Mike Huckabee’s devotion to the state of Israel is well-documented. The former Arkansas Governor and evangelical pastor refers to himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist” and he’s visited the country more than 100 times.
Over the years he has had a lot to say about Palestinians, who he believes are fake, and Palestinian land, which he believes to be Israel’s.
“Basically, there really is no such thing as — I need to be careful about saying this, because people will really get upset — there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he declared while running for President in 2008. “There’s not.”
“There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he told reporters in 2017. “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.”
During Trump’s first term, Huckabee said he hoped that the president would help Israel annex the West Bank.
Despite having strong opinions on these issues, since being tapped as Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Israel, Huckabee no longer wants to talk about them.
At his Senate confirmation hearing this week, Huckabee said he would “carry out the president’s priorities, not mine.”
“I am not here to articulate or defend my own views or policies, but to present myself as one who will respect and represent the President whose overwhelming election by the people will hopefully give me the honor of serving as ambassador to the State of Israel,” he explained in his opening statement.
Protesters interrupted Huckabee’s hearing three times, as Christian leaders and Jewish activists expressed their opposition to the pick.
“Mike Huckabee, the former governor and current TV personality is an extremist choice for the US Ambassador to Israel. His clear embrace of a violent Christian ideology and Christian Nationalism makes him very dangerous in this position,” said Rev. Margaret Ernst, a United Church of Christ minister and member of Christians for a Free Palestine. “As Christians committed to living into the loving and liberatory roots of their tradition, I felt it imperative to reject Huckabee’s violent Christian ideology.”
One of the Jewish activists who was arrested for disrupting the hearing was Lily Greenberg Call, a former Biden political appointee who resigned from her position over U.S. support for the genocidal assault on Gaza.
“Mike Huckabee is a Christian nationalist who has made common cause with antisemites, Islamophobes, and racists, and has denied the existence of Palestinians,” she said in a statement. “He is a threat to Palestinians, Israelis, and Jews in the United States. I cannot imagine anyone worse for the job.”
These sentiments were echoed by IfNotNow movement political director Lauren Maunus: “As American Jews, we wholeheartedly oppose Huckabee’s nomination and urge all Senators to vote NO. He would be catastrophic for any possibility of long-term equality, safety, and freedom for Palestinians and Israelis and is a threat to the safety of Jews, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants in the U.S.”
“The Jewish people need to know they have friends,” said Huckabee during his hearing. “It’s going to be a privilege to be able to be one of those people — not Jewish, Christian in fact — to say to our Jewish friends: you will never go through what you’ve gone through alone. We will stand, not behind you; we will stand with you.”
Schumer and Trump
After voting for the Trump/Musk budget, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) canceled his planned book tour over “security concerns.”
In other words, he didn’t want to face angry protests from Democratic voters for failing to stand up to the administration.
Schumer’s new book is called Antisemitism in America: A Warning. It claims that antisemitism has been increasing since 2017 and this is occurring on the right and the left.
Schumer might be hiding from his constituents, but he did give a lengthy interview to the New York Times where he attempted to justify his recent inaction and spoke about his book.
Schumer told the Times‘s Lulu Garcia-Navarro that what bothers him the most is when people refer to Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a genocide.
Here’s Schumer:
Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel. And I told Netanyahu, I said to him what I thought: You gotta reduce the number of casualties and make sure aid gets in and stuff like that. Here is the difficulty: Hamas has a different way of waging warfare, of using innocent Gazans as human shields. They put rockets in hospitals. They put their military supplies in schools. What is a country supposed to do when rockets are being fired from a school? So Israel’s been in a much more difficult position because of what Hamas did. And it’s not that Israel is above criticism. Of course it is not above criticism. But Hamas — I’m sorry, it matters so much to me. I feel so deeply about it. No one blames Hamas. I mean, the news reports every day for a while showed Palestinians being hurt and killed. I see the pictures of a little Palestinian boy without a leg, or one that sticks in my head, there’s a little girl, like 11, 12, crying because her parents were both killed. I ache for that. But on the news, they never mention that Hamas used the Palestinian people as human shields. And so when these protesters come and accuse Israel of genocide, I said, “What about Hamas?” They don’t even want to talk about Hamas.
When the Garcia-Navarro pointed out that a U.N. special committee has used the term, Schumer responded, “Please. The U.N. has been anti-Israel, antisemitically against Israel.”
When asked about the protests at Columbia, Schumer claimed the school hadn’t done enough to crack down on antisemitism and seemed to partially justify Trump’s decision to freeze $400 million in grants and contracts to the school.
“Columbia did not do enough. I criticized them. And believe me, I believe in free speech, I believe in the right to protest, as you read in my book,” said the Senator. “I started my career protesting the Vietnam War. I say to some people, ‘If I were your age, I’d be protesting something or other.’ So I get that, and I love it, and it’s about America. But when it shades over to violence and antisemitism, the colleges had to do something, and a lot of them didn’t do enough.”
“They shrugged their shoulders, looked the other way,” he continued. “Columbia among them. So what did they do? They took away $400 million. I’m trying to find out what they took away. Are they taking away money from cancer research, or Alzheimer’s? What is the $400 million? It could be hurting all students.”
