Mike Huckabee’s extremist agenda will bring only destruction to the Middle East
by Lily Greenberg CallConfirmation hearings started this week for President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. The choice is a boon for the messianic right wing in Jerusalem and Washington. If confirmed, Huckabee’s nomination will send a dangerous message to Israel’s authoritarian government and others in the region, that U.S. policy is dictated by religious extremists.
Huckabee’s politics are informed by his evangelical Christianity. He subscribes to a type of Christian Zionism that is profoundly dehumanizing to those in the Middle East, using Jews, Arabs and Palestinians as pawns in an “end times” theory of the rapture. In order to facilitate the return of Christ, according to some evangelicals, Palestinians must be removed from the biblical Land of Israel. After their removal, evangelicals will be lifted up to heaven to watch as the world’s armies invade Israel, Armageddon strikes and Christ returns to Earth. Jews, Muslims and non-Christians will have to convert or die.
Notably, Huckabee is not the only person in Trump’s inner circle with these beliefs: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Zionism is similarly rooted in the end-times theory of the rapture.
Huckabee is a longtime backer of Israel’s settler movement and an opponent of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. He claims Palestinian people do not exist and believes there is no such thing as an Israeli settlement because, as he sees it, the occupied Palestinian West Bank is part of Greater Israel. Extremists in Israel’s government, including Police Minster Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are openly thrilled about Huckabee’s nomination.
This nomination and recent statements by Trump — including his support for expelling Palestinians from Gaza entirely — signify that the Trump administration supports Israel’s annexation of the West Bank and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank.
The Israeli government has clearly received this message, shattering the ceasefire and engaging in a massive wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank that has forcibly displaced 40,000 people, using tanks in the territory for the first time in two decades.
Huckabee’s beliefs are incredibly dangerous for Palestinians, Israelis, Americans and the world at large. His appointment as ambassador to Israel will embolden the most extreme contingents in Israel and the settler movement, whose decades-long efforts to drive Palestinians off their land and to take over the Noble Sanctuary mosque complex in East Jerusalem threaten to spark a major religious conflagration.
A decade ago, I might not have understood the danger such a nomination represents. I was raised in a Jewish community where support for Israel was expected. I was a student leader with the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and served as president of an AIPAC affiliate group as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. I truly believed that by unconditionally supporting Israel, I was doing right by my people.
But after Trump was elected in 2016, it became clear to me that the Christian Zionists I had thought were supporters of Israel did not care about my community, much less many others who are unsafe because of Trump’s rhetoric and policies. I finally was able to see how the right weaponizes antisemitism to target Palestinians and progressive critics of Israel, and that unconditionally supporting Israel actually makes Jews unsafe. I would eventually come to understand the reality of what Israel means for Palestinians, and how the state is antithetical to the Jewish values I was raised with.
In May of last year, I publicly resigned from my position as an appointee in the Biden administration in protest of its unfettered support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, becoming the first Jewish appointee to do so.
Huckabee’s nomination is the latest in an escalation of attacks by Israel and its supporters against Palestinian human rights and freedom, and of right-wing politicians weaponizing false claims of antisemitism to justify authoritarian crackdowns on civil liberties. This includes the unconstitutional detention and threatened deportation of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and arrests of students who protest Israel’s war crimes. The continued suppression of Palestinian voices and erasure of Palestinian identity, self-determination and culture has laid the groundwork and manufactured consent for genocide.
Huckabee has no business being ambassador to Israel, and no member of Congress who truly cares about Jewish people, Palestinians, or U.S. interests in the region or beyond should vote to confirm him. He is beholden to an extremist religious agenda that will exacerbate an already untenable status quo in the region. Members of Congress and the American public must oppose Huckabee’s nomination and Trump’s backing for Israel’s far right — not just for the sake of stability and peace in the region but for U.S. standing around the world, and to fight against the influence of religious fanaticism in the United States, Israel and everywhere.
Lily Greenberg Call was the special assistant to the chief of staff at the Department of Interior. She worked on Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2020 primary campaign and President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and served in the Biden administration until May 15, 2024, when she became the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest of U.S. policy in Gaza.