Earlier this month, when Tucker Carlson was in Jordan interviewing Levantine Christians, the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called out the pundit with whom he’s been engaged in a public online feud for some time: “Instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me? You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?”
That, we can now see, was a bad mistake on Huckabee’s part. Carlson took up the offer, and, after some rather fraught back-and-forth about his travel arrangements, interviewed Huckabee at the private terminal at Ben Gurion Airport a few miles outside Tel Aviv.
In the podcast Huckabee comes across as much more endearing and agreeable than Ted Cruz, another Christian Zionist who clashed with Carlson in an interview last year about regime change in Iran. But much like Cruz, Huckabee could not help but blurt out many of the odder parts of his worldview.
What’s striking to the viewer is how reflexively Huckabee defends Israel, to the extent that one starts to question whether he is an official for the government in Washington or the one in Jerusalem.
Huckabee doesn’t hide that he has an incredibly close personal relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu, one that goes well beyond his duties as a diplomat.
On Israel’s “right to exist,” Huckabee goes back and forth between biblical, ethnic, and historical justifications that call into question whether he believes other Middle Eastern nations have a similar right not to be destroyed.
Carlson brings up Ireland and England, asking if Huckabee can muster up the same moral defense of their “right” to a homeland. The ambassador could only reply that the Irish and English probably think they have that “right” before concluding: “I haven’t thought about [it].”
It becomes apparent that Huckabee is incredibly invested in Israel as a moral and religious project, but does not show anywhere near the same interest in any other country.
Equally disastrous was Huckabee’s assertion that, from a “Christian” perspective, the modern nation state of Israel’s existence is protected through a covenant with God.
Carlson shrewdly notes that Genesis 15 not only list lands occupied by the modern state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, but also the entire landmass stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates: a decent chunk of the Middle East.
To which Huckabee replies, “It would be fine if [the Israelis] took it all.”
At a time when Donald Trump, along with his peace envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, are attempting to forge a peace between Israel and the Arab nations, and to rebuild Gaza with support from Muslim countries, it’s hard to think of a more foolhardy statement.
There were several more wince-making moments to come. Huckabee defends his decision to meet with the traitor and Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. He argues that even highly impressionable 14-year-olds who get caught up in Hamas deserve to die (the situation is admittedly a tad more complicated in wartime, but a damning thing for a pastor to say nevertheless). He praises the IDF as uniquely humane, even when compared to the armed forces of his own country, America.
Of course, Huckabee isn’t articulating Trump’s position, or necessarily that of the US State Department’s. He is voicing his own hardline evangelical view of what is right and proper in the Holy Land. But as US Ambassador in Jerusalem, his words carry weight, and what he says in public ought to reflect the position of his government, not Israel’s or his particular denomination’s.
Huckabee is incredibly invested in Israel, but does not show anywhere near the same interest in any other country
As things wrap up Carlson expresses a desire to return to Israel someday. Huckabee chuckles amiably: “I don’t hate you… go with me to some places, and to church.”
Huckabee felt the need to say this because he had just condemned the hatred of Muslims, which Carlson said was increasing on the American right. Huckabee claimed that, “I don’t support hate, in any form. I think it’s a horrible thing.” And yet, in the hours following the interview’s release, Huckabee was praising Laura Loomer, the online right provocateur who has described Muslims as “cancer on humanity.”
Who knows what Trump will make of the Carlson-Huckabee showdown. All I can say is that if I were an administration official and I’d just seen that interview, and especially if I cared about a renewal of the US-Israel relationship amid rising anti-Semitism and bitter anti-Israel hate on the right (which often takes reasonable grievances to an unjustifiable extreme), I’d be telling the President to consider a replacement.
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