Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, published a children’s book about the country with animated characters from the Torah and Holocaust. Photo-illustration by Arno Rosenfeld/Forward via Getty Images and eSpired Media
By Arno Rosenfeld
November 21, 2024
The Kids Guide to Israel, one of Mike Huckabee’s children’s books from a company he co-founded, tells a simplified story of courageous Jews standing up against Arabs and antisemites to found a country that is “central to the world’s destiny and salvation.” Palestinians exist only as antagonists.
The 20-page pamphlet offers a stark distillation of Huckabee’s Christian Zionist worldview, which has been under scrutiny since President-elect Donald Trump selected him as ambassador to Israel earlier this month. It was published by eSpired, the “faith-based” education company that Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, co-founded.
The book, which is undated but references the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, seamlessly integrates religious justifications for supporting Israel with political reasons, a mainstay of Huckabee’s approach to the Middle East and a hint of how he might conduct himself as ambassador if confirmed by the Senate.
Huckabee, who would be the first non-Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel since 2011, is a Baptist minister and ally of the Israeli settler movement who said during a visit to Israel following the Oct. 7 attack that “evangelicals stand with Israel.”
The guide echoes that sentiment, tracing Israel’s lineage to the establishment of God’s Biblical covenant with Abraham, although it’s not framed as an overtly religious publication. The melding of a conservative Christian sensibility with secular history and politics is a staple of eSpired, which has published dozens of other guides, including fawning accounts of Trump, Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis, and others on “fake news,” “fighting indoctrination” and “why capitalism rocks.”
Mixing Christianity with history
The 74, an online news outlet covering education, found that the Texas Education Agency hired eSpired to provide Bible-related content for its controversial Bluebonnet curriculum, which has been criticized for emphasizing Christianity over other religions.
Some of the illustrations included in Bluebonnet materials appear to have come directly from books in the “Kids Guide” series published by eSpired.
The Israel guide offers an abbreviated, and occasionally incorrect, summary of the state’s creation and modern history. The history of Jewish persecution is emphasized, while Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are omitted and no explanation — save for antisemitism — is offered when the book references the country’s opponents and critics.
Its timeline of Jewish history runs from the covenant with Abraham in 1800 BCE until Israel declared independence in 1948, with just a handful of detours; it mentions only two events in the nearly 2,000 years between the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and Theodor Herzl publishing his Zionist manifesto in 1896.
Descriptions of Israel’s modern history are sometimes jumbled. A section on “the intifadas” says that, after terrorist attacks in 2000, “again, Israel tried to negotiate” by signing the 1993 Oslo Accords.
And as much as the uncredited author appears to like Jews, that affinity is not always discerning. Under the banner of “why Israel matters to the world” one bullet point ticks off a series of Jewish — but not Israeli — scientists. “Not to mention the biblical figures of Moses, Noah, and Jesus. All were Jews.”
To underscore this last point, the page features clip art illustrations of the trio. Except: Noah wasn’t Jewish. Judaism’s concept of “Noahide laws” refers specifically to the commandments that non-Jews should also follow.
The company’s Israel booklet is a little vague on geography. The map featured on its cover shows Gaza, the West Bank and Golan Heights shaded in a different color, but it never mentions any of those regions by name. It refers to “various groups living in Palestine” during the brief section on the Oslo accords.
Arabs portrayed as the enemy
Arabs and Palestinians only appear as Israel’s enemies, or the recipients of its benevolence. Readers learn that “anti-Israel Arabs” tried to block Israel’s founding and that “just one day after Israel was created, Arab nations began a series of attacks that have continued through to today.”
“Palestinian leaders want Israel destroyed and the Jewish people gone,” according to the guide’s final spread.
This portrayal is consistent with Huckabee’s beliefs, as he told Fox News last year, “Hamas does not represent a civilized people. They represent barbarians who, in cold blood, murdered Israelis.”
Despite this, “Arabs are granted full civil rights under Israel law, which forbids discrimination of any kind,” the guide states, and it is “one of the few places in the Middle East where Arab women can vote, own property, and serve in the government.”
Yet “the media and other antisemitic people side with Israel’s sworn enemies and paint Israel’s peaceful Zionist ideal as aggression.”
Its section on the Holocaust, which features the illustration of a doe-eyed Jewish boy wearing a yellow Star of David, is fairly tame compared to Huckabee’s comments on the genocide. He once compared the removal of Jewish settlers in Gaza to the Holocaust and Israeli soldiers who removed them to Nazis.
“Surely, what they experienced with the Nazis should’ve taught us that must never happen again,” he said, “and this time … the guns were being held by Israelis.”
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