Mike Huckabee’s old-school Christian Zionism is bad news for anyone who wants Middle East peace
Understanding Huckabee’s theology is crucial to understanding the specific dangers of his vision
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. speaks during the Road to Majority’s Faith and Freedom policy conference in Washington, D.C. in June, 2023. Photo by Nathan Howard/Bloomberg/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Mike Huckabee to serve as ambassador to Israel will have deep implications for the geopolitical futures in the region — not just because Trump’s Abraham Accords and Huckabee’s pro-settlement ideology are not compatible designs for the Middle East.
Equally as important: Huckabee is an old-school Christian Zionist, with the goal of establishing full Israeli sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank. To understand just what the implications of that ideology might be, we need to understand the foundation of Huckabee’s particular strain of Christian thought, and its influences.
The goal of the ideology that Huckabee preaches — although the specifics are often left unarticulated — is the removal of Palestinians from the biblically defined land of Israel to facilitate Christ’s return. This extreme position goes farther than that of even the most rightward Israeli settlers, but to Huckabee and those who share his views, it is a matter of preordained fate. And along with their belief that this is God’s long-term plan comes a total removal of any sense of personal or collective guilt for the roughly 43,600 Palestinians who have been killed by Israel’s war in Gaza. What this means: Under Huckabee’s ambassadorship, Israel will become markedly less likely to find a peaceful resolution to this brutal conflict.
I refer to Huckabee’s beliefs as “old school” because he follows a form of what is known as “dispensational premillennialism“: a belief that “the Rapture will come,” sucking up all evangelicals to Heaven to watch Israel be invaded by the world’s armies, culminating in Armageddon and Christ’s return. Advancing this outcome is Huckabee’s four-year goal.
A matter of practical policy
On a practical level, Huckabee, like Trump’s previous ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, opposes a two-state solution. But the one-state solution advocated by parts of the political Left — which would see Israelis and Palestinians dwelling together in a representative democracy, with a minority Jewish population — is not the one he has in mind.
Instead, Huckabee envisions a state of Israel that extends from the river to the sea: From the Mediterranean to the river Euphrates, and down to the River Nile.
Huckabee made his first trip to Israel in 1973, just two months before the Yom Kippur War, and fewer than three years after the publication of Hal Lindsey’s seminal Cold War book Late Great Planet Earth, which would prove a foundational component of his foreign policy vision.
Lindsey framed American anxieties in relation to the counterculture movement of the 1960s and the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Six-Day War as signs of the End Times. His book sought to present a geopolitical framework for understanding the uncertainties of the time by outlining future apocalyptic events in which the Soviet Union would invade Israel. Also, crucially, he promised evangelicals an escape from the horrors of nuclear war during Armageddon via the Rapture.
Paul Boyer, a historian of American prophecy, has written that in large part because of predictions like Lindsey’s, evangelicals will be the last group to admit the Cold War is over; Huckabee’s foreign policy suggests that he is right. During his 2015 presidential run, he referred to the “Soviet Union’s” intention to supply Iran with anti-aircraft missiles. But that error wasn’t just a slip; rather it had deep implications for his perception of the Middle East. The impact of seeing massive violence unfold in Israel shortly after his first trip there may have helped affirm his belief in Lindsey’s vision: As his biographer, Scott Lamb, notes, “Given the eschatological fervor present within evangelicalism, it was no surprise that the war seemed to be evidence that the world was in its last days” to Huckabee.
Since, Huckabee claims to have been to Israel “over a hundred times” in 50 years.
Reflecting recently on a trip to Israel in December 2023, he told the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, “We are not dealing with an issue that is political, social, economic, or geographical. We are dealing with an issue that is spiritual. This is evil. The worst level of evil we have on the planet today we saw on Oct. 7.” For Huckabee, evil is not an abstract concept, it is a moral absolute with an address. Evil cannot be negotiated with; it can only be destroyed.
