Arutz Sheva is an Israeli news service associated with the settler movement.
I find former pastor, turned politician and political commentator, Mike Huckabee’s recent statements in Jerusalem quite inflammatory and incredibly uninformed. I am an evangelical pastor volunteering for 3 months in Israel/Palestine with an international Christian organization called Ecumenical Accompaniment Program for Palestine and Israel. Let me share my perspective of a few of Mr. Huckabee’s statements based on the “facts on the ground” as I understand them here in Israel/Palestine.
Huckabee: “My question is how would the government of the United States feel if Prime Minister Netanyahu began to dictate which people could live in the Bronx, which ones could live in Manhattan, and which could live in Queens. The Jewish settlers’ have the right to build anywhere in the place that God gave them.”
There is a semblance of logic here but East Jerusalem is not Israel’s territory to control. It is territory which it occupied by force in 1967 and illegally annexed as part of Israeli Jerusalem soon after its conquest. True, the US might not like being told who can build in the Bronx or Queens, but that analogy doesn’t apply here. It is more like the New York National Guard invading Newark, New Jersey, annexing it as part of New York City, and then severely restricting the residents in any construction while a flood of New Yorkers invaded with official support and few building limitations. Iraq conquered Kuwait by force of arms and felt it had every right to relocate Iraqi civilian population into Kuwait City but the US and the world community did not take too kindly to that whole scenario. Oh, and by the way, such a right of Jews to build wherever they want in this occupied territory is ILLEGAL. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, states very clearly that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Huckabee: “If Palestinians want an independent state, they should seek it from Arabs — not Israel. There are vast amounts of territory that are in the hands of Muslims, in the hands of Arabs.”
The aspiration of Palestinian nationhood is not based on a request to Israel to magnanimously give up a chunk of its sovereign territory to provide space for a Palestinian nation. It is based on international law calling upon the state of Israel to relinquish territory they have occupied and controlled by force of arms. Israel’s very right to exist is based on the UN mandate to partition Palestine, granting Israel nationhood with boundaries established through the negotiated armistice of 1948. They have no international right to control the occupied Palestinian Territories. If those occupied territories were returned to the former sovereign control of Egypt in the case of Gaza, and Jordan in the case of the West Bank, then we would be talking about calling upon Arab countries to release these territories for a Palestinian state. It is the height of injustice and ignorance to suggest that Palestinians vacate a land that they have occupied for hundreds and hundreds of years to give way to the State of Israel, the vast majority of whose population has come to this region in the last 100 years. Such a suggestion means that the 1.5 million in Gaza and 2.5 million in West Bank would follow in the footsteps of the 700,000 who fled as refugees from the area mandated for Israel in 1948.
Huckabee: “This place is the place that God gave them.”
As a fellow pastor I believe I understand what Mr. Huckabee means when he talks about this being Israel’s “God given land”, but my understanding of a just, loving and merciful God would never relegate the 4 million Palestinians who are indigenous to this area to the dust pile of history to make way for the nation of Israel. It is my belief that God not only cares about the Israeli people but He also passionately cares for and walks among this gracious, industrious and determined Palestinian people.
It is most alarming to me that Mike Huckabee, who at one time had his eye on the Oval Office and may yet again, would make such uninformed, provocative and unconstructive statements in the midst of this tension filled area. May it be that more knowledgeable, balanced and productive voices from America be raised up.
Wayne Smith has been a pastor at Praise Covenant Church in Tacoma, Washington for the past 10 years.
