Huckabee: Israel includes West Bank, US includes Israel
Mike Huckabee at an event organized by Christians United for Israel, July 13, 2015. Photo by Ron Sachs / Newscom / APIS
Israel as a Republican State of Mind
Mike Huckabee’s pilgrimage is another sign of the blurred lines between American and Israeli politics.
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect
August 20, 2015
Mike Huckabee met reporters Wednesday at the Waldorf-Astoria on a campaign stop. This particular Waldorf-Astoria was in downtown West Jerusalem. Huckabee wanted to talk about Iran. The folks with microphones and cameras mostly wanted him to talk about his previous campaign event. That was a fundraiser at the Israeli settlement of Shilo in the West Bank—or as Huckabee insistently called the area, “Judea and Samaria,” which he said was part of Israel.
The journalists’ interrogation grew fiercer, and the ex-governor of Arkansas said time was up. As he made his escape, a foreign correspondent sitting strategically near the door asked: “Do you also think Gaza is part of Israel?” and another said, “Would you be the first president to abandon the two-state solution?”
“I’m not sure,” Huckabee replied to one question or the other. It was the most reality-linked response of a hallucinatory session. He was, in fact, clueless.
Jerusalem and Shilo, let us note, are certainly not part of the United States. But why should that bother a Republican presidential candidate? The GOP and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have, together, steadily blurred the border between Israel and America as separate polities. Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in March—at once an eve-of-elections campaign rally for him and an assist to the GOP offensive against President Barack Obama—was a symptom, not an exception.
In 2012, