Confirmation hearings began this week for President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.
“Huckabee uses his Christianity to justify ethnic cleansing,” said one protestor at Huckabee’s hearing.
Ahead of his hearing, Huckabee visited the Ohel, the New York City gravesite of the late Chabad Hasidic leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He is highly revered in some circles, although some of his teachings were profoundly problematic. For example, Schneerson said that non-Jews have “satanic souls,” and that non-Jews are “created to serve the Jews.” This theology is especially unsettling for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (read more here).
“Gov. Huckabee can hold whatever faith views he believes,” said one of the many Jewish protesters at the hearing. “[W]e are gravely concerned by a teaching in which the well-being of Jews, of Israel, and of America are not ends in themselves but means to the fulfillment of Christian eschatology.”
Dozens of progressive, faith, and human rights groups on Monday sent a letter to U.S. Senate leaders and the top lawmakers on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, urging them to oppose the nomination of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. The letter called him “unfit” and cited his “extreme views supporting the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians.”
Christian Zionist tourism
According to the letter, Huckabee has taken more than 100 trips to Israel since 1973, including in the role of tour guide, and has “consistently engaged in inflammatory and discriminatory statements that demonize Palestinians and Muslims.”
An investigation by The Intercept reveals the type of tour evangelical audiences could expect:
In all-inclusive package tours, Huckabee whisks pilgrims to dozens of sites around Israel and the West Bank. The journeys cover “the teachings, battles and miracles of the Bible,” according to a promotion on Huckabee’s Facebook page. Travelers learn about ancient Israel and trace its lineage to the modern, powerful state they see today. Then they fly home with a message imprinted on their souls: Israel is the Jewish homeland, blessed by God, and America must safeguard it.
“It’s like Disneyland on steroids,” said John Munayer, a Palestinian native of Jerusalem and theologian of Palestinian Christianity.
“It reaffirms everything they believe,” Munayer said of people who take the tours. “To them, everything is a fulfillment of prophecy.”
“Huckabee’s view is Palestinians have no right to be there,” said Jerusalem native Aziz Abu Sarah, co-founder of the U.S.-based MEJDI Tours. “I can trace my family history back hundreds of years. By what logic can you go to my dad who was born in Palestine and say, ‘You need to leave’? It’s an absurdity that’s done under the belief that this is a religious tour. This is a political pilgrimage using religion as a way to justify injustices.”
The Trump administration defended Huckabee’s record.
In a statement to The Intercept, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said, “Mike Huckabee will do an excellent job as United States Ambassador to Israel, with his depth of knowledge on regional and religious issues.”
On the campaign trail in 2008, Huckabee told a rabbi in Massachusetts that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” During a trip to the West Bank in 2017, Huckabee said: “there is no such thing as a West Bank... There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Such foregone conclusions preclude any kind of fair diplomacy.
Ethnic cleansing
Lily Greenberg Call, a Jewish woman who publicly resigned from the Biden administration (among a host of others), summarizes the Christian Zionist belief system to which Huckabee subscribes:
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 [ethnically cleansed].
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.
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