Everyone is talking about Tucker Carlson’s interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. It has amassed millions of views, and if there’s one item that caught attention, it was Huckabee’s view that Israel had a biblical right to the land from the Euphrates River in Iraq to the Nile River in Egypt.
Carlson was shocked and pressed him on this:
“What does that mean? Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you’re appealing to Genesis, you’re saying that’s the original deed.”
Huckabee was clear: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
Some were in shock. Israeli hasbarists like Eylon Levy tried to tone it down – responding on X that “literally nobody” with power in Israel believes this and to think so is “a delusional fantasy of the antisemite’s imagination.” To which he added, “Stop spreading mindless conspiratorial bullshit.”
Even Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy opined that Huckabee was an extremist who neither represented the U.S. nor Israel, “he barely represents its crazies,” he wrote. “Huckabee Speaks Boldly in Ways Even Ben-Gvir and Kahane Wouldn’t Dare,” was Levy’s title:
“Not for nothing did Carlson say: This man doesn’t represent my country; he represents Israel. It’s neither of these, Carlson. This man doesn’t represent Israel; he barely represents its crazies. But it’s definitely possible that he represents an America in the making, one whose Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently lauded the West’s “Christian heritage” while in Munich.”
But then, the ‘liberal’ Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid proved both the Levys wrong.
In a press conference Monday for his party Yesh Atid (‘There is a Future’), Lapid answered a question from a religious Kipa News journalist:
“Good afternoon sir. The Ambassador Huckabee said this week, and we know the extent of the American administration on the government here, that he supports Israeli control from the Euphrates to the Nile, this means [control] over Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, do you support it or do you think this should be stopped?”
Lapid’s answered:
“Look, I don’t think I have a dispute on the biblical level [about] what the original borders of Israel are. The Euphrates, the last time I checked, was in Iraq. I don’t think that when the Americans entered Iraq, they experienced great relief. I support anything that will allow the Jews [to have] a big, vast, strong land, and a safe shelter for us, for our children, and for our children’s children. That’s what I support.”
Lapid was challenged on the size:
“How vast?”
“However possible.”
“Until Iraq?”
“The discussion is a security discussion. The fact that we are in our ancestral land… Yesh Atid’s position is as follows: Zionism is based on the bible. Our mandate of the land of Israel is biblical. The biblical borders of Israel are clear. There are also considerations of security, of policy, and of time. We were in exile for 2,000 years… you don’t really want all this lecture, right? At least you were not waiting for it… The answer is: there are practical considerations here. Beyond the practical considerations, I believe that our ownership deed over the land of Israel is the bible, therefore the borders are the biblical borders.”
“Wait, so fundamentally, the great, big land of Israel?”
“Fundamentally, the great, big and vast Israel, as much as possible within the limitations of Israeli security and considerations of Israeli policy”.
So there you have it. The bible is our deed. Like the first Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, said.
Lapid has stated his principle of “maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians” over ten years ago. Now he is saying that the “maximum land” is just a question of exigency – “practical considerations.”
A ‘liberal’, ‘secular’ Israeli opposition leader, just told us that “Zionism is based on the bible.”
I think we need to believe him. We need to stop talking about Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Huckabee. It’s Zionism, stupid.
“I think we need to believe him. We need to stop talking about Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Huckabee. It’s Zionism, stupid.”
There is an absolutely outstanding essay on Zionism in The Forward that hits the nail on the head – there’s a difference between the ideal, imaginary Zionism ( an ancient people returning to their ancestral homeland!! ) and the real-life Zionism. I’m selectively quoting here –
Zionism in principle is what Nathan Birnbaum meant when he coined the term in 1890: the movement to establish a Jewish state (details TBD) in the historic land of Israel. That sounds fairly unobjectionable. There are states for French people, Ugandan people, Vietnamese people — so why not a state for Jewish people?….But Zionism in practice has turned out to be something altogether different. For at least 80 years, it has involved the dispossession of another population that calls the territory home, the second-class citizenship held by non-Jews in the Jewish state (which shows up in countless specific legal contexts), and, ultimately, various forms of discrimination, dehumanization and violence. Contrary to the way some on the Left use the word, Zionism is not only these things, but it has, historically, involved all of them….
We are talking past one another on Zionism – The Forward
At least it’s slightly more out in the open now. Those in the region and those who actually pay attention have always known this to be Israel’s ultimate objective. Not a secret. One just had to listen to and read what Israelis have been saying for decades, even before the state’s creation. The Israeli flag actually delineates the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq. Israel, I believe, is the only UN member that has never defined its borders, and also has no constitution. They’ve already swallowed up parts of Lebanon and Syria in the last two years.
