Mike Huckabee speaks with President-elect Donald Trump in October. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for the next ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is going to seriously complicate his dream of achieving Israel-Saudi normalization and a broader expansion of the Abraham Accords.
What Huckabee’s selection signifies, instead: A win for right-wing ideologues in both Washington, D.C. and Jerusalem, and for the settler movement’s agenda.
How to make sense of this? On the one hand, Trump has referred to the expansion of the accords, a trademark foreign policy achievement of his first term, as an “absolute priority.” But any such expansion will at some point run into the fact that the Arab world has broadly insisted on an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and an advancement of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank — policies that Huckabee has freely advocated against.
Huckabee, who is an Evangelical Christian, has instead long been a fervent advocate of the settlement movement, and outspoken opponent of Palestinian statehood. He once quipped that “there is really no such thing as a Palestinian.” Far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose extremist views have rendered him persona non grata among Biden’s officials, has already proclaimed his love for Huckabee on Twitter.
Plus, while Israel’s ongoing push toward West Bank annexation has been a major point of tension between Joe Biden’s outgoing administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, Huckabee openly sees the West Bank as part of Israel.
What this means: There is, at least right now, little perceivable coherence in Trump’s approach to the Middle East — with enormous stakes for Israel, Palestinians and broader chances for peace in the regional.
Behind the Abraham Accords, tensions over the Palestinian issue
In his first term, President Trump succeeded in upending the conventional wisdom that Arab-Israeli normalization could only be achieved upon the establishment of a Palestinian state. In the absence of any meaningful progress toward a two-state outcome, his administration still managed to push the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020.
But contrary to what Netanyahu may claim, the Abraham Accords did not prove the Palestinian issue to be utterly irrelevant.
What enabled the UAE to take the plunge was, in fact, an Israeli commitment to forgo West Bank annexation, something it pledged to do with some degree of support from the Trump administration.
That commitment actually torpedoed a key policy priority of several key figures in Trump’s circle, including Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who aspired to see Israel apply sovereignty to Judea and Samaria, as spelled out in Trump’s Peace to Prosperity plan.
Now, Trump is squaring up to face the same competing interests again — between powerful administration figures who would like to see Israel annex the West Bank, and would fight back against any efforts to create an autonomous Palestinian state, and a stated commitment to securing further normalization deals.
The puzzle of Saudi Arabia
When Biden assumed the presidency in 2021, he vowed to expand on Trump’s achievements with the Abraham Accords by unlocking the crown jewel for Israel’s regional integration: Saudi Arabia.
But Biden took a markedly different approach from Trump. Rather than make quiet concessions on the Palestinian issue while publicly sidestepping it, he emphasized that Israel-Saudi normalization must advance a two-state outcome. And despite Israeli government opposition to any meaningful steps toward such an outcome, the Biden administration was thought to be on the verge of midwifing a historic Israel-Saudi deal, only for Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror invasion to set everything back.
From the perspective of a U.S. administration, there are two arguments for linking normalization to Israeli-Palestinian progress. The first is that a two-state outcome is itself a U.S. policy priority, and regional integration can be leveraged as a carrot to advance that goal. The second is that, contrary to what Trump or Netanyahu may claim, normalization cannot actually be delinked from the Palestinian issue, due to constraints facing Arab-state decisionmakers.
For Saudi Arabia, the latter argument may once have held less weight. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the key decision-maker in Saudi Arabia, has long desired closer ties with Israel, and is believed to not really care that much about the Palestinian issue. But in that, he is thought to be at odds with his father, King Salman, who ultimately has the final word on the matter.
The war in Gaza has also raised the price of normalization. Israel is deeply unpopular among Saudis, and the renewed attention on Palestinian suffering prompted by the war means that establishing ties with Israel could engender significant public backlash. Just as Egypt was suspended from the Arab League in the wake of the 1978 Camp David Accords, normalization could imperil the kingdom’s status as a leader in the Arab and Muslim world, where the popular narrative is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia has proven sensitive to these sentiments. Its statements on the war have largely blamed Israel rather than Hamas for the scale of suffering, with its rhetoric becoming increasingly harsh in recent weeks amid escalating death tolls in both Gaza and Lebanon. Prince Faisal, the kingdom’s foreign minister, affirmed that normalization is “not just at risk… it is off the table” in the absence of a plan to advance Palestinian statehood.
Weighing Trump’s priorities
Huckabee’s nomination suggests that the formation of a Palestinian state will cease to be a U.S. priority on Jan. 20. In the most extreme outcome, we could be in for a resumption and acceleration of the previous Trump administration’s embrace of settlements and annexation, eventually leading to a wholesale U.S. rejection of two states — including the greenlighting of Israeli settlements in Gaza.
This would all but torpedo the dream of Israel-Saudi normalization, and could even endanger Israel’s existing regional ties. In the post-Oct. 7 regional environment, the potential tactic of flirting with a declaration of annexation and subsequently pulling back at the last minute — without an actual reversal of creeping annexation on the ground — is highly unlikely to succeed. The UAE may have accepted Israel’s commitment to not pursue annexation in 2020; in the wake of escalating settler violence over the past year — and with increased regional focus on the plight of Palestinians — Saudi Arabia is unlikely to be as easy to persuade.
But Trump himself is not wedded to the idea of annexation, even if many in his orbit are.
Instead, Trump envisions himself as a deal-maker. He fantasizes about brokering apparently impossible bargains, and strong-arming intransigent parties into behaving. He is certainly aware that Israel-Saudi normalization and solidifying a Sunni-Israel-U.S. regional defense architecture — not to mention progress on the Israeli-Palestinian file — are accomplishments that would amplify that image, and burnish his foreign policy legacy.
Those hoping for real change when it comes to the Middle East must hope that Trump, despite Huckabee’s influence, will prioritize those gains over the fleeting praise from Israeli leaders, and Evangelicals at home, that will come if he supports the annexation of the West Bank. If Donald Trump is serious about being a peacemaker, he and any moderates in his ear need to think critically about how to rein in the ideological excesses of his annexationist allies.
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