Mike Huckabee said there’s ‘no such thing as a Palestinian.’ It’s worth thinking about what that means
President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel draws attention to the lack of linguistic clarity in the Middle East
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, arrives to testify during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on March 25. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Rabbi Avi Shafran March 25, 2025
There’s “really no such thing as a Palestinian,” said former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, President Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, in 2008.
Given the sensitive Middle Eastern post Huckabee is aiming for, that statement has drawn serious skepticism. But while Huckabee was, in one sense, clearly wrong, in another, he was right. Palestinians exist. There are both Arab and Jewish ones.
Let me explain. Back when I was a teen working summers at my uncle’s Jewish bookstore in Baltimore, I was tasked one day with discarding some old merchandise, and I came across a box of Palestinian coins.
They were dated 1927, when the British Mandate was the effective government in the Holy Land. The word “Palestine” was inscribed in Arabic, English and Hebrew. After the Hebrew word “Palestina” were the initials “aleph yud,” standing for “Eretz Yisrael” — “the Jewish Land.”
Yes: Palestine, then, was both Arab and Jewish. The Jewish community’s newspaper in the 1920s was called the Palestine Bulletin, later renamed The Palestine Post. Today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra began, in 1936, as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.
Palestine, as the coins I found evidenced, was and is a region— not necessarily a nationality. But today, the descriptor “Palestinian” has come to be used exclusively to refer to Arabs who have long lived in the Holy Land.
And there has always been a strong Arab presence there. But much of the Arab populace of Palestine in 1948, when Israel was founded, was not indigenous. Many who identify as Palestinians today are descended from waves of people who came to the area from other places.
Like Egypt, which was the source of successive waves of immigrants fleeing famine and government oppression at the end of the 18th century. Or Algeria, whence immigrants to Palestine arrived in large numbers in the 1800s. Groups of Bosnian Muslims, too, arrived after that.
In that, the histories of Palestine’s Arab and Jewish populations mirror one another. Many thousands of Jews immigrated in the early 1900s, well before the Holocaust. And that influx, interestingly, spurred even more Arab immigration. As Britain’s Peel Report noted in 1937, “The Arab population shows a remarkable increase ….. partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the [Jewish] National Home.”
So yes, Huckabee, who came under fire from Democrats during his confirmation hearing today over past statements in which he expressed support for Israel’s potential annexation of the occupied West Bank, is, in a sense, right. The word “Palestinian” doesn’t necessarily mean what many of those who care deeply about the Middle East, on both sides of the aisle, think it means.
Is that what Huckabee meant, when he made his much-maligned statement 17 years ago? It may or may not have been. Many have expressed a belief that, through that statement and others, he was denying that Arab Palestinians have a right to live in their homeland. Others have raised concerns that his Christian evangelism might represent a danger to Jews.
But in his testimony at his confirmation hearing, Huckabee played down the significance of his personal support for West Bank annexation, saying that “if confirmed, it will be my duty to carry out the president’s policies, not mine… I have previously supported annexation, but it would not be my prerogative to make it the policy of the president.” (Trump has so far demurred when asked if his administration would support an Israeli annexation of the West Bank.)
Huckabee also said that the premise of “the two-state solution — everyone living together, sitting around the campfire, toasting marshmallows and singing Kumbaya” will not happen “if one of the sides doesn’t believe the other one has a right to exist and continues to say ‘from the river to the sea.’”
And that, I believe, addressed the crux of the matter.
The Forward is free to read but not free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
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. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