There’s understandably been a lot of talk about how Democratic leaders like Schumer are not prepared or interested in fighting against Trump’s policies. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Schumer’s comments on the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, which occurred about a week before the NYT interview ran.
“I don’t know all the details yet,” Schumer tells the Times. “They’re trying to come out, and there’ll be a court case which will determine it. If he broke the law, he should be deported. If he didn’t break the law and just peacefully protested, he should not be deported. It’s plain and simple.”
When asked what “breaking the law” might mean in this context, Schumer brought up university rules.
“It’s a legal issue, and it’s, what are Columbia’s rules, and what does it mean breaking them, and what are the legal rules?,” he explained. “What did he do? I don’t know what he did, I don’t know what the charge against him is. So it’s a little premature to make a decision, except if he didn’t break the law, he should not be deported. If he broke the law, he should.”
“That sounds easy,” Garcia-Navarro told him. “But when we’re talking about the right to protest, breaking the law, not breaking the law — those things can be weaponized for political purposes. You can arrest political protesters, put them in prison, but they’re actually taking part in what is their constitutionally protected right.”
“Well, if they’re just protesting, and they’re arrested, they shouldn’t be arrested for protesting as long as they go by the rules,” the Senator told her. “Look, I get protests in front of my house all the time, but they have to have a permit and they have to obey certain rules. There are rules. But the bottom line is we have courts, and Khalil will go to court. And I have a lot of faith that the judge will give a fair ruling. It’s not the Trump administration, it’s an independent federal judge.”
Just two days after this interview ran, Schumer was the subject of a New York Times Op-Ed from conservative Bret Stephens. Trump had recently referred to Schumer as “a Palestinian” who was “not Jewish anymore,” a line of attack he has returned to since the Senator lightly criticized Israel’s most recent path of carnage.
Stephens dutifully defended the lawmaker against this slander, by focusing on his love for Israel.
Stephens quotes something that Schumer told him directly: “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.”
This is a notable admission and a fact that observers should keep in mind going forward.
Odds & Ends
🇺🇲 Trump launches ‘October 7 Joint Task Force’, as war on Palestine protesters widens
🏫 Call to resist repression: Universities must refuse cooperation with the Trump regime
🇾🇪 The real reason Donald Trump is bombing Yemen
🐘 How Trump’s attacks on DEI and Palestine activists are connected
🇿🇦 The Guardian: Trump names pro-Israel media activist as US ambassador to South Africa
🇮🇱 Jewish Insider: RJC board member calls for Witkoff’s dismissal over ‘his utter incompetence’
🪧 Common Dreams: Push Back Against Sen. Cotton’s McCarthyite Lies About CODEPINK: Women for Peace
🚓 Drop Site: Georgetown Postdoc the Latest to Be Detained by ICE as Crackdown on Campus Speech Widens
⚖️ The Hill: Judge temporarily blocks Trump admin from deporting South Korean Columbia student
ℹ️ Truthout: Lawsuit Challenges Trump Administration Plan to Share Tax Data With ICE
🪖 Responsible Statecraft: Does the US military even know why it’s bombing Yemen?
⛓️ Zeteo: The Moment Masked ICE Agents Arrested Tufts Graduate Student Who Spoke Out in Support of Palestine
🎆 Counterpunch: The War on Terror Comes Home in the Trump Era
🎓 Electronic Intifada: Universities buckle to authoritarian demands
🇵🇸 Middle East Eye: Witkoff and Trump’s Gaza dream has one thing missing: Palestinians
👨⚖️ The Guardian: Judge orders Trump administration to explain Ice detention of Tufts student
🚨 In These Times: Notes From an Arab on Surviving Trump
📝 Newsweek: Mahmoud Khalil’s Attorney: ICE Arrest of My Client Illegal, Unconstitutional
✝️ AP: Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for Israel ambassador, tries to distance from past Palestinian rhetoric
“Here is the difficulty: Hamas has a different way of waging warfare, of using innocent Gazans as human shields.” says Chuck Schumer.
Israeli soldier tells CBS News he was ordered to use Palestinians as human shields in Gaza….CBS News spoke recently with an Israeli soldier who has questioned the military’s tactics. Tommy — not his real name, as he agreed to speak with CBS News on the condition of anonymity — fought in Gaza for the IDF, and his account of the tactics used raises some serious questions….”We’ve burned down buildings for no reasons, which is violating the international law, of course,” he told CBS News. “…And we used human shields as protection.”…Tommy said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israeli-soldier-palestinians-human-shields-gaza/
Huckabee I knew about. I knew little about Schumer; now I know that there are more brains in a cheap hotdog.
It is a monumental tragedy for the region and for humanity’s future that this discussion is about anti-Semitism instead of a plausible or desirable future. Human rights and equal citizenship.
Ask a Palestinian: How can Israel make Palestinians more accepted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6wVPMmVAPE
Mike Huckabee visited Israel more than 100 times. I wonder who actually paid for all those trips and expenses? Did it come out of Huckabee’s deep pockets?