Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee on Oct. 29, 2024. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh
November 12, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Tuesday the appointment of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a pivotal role in strengthening ties between the two allied nations.
He is the first non-Jewish ambassador since 2011. James Cunningham, a career diplomat in the state department served in the role during former President Barack Obama’s first term.
Huckabee “loves Israel and the people of Israel,” Trump said in a statement. “And likewise, the people of Israel love him.”
The nomination, following the selection of Rep. Mike Waltz as national security adviser and Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state, signals Trump’s intent to maintain his strong support for Israel in a second term and a tougher approach toward Iran. Huckabee “will work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East,” Trump said on Tuesday
What Huckabee has said on Israel
Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has been traveling to Israel since 1973 and claims to have taken more than 100 trips since then. Last year, he led a mission of evangelical leaders to Israel last year following the Oct. 7 attacks. “I came here to say loud and clear that evangelicals stand with Israel,” Huckabee said on a tour of Kfar Aza, a devastated kibbutz.
Commenting on the war in Gaza last year, Huckabee said in an interview with Fox News, “Hamas does not represent a civilized people. They represent barbarians who, in cold blood, murdered Israelis, and they did it not as military targets but as innocent civilians. And I think all of us in the world should do everything possible to stand with our Jewish friends and these people of Israel, and to say we are not going to go weak and wobbly. We will stand strong.”
The former governor, who ran for president in 2012, is an ally of the Israeli settler movement.
In 2008, Huckabee said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Huckabee said he saw the occupied West Bank as an “integral part” of Israel and pledged to support settlement expansion.
In 2017, he waved a hat that was reminiscent of Donald Trump’s slogan, reading “Build Israel Great Again,” during an event at the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Visiting the settlement of Efrat in 2018, Huckabee said that he was considering buying a “holiday home” there.
Huckabee is a close friend of David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel in his first term, both proponents of annexing the occupied West Bank.
In 2015, Huckabee likened the expulsion of Jewish settlers from their homes in Gush Katif during the disengagement in 2005 to the Holocaust. During a political Jewish fundraiser in Brooklyn, Huckabee said her wept when he saw the clips of Jewish families “taken at gunpoint out of their own home and marched out” of the Gaza Strip. “Surely, what they experienced with the Nazis should’ve taught us that must never happen again,” he said, “and this time that the guns were being held by Israelis.”
JTA contributed to this report.
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