Trump’s Ambassador To Israel Believes Palestine Is A ‘Mythical Land’

President-elect Donald Trump has been filling out his administration in the week since his landslide election. On Tuesday, he announced that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is his choice to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Israel. The pick is notable because Huckabee has a long history with the country, including statements that indicate he doesn’t necessarily believe in the two state solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinian people. 

In multiple posts on the site once known as Twitter, Huckabee has suggested the nation of Palestine does not exist at all. For example, in 2019, Huckabee tweeted “there has NEVER been a nation called Palestine.” That comment came as a response to reports about the first Palestinian-American congresswoman, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (R-MI), including a new report at the time about a map in her office that was branded with a post-it note saying Palestine placed next to Israel. Huckabee offered a similar perspective in a 2020 tweet where he endorsed former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) against the man who ultimately won her seat, Raphael Warnock. 

“Until terrorist Yassar Afafat ‘invented’ a ‘Palestinian nation’ in 1962, the term applied to ALL who lived in the region, including the Jews,” Huckabee wrote.

Huckabee did not respond to a request for comment. His contention that Palestine has never been a country and that the term “Palestinian” has applied to everyone in the region is a decidedly ahistorical one. The modern nation of Palestine, which includes the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is recognized by over 140 other countries. That list does not include Israel, which has been engaged in a decades long conflict over borders with the Palestinians since its own founding in 1948, and the United States. The Palestinian people, a group that includes Arab Christians and Muslims, have been described as inhabiting the region since the Biblical times. English translations of the Torah and Bible translate the Arabic and Greek references to the group by calling them Philistines. In the relatively modern era, the region was ruled by a series of colonial powers, including the Ottoman Empire and the British, who left the territory in 1948, setting off a conflict between the newly-declared Jewish State of Israel and Arabs in the region. 

However, in Huckabee’s telling, any notion of a Palestinian state seems to be totally illegitimate. He reiterated this view in February when President Joe Biden visited the town of East Palestine, Ohio. On Twitter, Huckabee quipped that Biden made a mistake and thought it was “actually a visit to the mythical land of ‘Palestine’ where Jew-hating genocidal Hamas & Fatah rule and celebrate murder of Jews.”

The long simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict reached a new level of urgency in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack staged by Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. During the violence, Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, killed over a thousand people and took more than 200 hostages. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by staging an invasion of Gaza, which is ongoing and has left over 40,000 people dead, so far. Fighting has also spilled over into Lebanon, Israel’s Northern neighbor. 

President Biden’s support for Israel despite an invasion that many on the left view as a genocide is one of the issues believed to have helped erode support for Vice President Kamala Harris as she lost last week’s election to Trump. While some Democrats and leftists may have been unhappy with Biden’s support for Israel, during the election, Netanyahu displayed a clear preference for Trump. And, despite shifting comments on the conflict, Trump has increasingly indicated he would be open to a so-called one-state solution that saw Israel take control over the Palestinian territories. 

In his statement announcing the appointment of Huckabee, Trump declared, “Mike will work tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East!”

“He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him,” Trump said.

The selection of Huckabee may be the clearest indication yet that Trump’s vision for “peace” in the region does not include a Palestinian state. 

Huckabee, who is a Baptist minister, is a prominent figure among Christian Evangelicals who support Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli leaders. He has led religious trips to the region and developed a close relationship with Netanyahu. During one of these visits, Huckabee also demonstrated a view that was notably to the right of even Trump’s at the time. 

In 2018, the Times of Israel reported Huckabee came to the country as part of an evangelical delegation. On the trip, Huckabee laid ceremonial bricks down at a housing complex for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Huckabee also reportedly declared he “might one day like to purchase a holiday home” in the complex. The settlement was over the “green line,” which is Israel’s internationally recognized border with Palestine. Around the time of Huckabee’s visit Trump had expressed a view that construction beyond the green line was “unhelpful” and “not a good thing for peace.” At the ceremony, Huckabee dismissed the notion that he and Trump had a different perspective as settlement leaders expressed concern about Trump’s tendency to change his mind. 

“If President Trump could be here today, he’d be a very happy man,” Huckabee said. 

Behind him, a sign spelled out a vision for the Palestinian territories that echoed both Huckabee’s apparent one-state perspective and Trump’s infamous campaign slogan: “Build Israel Great Again.” 

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