“I am against annexation,” US President Donald Trump told a reporter earlier this month, in reference to fears of a new Israeli effort to grab Palestinian land in the West Bank. America’s own ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, apparently feels differently. “It would be fine if [Israel] took it all,” he told US political commentator Tucker Carlson in an interview released this week.
Alarmingly, Mr Huckabee was referring not only to the West Bank (which he calls “Judea and Samaria”, in deference to Israel), but Gaza and even Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia, arguing Israel’s claim over such an immense area of land is prescribed in the Bible.
Israel, he argued, deserves credit for not exercising such a claim over sovereign states – many of which predate Israel's establishment – and instead limiting its appetite to Palestinian land. The Ambassador’s comments were swiftly condemned by dozens of countries, including the UAE and other close US allies in the region.
An evangelical Christian Zionist, Mr Huckabee is clearly articulating his own extreme beliefs. But as US Ambassador, he is expounding a wildly irresponsible position that undermines American foreign policy in the region and puts Palestinian and American lives at risk. In a tragic illustration of that point, a mere two days before Mr Huckabee’s interview, Israeli settlers hoping to “take it all” shot dead a Palestinian American teenager near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Nineteen-year-old Nasrallah Abu Siyam is at least the sixth US citizen killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the territory in the past two years.
Mr Huckabee’s remarks should fill the White House with concern. Mr Trump and American diplomats have worked tirelessly for months to launch the Board of Peace, a supervisory body charged with ending the war in Gaza and facilitating the Palestinian territory’s reconstruction. On Friday, the board announced at its inaugural meeting that it raised $17 billion for that effort, including $1.2 billion from the UAE. The US administration has presented its Gaza plan as a critical step towards restoring Palestinian governance, with US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff saying Gazans should get “ready for a renaissance”.
In truth, the region cannot stabilise without Israel accepting internationally recognised borders. And there can be no rebirth for Palestinians without Palestinian self-determination. American officials have spoken at great length about the need to curb extremism in Gaza as a prerequisite for this. Meanwhile, they have said little about the extremism that plagues Israel’s government, whose far-right factions have launched an unprecedented push to expand their country’s territory in the name of religion. It may be harder still for Washington to halt such a project when it is so enthusiastically helped along by its own ambassador.
