The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed with Carlson interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.
Carlson – who recently made disputed claims that he was detained at Tel Aviv airport in Israel – asked Huckabee about a biblical verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land “from the wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites”.
Carlson pointed out that this area in modern geography would include “like, basically the entire Middle East”.
“The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon – it’d also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said.
Huckabee said: “I’m not sure it would go that far, but it would be a big piece of land.”
He continued: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.”
Pressed by Carlson on whether Israel has the right to that land, Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
The interview with Huckabee was conducted in Israel on a trip that generated headlines when Carlson claimed he had experienced “bizarre” treatment at the Ben Gurion airport. But Israeli and US officials said he underwent routine security questioning.
Huckabee responded to another aspect of the Carlson interview on Saturday in which, Huckabee wrote on X, Carlson “seemed to be insinuating that the Jews of today aren’t really same people as the Jews of the Bible”.
Huckabee said he had not encountered the theory previously “because it comes from some of the darkest realms of the Internet and social media” and described it as a “dangerous conspiracy theory” that has been “weaponized by very bad people to delegitimize Jews and strip them of their history”.
The ambassador noted that it is “an idea that gained traction in the ’80s and ’90s with David Duke and other Klansmen and neo-Nazis”.
But he went on to question Carlson’s overall approach and motive for seeking an interview with him.
“I was expecting a thoughtful conversation and that he would ask questions and give me the opportunity to actually respond – just like he did with the little Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes or the guy who thought Hitler was the good guy and Churchill the bad guy.
“What I wasn’t anticipating was a lengthy series of questions where he seemed to be insinuating that the Jews of today aren’t really same people as the Jews of the Bible,” he added.
Carlson has increasingly questioned US support of Israel, moving him from the center to the fringe of the Make America Great Again movement.
Huckabee represents a more traditional pro-Israel conservative position.
After Carlson’s aired his claims of unusual treatment in Tel Aviv, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said the former Fox News host was being “chickenshit”.
“Next time he talks about Israel as if he’s some expert, just remember this guy is a phony!” Bennett said in an X post on Wednesday.
Huckabee, in his own post on X, said: “EVERYONE who comes in/out of Israel (every country for that matter) has passports checked & routinely asked security questions.”
The Israel Airports Authority said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday: “Tucker Carlson and his entourage were not detained, delayed, or interrogated.”
