FILE - Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., takes questions from the media, prior to laying a brick at a new housing complex in the Israeli settlement of Efrat.AP
Huckabee, a former TV host and Baptist preacher, frequently visits Israel and once said he wanted to buy a holiday home there. He has maintained throughout the years that the West Bank belongs to Israel, and recently said “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.” He says there is no occupation and no such thing as "Palestinians" or the "West Bank".
He is decisively against a Palestinian state
Huckabee has never supported a two-state compromise even when Netanyahu endorsed the idea in 2009.
The U.S., along with most of the international community, has supported the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines as the cornerstone of a peace agreement. Even Israel’s hardline prime minister once endorsed a two-state solution while rejecting a return to Israel’s pre-1967 lines. Netanyahu now rejects the creation of a Palestinian state.
Huckabee has never supported any solution that would require Israeli settlers to be uprooted.
In an interview with The Associated Press in 2015, Huckabee, then running for the GOP presidential nomination, said recognizing the West Bank as Israeli would be the “formal position” of his administration.
He criticized Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and described settlers evacuated by Israeli forces as having been “marched at gunpoint.”
“I feel that we have a responsibility to respect that this is land that has historically belonged to the Jews,” he said.
He compared the Iran nuclear deal to the Holocaust
In 2015, Huckabee likened the Iran nuclear deal to marching Israelis “to the door of the oven,” a reference to the crematorium in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Huckabee was criticizing then-President Barack Obama for his role in the agreement the U.S. and other world powers reached with Tehran. Republicans back then were united in their opposition to the deal, arguing it didn’t address Iran's support for terrorism. Trump during his first administration withdrew from the deal, in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
The comment was denounced by Democrats, but Huckabee stood by it.
He doesn’t accept Palestinians as a term.
In a recent interview with a podcaster, Huckabee said he did not believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.”
“There really isn’t such a thing,” he said earlier this year on “Think Twice” with Jonathan Tobin. “It’s a term that was co-opted by Yasser Arafat in 1962,” referring to one of the early leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
During the same podcast, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.”
In defending Israel, Huckabee said he wished people understood that “this is an extraordinary oasis in a land of totalitarianism surrounded by tyranny.”
The former governor also said many “radical Muslims want to take us back to the seventh century.”
“I don't want to go back there,” he said. “I like modernity.”
* This story was edited by Ahram Online.
Short link: