A Christian Zionist will be our new ambassador to Israel

(RNS) — You’ve got to hand it to President-elect Donald Trump.

After cuddling up to Muslims and winning more of their votes than his Democratic rival a week ago, he’s thrown them under the bus with an alacrity remarkable even for him. In a dream come true for Israel’s annexationist right wing, he announced Tuesday (Nov. 12) that his ambassador to Israel will be former Arkansas Gov. and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee.

From the Israeli right: “He’s a great friend to Israel,” said Yishai Fleisher, spokesperson for the Jewish Community of Hebron, on the West Bank. “We’re thrilled to have him.” 

From America’s Arab American community: crickets.

It should surprise no one that Trump would send a pro-Israel evangelical Christian to the Jewish state. At the ceremony marking the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem in 2018, the clergy speakers comprised one American rabbi and two prominent evangelical ministers: the Rev. Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, and the Rev. John Hagee, pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio and founder of Christians United for Israel.

Huckabee has connections to this crowd. He made an appearance at Hagee’s church in December 2007, when Huckabee was seeking the Republican presidential nomination. That year, Hagee was dealing with the controversy he had stirred up in the evangelical world with “In Defense of Israel,” a book that rejected what’s known as supersessionism, the idea that “Israel has been rejected and replaced by the church to carry out the work once entrusted to Israel,” as Hagee explained in the book.

But Hagee called this notion that “the Jewish people have ceased to be God’s people, and the church is now spiritual Israel” a “misconception … rooted in the theological anti-Semitism that began in the first century.” It was time, he wrote, “for Christians everywhere to recognize that the nation of Israel will never convert to Christianity.” 

So much, evidently, for the widespread evangelical belief that come the end times, Jews will return to Israel and many will convert and be saved.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee prays for political leaders at an American Renewal Project pastor luncheon in Henderson, N.C., Sept. 24, 2024. (RNS photo/Yonat Shimron)

What Huckabee himself believes about Judaism is not so easy to determine. Reporters covering his impressive 2008 presidential run — which included a victory in the Iowa caucuses — were able to come up with a tape of just one of the innumerable sermons he recorded during his 12 years as a Baptist pastor. In a 2010 New Yorker piece, he hedged on the question of end times Jewish conversion.

In 2008, he did say that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian” and that the notion of a Palestinian state is used as a “political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” Visiting the West Bank seven years ago, he said, “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” adding that “there’s no such thing as an occupation.”

He’s long been an advocate of a one-state solution (i.e., Israel) and, according to the AP, he recently said, “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.” That would be a reference to the 12th chapter of Genesis, where God says to Abraham, “Unto thy seed will I give this land.” Huckabee calls himself a Zionist.

“President-elect Trump has made an inspiring choice,” Hagee said in a statement from CUFI after Huckabee’s appointment was announced.

Speaking on Israeli Army Radio on Wednesday, Huckabee was asked whether Israeli annexation of the West Bank would be a possibility after Trump takes office in January. “Well, of course,” he answered. “I won’t make the policy, I will carry out the policy of the president.”

That policy is best characterized as Christian Zionist.