President-elect Donald Trump has selected Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, as his ambassador to Israel, putting a figure who has rejected the existence of the Palestinian people at the center of US diplomacy with Israel amid the wars against Gaza and Lebanon. .

Huckabee is a prominent leader in the pro-Israel evangelical Christian movement.

He served as governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007 and ran twice as the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 and 2016.

“Mike has been a great public servant, governor and faith leader for many years,” Trump said in a statement. “He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and in the same way the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring peace to the Middle East!”

It is unclear how Huckabee would advance Trump’s pledge to end the war in Gaza. “There is no valid reason for a ceasefire with Hamas,” Huckabee said in June.

Huckabee has also advocated the forced displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s war on Gaza.

“If the so-called Palestinians are so beloved by the Muslim countries of the world, why don’t any of those countries at least offer to provide temporary shelter to their brothers and sisters in Gaza,” Huckabee said in October 2023.

Followers of Christian Zionism believe that the modern state of Israel is a manifestation of Bible prophecies; the fate of the United States is implicitly tied to that of Israel.

Trump breaks with nominating a Jewish ambassador

Huckabee is the first non-Jewish American to be appointed ambassador to Israel in nearly two decades.

The last was Ambassador James Cunningham, nominated by President George W. Bush in 2008. Cunningham was a career diplomat, and the last non-Jewish political appointee nominated as ambassador to Israel was in the 1970s.

Huckabee’s nomination underscores the growing influence of evangelical Christians in the Republican Party’s ties with Israel.

Huckabee has fallen somewhat out of the political spotlight. In recent years he has focused on offering all-inclusive evangelical Christian tours of Israel for $5,850 per trip. The tours, aimed at seniors, combine traveling with a dose of politics.

“You will learn about Israel’s heritage from both a Biblical and historical perspective. You will hear from top Israeli officials about the strategic place Israel occupies today and why America is such a valuable ally for her,” said the ad for the Huckabee-led tours.

When running for Republican presidential nomination, Huckabee claimed, “There is actually no such thing as a Palestinian,” adding that the national identity was created as “a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.”

Huckabee has been an outspoken advocate for Israel’s annexation of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. “I think Israel has a title deed to Judea and Samaria,” he told Politico in 2017, using Hebrew terms for the occupied West Bank.

“There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It is Judea and Samaria. There is no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they are neighborhoods, they are cities. There is no such thing as a profession.”

Huckabee was an evangelical minister before rising to the top of Arkansas politics. However, his interest in Israel and the Middle East stemmed from a trip to the region when he was 17 years old, during which he traveled through Greece, Syria and Israel.

In an interview, Huckabee fondly said he saw “fantastic Israeli girls in bikinis, just showing off and flirting” when he arrived at the Jordan River.

He has outright rejected the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, saying that to prevent Israeli Jews from becoming a minority in one state, there must be an “aggressive interest in bringing Jews from all over the world to the homeland.”