So, it seems, the modern world will now adjudicate national borders based on the bible based on what goat herders from 3500 years ago claim God awarded. The irony, of course, is that Palestinian Christian and Muslim DNA is traceable to the ancient Hebrew and Canaanites. Over centuries they converted, or were forced to convert, to other religions.
The other irony is that Israel and its supporters who viciously accused Palestinians of wanting the destruction of Israel when chanting “River to the Sea” (they weren’t, they wanted their freedom from occupation), were actually confessing their desire to destroy Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. A third irony is that the vast majority of Israelis are secular. It’s not really about the bible. It’s about conquest which will ensure another hundred years of war and misery from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Since Zionism is based on the Bible, the root problem is the Bible. Beliefs of people determine their actions. Belief in the Bible leads to genocide. The Deist Thomas Paine was right when he wrote in The Age of Reason that we need a revolution in religion based on God-given reason and Deism.
Nope, the myth said the Promised Land only included the land promised in Canaan. The Israelites were strangers, were exiled, sojourned, or enslaved in Egypt. They became a mighty ethnic group (nation) there, but were brought out, not given the land in Egypt.
If you were born and raised in Babylonia, which served as a premier center of Hebrew and Talmudic civilization for roughly 1,000 years, you might not know that in biblical geography, the Jordan River is the primary river flowing through the heart of Canaan and acts as the immediate, central boundary of the Promised Land, not the Euphrates.
Other than the inability to read the historical, archeological, and scriptural records or consult a map, there was no one before Woollsey (in the era 1922-1934) who argued Abraham or his family came to Canaan from Southern Babylonia. It is located on the wrong side of the river Euphrates, and never required the river crossing described in scripture. Haran is in the opposite direction of Canaan and would have required a long detour. Woolley’s excavation partner, Cyrus Gordon, explained that Abraham would never have traveled so far and that the Biblical Ur should be identified with Urfa, in southern Turkey. Both Urfa and the Chaldeans were already located in the Levant, and only migrated into Babylonia after 950 BCE.
The traditional site of Abram’s family migration was Urfa a few miles across the Euphrates river in Southern Turkey from the site of Haran in Paddan-aram. From there it’s about 250 miles south to Damascus and then on to the Land of Canaan. See: Ur Kasdim: Where Is Abraham’s Birthplace? and Abraham’s Ur: Did Woolley Excavate the Wrong Place? Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt, BAR 26:01, Jan-Feb 2000
Likewise, the scriptures make it clear that God brought the Philistines from Cyprus to the “Land of the Philistines” in the coastal plain. Abimelech and Abram had a Covenant of Peace (Genesis 21:22–34). The Israelites came up from Egypt to the Land Canaan near where the Philistines were placed in Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gerar, and Gath by God. (Amos 9:7). Those cities in Gaza were not located in the Promised Land. Moses was ordered not to go north through Gaza by the Egyptian ruled region of the Kings Highway trade routes to Damascus or the Negev to Petra (Exodus 13:17-18).
Huckabee seems to have neither knowledge nor understanding of the Bible.
Jeremiah 31:30-33 explains that the Israelites broke the covenant and that the original covenant of the land no longer exists.
Jesus, who was Messiah to the Judean ancestors of Palestinians, established a new covenant with the peasantry of the Land.
Here is a typical English translation (New International Version) of Matthew 5:5:
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
[Note that in some versions of the Christian Bible Matthew verses 5:5 and 5:4 interchange.]
The above English translation is sloppy as both the Syriac Peshitta and also the Greek version of the New Testament show.
The meek are the humble people of the land (am haaretz) the ancestors of us Palestinians not white racial supremacist European Zionist colonial settlers, who are invaders, interlopers, thieves, impostors, and perpetrators of genocide.
Where the English Bibles usually have the phrase the earth, the Peshitta uses the word ar
a (Hebrew haaretz), and the Greek New Testament has the phrase ten gen, which means primarily the land and not the earth. Aramaic speakers at the time of Jesus would almost certainly have understood ara idiomatically as the Land of Palestine.[Land of Israel was a cultic or religious phrase that seems hardly to have been used outside a religious context like the Jerusalem Temple or like a synagogue. The New Testament hardly ever uses the phrase while a Hasmonean or Herodian king never called himself the King of Israel.]