A grim outlook for Palestinians
The practical consequences of the Christian Zionist perception that Palestinians have given rise to a great spiritual evil are clearly visible in the West Bank.
Christian Zionists are leading donors to the settler movement, and have consistently propped up American political support for Israel’s far-right. For them, the violence these actions have helped perpetuate is not a matter of personal consequence: Christian Zionists believe it is not their agency taking such action, but rather the hand of God guiding them.
Huckabee has proudly contributed to these endeavors. His support for settlement activity is well documented, as is his cartographic anxiety with the term “West Bank.”
“I never use the term West Bank,” he told the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. “I find it offensive, we are talking about Judea and Samaria… we need to use the biblical language.” Previously he had said that he doesn’t see the West Bank “as occupied, that makes it appear as if someone is illegally taking land.”
Even worse, Huckabee has consistently denied that there is a people or nation called “Palestinians.” “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he once said. “That’s been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.” The future Huckabee imagines for Palestinians is clearly elsewhere than Gaza and the West Bank: he has also said that “there’s plenty of land” for Palestinians in countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
A taste for Messianic Judaism
Dispensational premillennialism revises Christian replacement theology by positioning Jews as the chosen people of earth, and Christians as the chosen people of heaven. This often gives messianic Jews — people with Jewish backgrounds who believe that Christ is the messiah — significant social capital in the Evangelical movement.
On a 2010 trip to Israel, Huckabee said “I think what I should do is convert” noting that his kippah “covers my bald spot completely.” He continued with cringy enthusiasm, “I worship a Jew!… I have a lot of Jewish friends, and they’re kind of, like, ‘You evangelicals love Israel more than we do.’ I’m like, ‘Do you not get it? If there weren’t a Jewish faith, there wouldn’t be a Christian faith!’”
Here he is both positioning Christians and Christianity as not post-Jew but part-Jew. The scholar Brian Klug puts this well: “Thinking that Jews are really ‘Jews’ is precisely the core of antisemitism. For Huckabee, the Jew is only a Jew in so far as they conform to his expectations. Jews and Israel, as the scholar S. Jonathon O’Donnell writes, are “overdetermined, coming to operate as fetish objects.”
Huckabee’s Trump
In a 2016 Q&A event in New York organized by Ben Carson, influential evangelical pastors were invited to question Trump about his Christian ethic, and specifically his support of Israel. Huckabee, as the moderator, warned those pastors — James Dobson, Franklin Graham, and Jerry Falwell Jr. — that Trump was “off the hook for deep theological questions.” But when asked of his support for Israel, Trump simply responded, “I’m 100% for Israel.”
After the event, Huckabee told the audience that the interview was “the seminal event and turning point” for Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s ties to Huckabee have only strengthened since. In late 2023, Huckabee noted, “I think the best thing you can say about Trump is that he’s the guy that moved the Embassy, who recognized the Golan Heights, who recognized Jerusalem as the eternal capital, and got the Abraham Accords signed. I don’t know what else he could do to show his absolute support for Israel.”
In moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv Trump to Jerusalem, Netanyahu gave Trump the moniker of King Cyrus — a pagan king used by God to deliver Jews from Babylonian captivity — in a meaningful signal to many Christian Zionists to see Trump is a vessel for God’s providential Ends.
Abortion, religious liberty, and school segregation were the initial rallying cries for the political awakening of the Christian Right in the 1970s. But it is the fatalistic future history evangelicals imagine for Israel that has helped give rise to opportunists like Trump, who hope to pander to the evangelical base. As ambassador to Israel, Huckabee will only advance that cause.
Trump has invited into the White House a man who, following Reagan’s words, believes “politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality’s foundation is religion,” said “we shouldn’t force a separation between politics and religion.”
For Huckabee, what happens next in the Middle East will not be about politics. It will be about a violent vision of religion, one in which violence, war and dismal fates for Palestinians and Jews alike are preordained by God.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
