 1, 2018. President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. Trump said Tuesday that Huckabee is a staunch defender of Israel and his intended nomination comes as Trump has promised to align U.S. foreign policy more closely with Israel’s interests as it wages wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty, File)

Mark Silk
November 13, 2024
(RNS) — You’ve got to hand it to President-elect Donald Trump.

After cuddling up to Muslims and winning more of their votes than his Democratic rival a week ago, he’s thrown them under the bus with an alacrity remarkable even for him. In a dream come true for Israel’s annexationist right wing, he announced Tuesday (Nov. 12) that his ambassador to Israel will be former Arkansas Gov. and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee.

From the Israeli right: “He’s a great friend to Israel,” said Yishai Fleisher, spokesperson for the Jewish Community of Hebron, on the West Bank. “We’re thrilled to have him.”

From America’s Arab American community: crickets.

It should surprise no one that Trump would send a pro-Israel evangelical Christian to the Jewish state. At the ceremony marking the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, the clergy speakers comprised one American rabbi and two prominent evangelical ministers: the Rev. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, and the Rev. John Hagee, pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and founder of Christians United for Israel.

Huckabee has connections to this crowd. He made an appearance at Hagee’s church in December 2007, when Huckabee was seeking the Republican presidential nomination. That year, Hagee was dealing with the controversy he had stirred up in the evangelical world with “In Defense of Israel,” a book that rejected what’s known as supersessionism, the idea that “Israel has been rejected and replaced by the church to carry out the work once entrusted to Israel,” as Hagee explained in the book.

But Hagee called this notion that “the Jewish people have ceased to be God’s people, and the church is now spiritual Israel” a “misconception … rooted in the theological anti-Semitism that began in the first century.” It was time, he wrote, “for Christians everywhere to recognize that the nation of Israel will never convert to Christianity.”

So much, evidently, for the widespread evangelical belief that come the end times, Jews will return to Israel and many will convert and be saved.


Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee prays for political leaders at an American Renewal Project pastor luncheon in Henderson, N.C., Sept. 24, 2024. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

What Huckabee himself believes about Judaism is not so easy to determine. Reporters covering his impressive 2008 presidential run — which included a victory in the Iowa caucuses — were able to come up with a tape of just one of the innumerable sermons he recorded during his 12 years as a Baptist pastor. In a 2010 New Yorker piece, he hedged on the question of end times Jewish conversion.

In 2008, he did say that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and that the notion of a Palestinian state is used as a “political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” Visiting the West Bank seven years ago, he said, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” adding that “there’s no such thing as an occupation.”

He’s long been an advocate of a one-state solution (i.e., Israel) and, according to the AP, he recently said, “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.” That would be a reference to the 12th chapter of Genesis, where God says to Abraham, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.” Huckabee calls himself a Zionist.

“President-elect Trump has made an inspiring choice,” Hagee said in a statement from CUFI after Huckabee’s appointment was announced.

Speaking on Israeli Army Radio on Wednesday, Huckabee was asked whether Israeli annexation of the West Bank would be a possibility after Trump takes office in January. “Well, of course,” he answered. “I won’t make the policy, I will carry out the policy of the president.”

That policy is best characterized as Christian Zionist.

In Mike Huckabee, Israel will have a longtime friend and true believer as ambassador

(RNS)—The former Arkansas governor and pastor-turned-Fox News host has been a supporter of Israel since his first visit in the 1970s. He sees the growth of Israel as a sign that biblical prophecies are true.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee takes questions from the media, prior to laying a brick at a new housing complex in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, Aug. 1, 2018. President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. Trump said Tuesday that Huckabee is a staunch defender of Israel and his intended nomination comes as Trump has promised to align U.S. foreign policy more closely with Israel’s interests as it wages wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty, File)

Bob Smietana, Yonat Shimron, and Jack Jenkins
November 14, 2024

(RNS) — Mike Huckabee’s journey to becoming the U.S. ambassador to Israel began 50 years ago.

The former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate and Fox News host first visited Israel with a friend on a tour of the Middle East not long after graduating from high school. “This is a place I’d never been, but I felt at home,” Huckabee said in a podcast interview at the National Religious Broadcasters convention earlier this year, about his experience as a teen.

“I felt an overwhelming spiritual reality of understanding this is the land that God has given to the Jews,” he told Paul Lanier, board chair of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, for the “Nourish Your Biblical Roots” podcast.

Huckabee said he began hosting his own tours of Israel in the 1980s and has visited the country more than 100 times. He’s a longtime supporter of pro-Israel groups like IFCJ — a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen ties between Christians and Jews and does humanitarian work in Israel — and has helped raise money for the group.

