Israel Has Two Ambassadors Representing It in the United States
One of them doesn't--and can't--formally hold that position, but he might as well.
READ IN APP Israel is isolated internationally as never before because of Gaza’s mounting death toll and food crisis. As many as 84,000 Gazans were killed between October 2023 and January 2025 according to a study published this June in Nature, a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal. Plus, an unknown number of bodies remain buried in the rubble. Pervasive hunger, severe malnutrition—which the World Health Organization estimates now afflicts nearly one in five children—and a looming famine now grip the territory.
Even in the United States, goodwill toward Israel has plummeted, including among Republicans, and is now at an all-time low. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the genocide happening in Gaza.
But in one respect Israel is in a uniquely fortunate diplomatic position. It has, in effect, two ambassadors representing its interests in the United States. One of them, Yechiel Leiter, was appointed by the Israeli government in January to succeed Michael Herzog. The other? Mike Huckabee, the current American ambassador to Israel and a former governor of Arkansas. He’s of course not formally Israel’s ambassador, but as you’ll see, he might as well be.
Like his fellow white Evangelical Christians, Huckabee believes that unconditional support for Israel is a divinely-decreed duty. Only when Jews return to their ancient homeland, the Bible says, will the stage be set for the battle of Armageddon and, thereafter, the Second Coming of Christ. But according to some interpretations of the Bible, there’s a catch. To survive this apocalyptic showdown between the forces of good and evil, Jews, too, must accept Christ as their savior.
According to a Pew poll, 82% of white Evangelicals believe that God gave all of the land of biblical Israel to the Jewish people. That compares to 47% of all American Jews who consider themselves religious and hold this same belief and 84% of the Orthodox among them.
The fact that the American ambassador to Israel is a white Evangelical Christian isn’t, therefore, an incidental detail, as Huckabee has demonstrated since taking up his post in April.
Following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment installations in June, Huckabee took to social media to declare that God had saved President Donald Trump from the assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, and that he, Huckabee, was Trump’s “appointed servant in this land.” “You [Trump] did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU.”
This was a call to back Israel’s military strikes against Iran, which Trump did, using the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a bomb Israel lacked but that was essential to destroy the Fordo centrifuge complex, which is buried in the side of a mountain.
Never mind that Netanyahu’s claims that Iran was days away from building a nuclear bomb extend back to 1992 and that the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement reached under President Obama, included verifiable provisions that closed off Iran’s ability to engage in weapons-grade enrichment of uranium and plutonium. Never mind that Netanyahu, by his own admission, convinced Trump to withdraw from that deal in 2018.
That’s not all.
Huckabee habitually refers to the Palestinian-populated West Bank, which the far-right religious parties in Netanyahu’s governing coalition are determined to annex, as “Judea and Samaria.” This even as Israel has been engaged—before Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, mind you—in an accelerated campaign of land grabs, home demolitions, settlement-building, and forced evictions in that territory.
Huckabee approves of Israel’s creeping annexation. The decision to extend Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, he insists, “is for Israel to make.” Why? Because Israel, as he said in June, “has title deed to Judea and Samaria.”
It doesn’t matter to Huckabee that armed Jewish settlers have been harassing and attacking Palestinians, encroaching on their livestock grazing grounds, burning their olive groves, and erecting “outposts,” which are illegal even under Israeli law.
As for Palestinians’ yearning for an independent homeland, Huckabee proffered a solution recently: “Muslim countries” have “644 times the land” Israel does, so they should set aside some of their territory to create a Palestinian state.
Huckabee’s views on Israel predate his appointment as ambassador. During his failed run for the White House in 2008, he declared that “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and “there’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities.” He added that “there’s no such thing as an occupation.” In his mind, all claims to the contrary are ruses to “rob Israel of its land.”
Since becoming ambassador, Huckabee hasn’t bothered to meet Palestinians to learn what they think about these pronouncements, though he did visit the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank last month after Jewish settlers vandalized its fifth-century church. Then again, why should the ambassador bother to hold discussions with Palestinian under Israeli occupation when God has sanctified his beliefs?
