The IJN attended a 30-minute briefing, Aug. 19, with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, hosted by the American Jewish Congress. The briefing explores the ambassador’s love of Israel and the prospect of a ceasefire in Gaza. It is edited.
Ambassador Huckabee:
I’m so proud, so grateful to G-d and to President Trump for letting me be in this incredible position and place at a moment of time in history that is just remarkable.
I didn’t want a federal job, to be honest with you. I wasn’t looking for something to do. I was busier than I’ve ever been in my life, enjoying life in the private sector.
Then a few days after the election, President Trump called. He didn’t ask me to come. President Trump doesn’t ask anyone. He tells you what you’re going to do, and he did. He called me and told me that I’m going to be the ambassador to Israel.
To be honest, it is the only thing he would have ever asked me to do that I would have said yes to. But I couldn’t say no. For me, it was an Isaiah moment.
Here am I, L-rd. Send me. And I believe He has.
I want to say thanks to all of the Jewish community, both in the United States and here in Israel. I was a little concerned that when the president named me, there might be some pushback that I wasn’t Jewish. Maybe I wasn’t qualified to be the ambassador to Israel.
It’s been the opposite reaction. The support has been overwhelming, incredibly gratifying. I cannot begin to express how much it means to me to be able to serve in this capacity.
When people ask me, but you’re a Christian, you’re not even Jewish, why are you so supportive of the Jewish people in general and the state of Israel? I say, Well, it’s pretty simple. You can be Jewish and have nothing to do with Christians. I can’t be a Christian without owing everything in my faith to the foundation upon which it rests. And that’s Judaism.
I have a deep respect and a deep belief in the Bible. So for me, this gets pretty simple. I read the Bible. I understand something. G-d chose the Jewish people. He chose the place. He gave Israel and its boundaries to the people He chose. And then He gave them a purpose. And that purpose was to be those through whom He would reveal His light, His love, His purpose for the world and, of course, His law.
So for me, it’s a matter of I owe a debt of obligation. I am deeply indebted to my Jewish friends without whom my own faith doesn’t even exist. So I want you to know that I come to this position with a real sense of obligation and duty.
Sometimes people tell me that I say things that maybe a Jewish ambassador would be afraid to say. Maybe someday I’ll be afraid to say some things, but right now I feel like it’s time to be bold.
I’ve been accused even of being almost Israel’s ambassador to the US. They say, you defend Israel so much. And I say, well, let me explain this. I am the ambassador from the United States to Israel. It’s my job to represent my nation, my president, to the land of Israel. But Israel is not just a friend or an ally. We have a lot of friends, a lot of allies in the world, but America only has one real partner. That’s Israel. And by being our partner, we have a relationship that is unique. It is also a relationship of great depth.
Sure, we share military hardware and software, and we share intelligence at a level that most people would be shocked to know. Our ooperation is virtually seamless.
But the reason that we are a partner with Israel is deeper than that. It’s because we really share the same spiritual and heritage of values. We both are based on the understanding that G-d created the world and put us in it, that He gives us purpose, and that our value as human beings is individual. It’s not corporate. It’s not collective. It’s individual. That’s something that we share that is unique in all the world.
As more and more countries abandon the tenets of Western civilization, it’s even more important to recognize this incredible bond.
So having said that, when I get accused sometimes by the Israeli press or even American press, you sure are supportive of Israel, you seem to always be defending them, well, when I think they need it, I certainly do. But here’s why.
As I said, Israel is our partner. My wife and I have been married 51 years. It’s a partnership. If you were to come to my home and I invited you to dinner and you walked in and you said, ‘Mike, we like you, we really think the world of you, but we sure don’t like your wife. We can’t stand her.’
The first thing I do is throw you out of my house. I would not be complimented that you claim to like me but not my spouse. I would be highly offended. You have insulted me by insulting my choice of a partner.
If I’m defensive of Israel, if I stand up for Israel, I’m standing up for the partner that America has chosen. I’m not going to let people say lies and horrible things about the partner, because they’re saying something negative about the choice that America has made.