Huckabee has also long articulated staunchly pro-Israel political views. As a candidate for president in 2008, Huckabee said he believed there is “no such thing as a Palestinian,” according to CNN. He argued that the very concept of Palestinian identity is “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”

When he ran for president again in 2015, he held a fundraiser in one of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.

In his conversation with Lanier, Huckabee compared the origin of Israel to the founding of the United States, saying both were started by people who moved to a new land to find peace and security. He also said the growth of Israel since 1948 is like biblical prophecies come true.

“I’ve seen Scripture come to life,” he said. “The desert has bloomed before my eyes.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Huckabee may be the first political appointee — as opposed to interim career foreign service officers — to come to the U.S. Embassy in Israel from a group known as Christian Zionists, who back Israel for theological as well as geopolitical reasons. (The current U.S. ambassador is Jack Lew, an American Jew who served as secretary of the Treasury under Barack Obama.)



Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee during a roundtable at the Drexelbrook Catering & Event Center, Oct. 29, 2024, in Drexel Hill, Pa. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Many Christian Zionists are millenarianists — they view the creation of the modern state of Israel as a necessary precondition for the second coming of Jesus and the apocalyptic purification of the world in the end times. Israel, along with the occupied territories it captured in 1967, is considered given by God to the biblical patriarch Abraham, who is told in the Book of Genesis, “God will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”

Huckabee’s own biblical approach to Israel shows up in his habit of referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” — a way of signaling a belief that the land has always belonged to the Jewish people.

That divine patrimony, believers say, should shape how nations, including the United States, treat Israel and how individual Christians should view the nation. Over the past 30 years, evangelicals, including Southern Baptists like Huckabee, but also growing groups of charismatic nondenominational Christians, have duly formed strong alliances with Israeli leaders and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular.

They give more to Israeli causes than Jewish Americans do and have formed strong support groups. With 5 million members, Christians United for Israel, led by San Antonio pastor John Hagee, is thought to be the largest pro-Israel nonprofit in the United States. In 2017, when then-President Donald Trump moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the move was applauded by Christian Zionist supporters, and Hagee spoke at the dedication of the new embassy.

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Mordechai Inbari, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, said Huckabee’s appointment as U.S. ambassador to Israel would be greeted “with open arms” by the Netanyahu government. “Huckabee belongs to the network of supporters of Netanyahu and his government among evangelicals and is considered to be a strong supporter of Israel,” said Inbari.

Huckabee was pressed by Israeli radio Wednesday (Nov. 13) on whether he believed the Trump administration would support annexation by Israel of the occupied territories, principally the West Bank, but also Gaza. He demurred but made it clear that he sees his job as following the decisions made by the president.

“There’s never been an American president,” he added, “that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel — from the moving of the embassy, recognition of the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem as the capital, no one has done more than president Trump and I fully expect that will continue,” Huckabee said.

Inbari, for one, didn’t think the new Trump administration would rush to see Israel annex the territories. Trump has shown a desire to expand the Mideast peace deal known as the Abraham Accords, inked in his first administration, to include Saudi Arabia. The accords, signed in 2020, normalized Israeli relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and later Sudan and Morocco.

Israel and Saudi Arabia appeared close to a deal in 2023, but the negotiations were derailed by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Saudi Arabia now insists it will only normalize ties with Israel if there is a pathway for a Palestinian state, which the Israeli government currently rejects.

“I think Trump would want peace with Saudi Arabia rather than Israel annexing the West Bank,” said Inbari. “And so I don’t think that this is something that’s going to happen.”

Yael Eckstein, president of the IFCJ, who traveled to Israel with Huckabee earlier this year to deliver humanitarian aid there, said the former governor has the best interests of the United States and Israel at heart and she views his new role as ambassador as a good thing.

“I think it’s wonderful news, not just for Israel, but for America and the entire world,” she said. “Because I think the stronger Israel and America are in their bond and relationship, the stronger the entire world is.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee prays for political leaders at an American Renewal Project pastor luncheon in Henderson, N.C., Sept. 24, 2024. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, a pro-Israel group, likewise called Huckabee a good choice. Moon cited Huckabee’s past support for Israel and the fact that as an evangelical, he’s not involved in the internal politics of the American Jewish community.

Moon also said that the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the war in Gaza — and the campus protests in the U.S. against that war — likely played a role in the 2024 election.

Whether people were voting for Israel or they were opposed to pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, said Moon, “either way I’ll take it.”

Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said he was encouraged that Huckabee was one of the first ambassadors to be named by Trump.

“That shows that Israel is top of mind for President-elect Trump,” he said. “I think that is a good thing.”