Huckabee was in Gaza recently, accompanied by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy for the Middle East, for what amounted to a guided tour conducted by the IDF. The ambassador seemed not to know, or care, that his was a Potemkin Village-like visit.
Photos of emaciated children continue to come out of Gaza. Israel has nevertheless slashed the number of food distribution centers from 400, which were run by the UN affiliates and other international relief agencies, to four managed by Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). All but one are based in southern Gaza, so that Israel can compel Palestinians to congregate there as the IDF depopulates the rest of the territory.
During his visit to Gaza, Huckabee was briefed on the work of the GHF, which, backed by Israel and the US, is headed by his longtime buddy and fellow Evangelical Christian, Rev. Johnnie Moore, a PR expert who lacks any qualifications for managing relief operations, least of all in a war zone where hunger runs rampant.
Huckabee praised the Foundation for having delivered 100 million meals since Israel lifted the ban it imposed between March 2 and May 19 on the delivery of food and other supplies. The ambassador declared that GHF had performed “an incredible feat,” a verdict perhaps meant to buttress Netanyahu’s outrageous claim that there isn’t any starvation in Gaza, nor any impediments to the delivery of food.
One hundred million meals! That sounds like a lot—assuming one can trust the widely criticized GHF, which operates under ground rules set by the IDF. But consider that Gaza has a population of 2.1 million and that Israel’s ban on deliveries has been lifted for two and a half months. If you do the math, GHF’s deliveries amount to half a meal a day per person.
And keep in mind that Gaza isn’t just experiencing a catastrophic shortage of meals; it also lacks a host of other necessities, including potable water, cooking oil, flour, medical supplies, and supplements for treating malnutrition. What’s more, trudging to GHF’s four food distribution centers requires Gazans to risk their lives. Since the end of May, GHF’s armed contractors and IDF soldiers have reportedly shot and killed 859 people who had gathered at GHF sites, and another 514 as they walked along food convoy routes.
Huckabee and Witkoff spent all of five hours in Gaza. They received briefings from the IDF but didn’t take the time to talk privately with Gazans to learn about their experiences with the food distribution system. That’s not surprising. After all, the ambassador doesn’t believe that Palestinians even exist.
Given all that Mike Huckabee has been doing in Israel’s behalf, Yechiel Leiter, its ambassador to Washington, can work a shorter week and take longer vacations.
A couple of closing points:
First, in an attempt to dispute the by-now undeniable information on the widespread hunger in Gaza, some of Israel’s defenders have sought to discredit what has become a well-known photo: an anguished mother cradling her skeletal child, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq.
They claim that Muhammad had a preexisting condition and that the media failed to report that fact, which accounts for his horrific condition. And, they add, though his “relatively healthy” brother stood beside him, the sibling was cropped out of media images. The implication is that the press has, as usual, been peddling Hamas’s propaganda.
This is a bogus defense. Surely, withholding food from children suffering from a serious illness is worse than denying sustenance to kids who have no underlying health complications. Moreover, Muhammad’s photo isn’t the only one attesting to starving children in Gaza; there are many others.
Second, I have not been able to do justice here to the GHF’s incompetence and brutality. So, if you can, do watch the nearly hour-long interview with Anthony Aguilar, a retired lieutenant colonel who served for 25 years, including in the Special Forces. Aguilar, who has experienced war firsthand on several occasions and witnessed many deaths, signed up with GHF to help alleviate hunger in Gaza. What he saw there left him shaken.
One particularly shocking story Aguilar shares involves a young boy who had received a small amount of food. The child walked up to two GHF guards, including Aguilar, said “Shukran” (thank you in Arabic), kissed their hands, and turned to walk back home. Moments later, he was killed by a gunshot. In some instances, Aguilar recounted, some GHF guards shot people and then whooped or exclaimed in celebration.
Here’s the link to the video: Aguilar interview. The video may be behind a paywall, but you can probably find a shorter version on YouTube.
Zeteo
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