Michael Huckabee and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

30 May 2025

“When Conroy asked Huckabee if he considers himself well-positioned to win the ‘Sheldon sweepstakes’ in 2016, Huckabee was frank. ‘Gee, I would hope so, I wouldn’t presume on anyone or anything, but if I did do this, would I love to have his support? Yeah. I don’t want to be subtle.”

“Huckabee on the Adelson Sweepstakes”, Jewish Insider, 23 October 2014.

The Israel lobby dominates American foreign policy regarding Palestine and its surroundings. Significant American Jewish political influence dates back to the unjustified United Nations 1947 partition plan of Palestine. Presidential politics and policy of Democrats and Republicans have been under the direct communication and influence of Israel’s backers and their proxies, the Adelson family and Chaim Saban, since the Oslo Accords. AIPAC is a facilitator that organizes finance and its distribution to many Congress members, including supplying rival candidates to incumbents who criticize Israel with necessary financial assistance and televised advertisements. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee utilize antisemitism to stifle discussion of Zionism and Israel. And there is Stephen Miller. This influence is more persistent and crippling to the American system than the standing of oil and gas rich Gulf countries where the United States has an ultimate strategic stake. More often than not, these countries tend to accommodate the extensive reach of Israel’s supporters in the United States.

American ambassador to Israel Michael Huckabee is an ideological supporter of Israel. He is a Christian Zionist. The notion that Israel is a colonial, apartheid, and an occupying power state and that Zionism did not possess nor does it have today a right to sovereignty in Palestine is beyond his intellectual comprehension, which is faith-based and messianic. It competes with the settler ideology of Zionists from Theodore Herzl and David Ben Gurion onward.

Christian Zionism has a very clear interpretation of Christianity’s founding texts, projecting ancient beliefs and mythologies onto contemporary politics. Israel is central to understanding the Christian Zionist foundational being. Translated to the American public sphere, this means a geopolitical commitment by the United States towards Israel that transcends time and space.[1] 

Huckabee himself has been a vocal cheerleader for Israel within and outside the United States. As most Republican Congress members, the potential wrath of the Adelson effect is always an alarming sign before even considering expressing a decent opinion about Israel and its consistent violations of international law, not to mention its nature as a colonial and apartheid state. In December 2023, when Israel was exercising its genocide in Gaza, Huckabee visited Israel, providing an extreme gesture of solidarity.

The Biden administration facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza, adhering to the dictates of Israel’s enthusiasts by supplying endless arms, constant diplomatic support, and engaging in sabotaging legal efforts to hold Israel accountable before international forums. The ceasefire reached on 15 January 2025 by an outgoing American administration after relentless Israeli backtracking and American cover was eventually and unsurprisingly breached by Israel on 18 March 2025 with the Trump administration’s blessing. Both the Biden and the Trump administrations are complicit in Israel’s genocide beyond any doubt, reasonable or not.  

Donald Trump is a populist New York politician and a businessman specialising in real estate deals. In his first term, he delivered to Sheldon Adelson all of his wishes when his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was still committed to him. Trump sidelined and banned aid from the Palestinians; declared Jerusalem as unified and capital of Israel in contrast to international law; revoked the nuclear deal reachd between Iran, the United States, and European powers; engaged in hostilities against Iran; continued the illegal war on terrorism commenced in September 2001; and announced Israeli entitlement over occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Trump also diplomatically and economically pushed developing Arab countries to make peace with a rejectionist Israel and capitalized on the de jure alliance between the United Arab Emirates and the occupying, as well as an apartheid country.

The current Trump administration is his last, and he has tense relations with his son-in-law Jared Kushner. However, Trump’s commitment to Israel due to internal American politics and the presence of Israel’s clappers has not diminished, despite some meaningless public statements. On the contrary. Huckabee reflects a large social group of American Christian Zionists numbering more than 30 million people. Given the near-total control that the Israel lobby has over presidential and congressional politics regarding Palestine, it is difficult to describe the emergence of Stephen Miller as an excess of undermining normative political processes.

Miller amplifies the Trump administration’s lawlessness at home and its unilateral aspirations abroad. A special theme among his interests is knowledge production regarding Palestine on American campuses in line with the George Soros-oriented Bill Ackman and Heritage Foundation’s Project 25. Trump and his team launched blatant attacks against top-ranked American universities under the banner of combating antisemitism, targeting scholarship and activism concerning Palestinian rights. They arrested prominent protesters and academics and withheld federal funding from universities that either explicitly caved in or decided to contemplate what the appropriate curricula under the circumstances should be. Saban and Adelson have also been starring on this front of anti-Palestinian rights for years.[2] 

The future is unforeseeable and uncertain, but the past has provided little hope for official American understanding of Palestine, the Palestinians, and the region where they reside. The campaign to obstruct awareness and education about Palestine in an explicit Wall Street takeover mode or simple authoritarian administrative action should produce contemporary, mid-, and long-term opposition against Zionism, Israel, and their supporters in the United States.

Michael Huckabee. Source: The Atlantic, 4 November 2024.

Stephen Miller. Source: New York Times, 21 March 2024.

AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt. Source: Times of Israel, June 2024.

ADL's Executive Director, Jonathan Greenblatt. Source: Times of Israel, 6 November 2014.

Bill Ackman. Source: New York Magazine, 12 February 2024.

[1] Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 36e Année, No. 75, pp.75 – 103 (1991); Joseph Williams, “The Pentecostalization of Christian Zionism”, 84(1) Church History, pp.159-194 (2015).

[2] TOI Staff, “Saban calls Orange liars, joins with Adelson to battle boycott; tsunami’”, Times of Israel, 6 June 2015; Israel Wullman, “Haim Saban battling BDS”, YNET, 17 February 2016; Eli Clifton, “The Israeli – American Trump mega-donor behind crackdowns”, Responsible Statecraft, 18 March 2025.