My love of Israel started in 1973 when I made my first pilgrimage here. I was 17.It was between my high school graduation, my freshman year of college, 1973, just before the Yom Kippur War, in July of that year.
Israel, quite frankly, was a sleepy little country then. It was not the startup nation that we know it to be today. For the past 52 years, I’ve made over 100 trips here. In 1981, I started bringing Americans to experience Israel.
Through the years, I brought tens of thousands of Americans to Israel. Every time I get on the plane to come home, I’m already trying to figure out when am I going to get back. I love being here.
I believe G-d has His hand on Israel. I really do. It’s a land of miracles. I see them every day.
Question:
What is your message to leaders like Macron from France, Starmer from the UK, Carney from Canada, some of whom are the closest friends of the United States, who have announced that their countries will recognize [Palestine]?
Amb. Huckabee:
They’re making a huge mistake.
I know they don’t intend this, but they’re really empowering and emboldening Hamas. In the middle of a war, you don’t criticize your best friend for how he is conducting the war against those who sought to annihilate it. Israel is the country that was attacked.
Israel isn’t holding anyone hostage, but Hamas is holding still 50 people, but they kidnapped 250 and they murdered a bunch of them. They tortured some that have remained alive, and they’ve even kept the remains of those that are deceased, kept those remains from getting back to their families for the respectful proper burial.
It’s disgraceful.
The video we saw recently was the emaciated hostages who were being forced to dig their own graves. This is appalling.
Let’s never forget what happened on October 7th. It was not an attack against the nation of Israel and its military. It was a massacre of citizens, civilians, innocent children, women, sometimes pregnant women, elderly people; and the worst of all, in the massacre and mutilation of the victims, the people who did it were proud of what they were doing.
They videotaped themselves committing these atrocities and boasted of it. And that’s to me the most unspeakable horror of it all.
I would say to France and to England and all these countries, for heaven’s sakes, put the pressure not on Israel, put the pressure on Hamas.
Demand that all the hostages be released at once. Do what the Arab League did for heaven’s sakes. Call for the disarmament of Hamas and the release of all the hostages unconditionally.
That’s what should be the only message that the world is giving right now. It’s not a message lecturing Israel on feeding all the people who tried to kill them. It’s a message to say to Hamas, end this and end it now.
Question:
We’re hearing about an advancement in negotiation for another deal.
Amb. Huckabee:
I want to be optimistic, but I’m also aware of who we’re dealing with. We’re not dealing with a nation state. We’re not dealing with honorable people. We’re dealing with savages.
They’re not in a mood of trying to act like civilized people. If they were, they would sit down and say, OK, you know what? We’re going to get the hostages out.
We’re going to let them go home to their families, and we will go into exile. Israel has offered that. Whether or not [Hamas] are serious about bringing this to a close, all I can do is tell you I hope so.
But what has happened before, even when [Hamas] says we’re thinking very seriously about bringing this to a conclusion, they always add one or more things that are completely unacceptable, and it all starts over again.
I’m not going to give up. But these are not people that come to the table because they are reasonable. They’re just not.
Question:
How do you see the war in Gaza eventually ending? What is the day after going to look like in Gaza? What is your view on the recent Israeli Cabinet decision of expanding the war to Gaza City?
Does the US administration have a deadline on defeating Hamas?
Amb. Huckabee:
The president has been very clear. He said Hamas has no future in Gaza, and that they’re not going to be able to stay and have any leadership role.
That’s the position that the president takes. Therefore, it’s the position that I take.
Hamas ought to listen to the president. The people of Iran didn’t listen to him when he told them they weren’t going to have a nuclear weapon and they weren’t going to enrich in uranium. They didn’t believe him.
What I would say is that leaving Hamas in Gaza, letting them have some future there, would be like leaving the Nazis in Germany after WWII. It would be absurd.
It would be equally absurd to let Hamas claim some form of victory in all this, because to do so means you’ll have another October 7th and there will be more hostages and more families will have to go through the excruciating pain of not knowing whether their loved ones are alive or dead, and not knowing when they’ll ever get them back.
There are a lot of opinions on how this could and should end. I don’t know that anybody can say they know exactly the right way.
But the one thing we can agree on, whether you agree to a strong military action in Gaza City, or to 60-day ceasefire with the hostages dribbling out four, five, ten at a time, I would hope that we all agree that Hamas can’t win, can’t stay, must disarm, and that the future of Gaza will be very different than its past.
One of the things that I heard when I was in Gaza talking to people was their attitude about Hamas —these people are horrible.
Everyone I visited with had had a family member murdered by someone in Hamas.
But here’s the other part they said. They want nothing to do in the future with the PA, the PLO or Fatah.
So if the Palestinian Authority thinks that they’re going to go back in and take control and govern Gaza, I can assure you the people of Gaza will not be in favor of that. So it’s going to be a very different future.
I think we take it step at a time, and the first step, get the hostages home, get Hamas out of there.
Question:
I’m guessing that after two months, we have a little bit more intelligence about what how effective the strike against Fordow and Iran was.
Amb. Huckabee:
I think the president was right when he said we obliterated their nuclear capacity. Of course, as you know, most of their scientists were killed in the very first few seconds of the beginning of the war.
That set them back, even if we hadn’t taken down a good bit of the infrastructure of their nuclear program. But the MOP bombs, the very powerful bombs that were dropped by the B-2s, hit their targets directly and accurately.
The result was devastating impact on the nuclear sites that they were developing. That’s not to say that Iran doesn’t still have nuclear aspirations.
I grew up in the south, as you know, down in Arkansas. We have a saying down South that there is no education in the second kick of a mule. Unfortunately, Iran doesn’t seem to understand that. So they’re still talking about how to get nuclear capacity.
I would say to them, You’ve been kicked once. You really don’t want to go through it again.
Question:
We’re hearing criticism in the US about what’s going on in Gaza, in media, in protests and especially universities.
Amb. Huckabee:
We have to keep letting people hear the truth.
When I hear people say, well, Israel is a genocidal nation, I push back immediately. Let me tell you something. If Israel is trying to commit genocide, they’re really, really bad at it.
They could have committed genocide in Gaza on October 8th. If anyone doesn’t think they have the military capacity to wipe Gaza completely out, then they didn’t pay attention to what happened in Iran in the 12-day war.
[Israel] is not a genocidal nation, nor is it an apartheid nation.
It’s not a nation in which people don’t have rights. I ask people sometimes, who are really ignorant about Israel, are you aware that there are Arabs in the Knesset? No, there’s not. Yes, there is.
Are you aware that there are Arabs on the Israeli Supreme Court and that an Arab judge sentenced a sitting president and a prime minister to prison? Oh, no, that didn’t happen. Yes, it actually did.
Are you aware that Arabs and Jews work side by side at Hadassah Medical Center and hospitals and businesses all over the land of Israel and they get along? Surely not. I thought it was apartheid.
Well, somebody forgot to tell the people of Israel that they’re an apartheid nation. So they live in a democracy where people not only can elect their government, but can disagree with it and not be afraid of getting shot and never seeing another breakfast.
This is an extraordinary country. It is amazing what has happened in this tiny little sliver of real estate. More Nobel science prize winners than any country on earth, disproportionate to its small population of nine-and-a-half million people.
It has a tiny landmass. Muslim countries have 644 times the amount of land Israel does. And yet [Israel] is a superpower and just recently defeated a country that is 10 times its size.
So it is the David in a world of Goliaths. People ought to understand, I wouldn’t mess with Israel.
I’m proud the US stands with Israel because I do believe the Bible when it says G-d will bless those who bless Israel and He will curse those who curse Israel.
I want to be blessed. I want my country to be blessed. And so we stand with Israel.
