The Real Reason Trump Picked Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel

On Tuesday, Donald Trump announced that he would be nominating former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee to serve as his ambassador to Israel. A Baptist minister, Huckabee is both familiar with the region and a vocal player in its many controversies. He has led religious pilgrimages to Israel and visited the country dozens of times over the course of several decades. He also opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” and advocates permanent Israeli control over the occupied West Bank, which Palestinians claim for their future state.

These positions stand in stark contrast to those held by most American Jews: A Pew survey earlier this year found that 46 percent support a two-state solution, the highest proportion of any religious demographic. Just 22 percent support a single Israeli state in the entire land, as Huckabee does.

Thus, though exceedingly unlikely to bring peace to the Middle East, Huckabee’s appointment has one salutary effect: It makes clear whom Trump’s Israel policy is meant to serve. Far from the product of some clandestine Jewish cabal, as anti-Semites might allege, it is a transaction meant to reward evangelical Christians, who are among the president-elect’s most ardent non-Jewish supporters.

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Trump has stiffed many of his business partners over his career, but in politics, he has made good on his promises to his allies on the Christian right. Domestically, he nominated the justices they needed to overturn America’s abortion laws. Internationally, he largely deferred to their preferences on Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as the country’s capital and backing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem,” Trump said at an August 2020 rally in Wisconsin. “That’s for the evangelicals.”

By contrast, the president-elect has frequently complained that American Jews—who mostly vote Democratic—have been ungrateful to him. His previous ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, though Jewish himself, infamously referred to a liberal Jewish organization as “worse than kapos,” a term for Nazi collaborators. Elevating Huckabee helpfully clarifies who truly holds sway on this subject.

But evangelicals are not the only members of Trump’s circle with a stake in the region, and they will not be the only ones to shape its future. Both Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, an architect of Israel’s Abraham Accords with the Sunni Arab states, have personal and business interests in common with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. During the previous Trump administration, Kushner texted regularly with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and after Trump left office, the country’s Public Investment Fund poured billions into Kushner’s private-equity firm. And although Trump’s evangelical allies like Huckabee would happily have Israel annex swaths of the West Bank, the president’s Middle Eastern partners in places such as the United Arab Emirates strongly oppose such a move—and succeeded in blocking it during the previous Trump presidency as a condition of the Abraham Accords.

The question today is whether the conflict between these two camps will play out differently this time. As Trump enters office, he will find a region far less amenable to compromise. In 2020, Netanyahu shelved annexation in exchange for Arab diplomatic recognition, but in 2024, his unpopular governing coalition depends on far-right religious parties, which demand annexation and largely dictate the prime minister’s agenda. Meanwhile, Arab authoritarians like Saudi Arabia’s bin Salman and UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed, once eager to downgrade the Palestinian issue in pursuit of an alliance with America and Israel against Iran, can no longer easily sideline the subject, given popular discontent over the Gaza war. These diverging interests are likely to provoke a clash during Trump’s second term, in which Huckabee will play a significant role.

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In his decades-long religious love affair with the land of Israel and general disinterest in its Palestinian inhabitants, Huckabee resembles many members of Israel’s hard-right government. To the country’s settlement movement, he is a dream pick who will advance their maximalist aims. But although Huckabee’s appointment signals that evangelicals and the Israeli far right will have a voice in the conversation, the former governor will not have a veto—and he seems well aware of the limits of his position.

Asked by Israel’s Army Radio whether annexation would be on the agenda in a second Trump term, Huckabee demurred, saying, “I won’t make the policy; I will carry out the policy of the president.” Similarly, when pressed on whether he’d support Israel rebuilding settlements in the Gaza Strip, a far-right aspiration unpopular among most Israelis, he replied, “I don’t want to make any comments about policy because those won’t be mine to make.”

In fact, Friedman, Trump’s last ambassador, also backed annexing parts of the West Bank, but he lost that fight with Kushner and Trump’s domestic team, who preferred the Abraham Accords. Trump is heavily influenced by those closest to him, and with distance comes diminishment. Whether Kushner will be returning to the White House remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that those in the West Wing will have more sway over Trump’s approach than those in the West Bank.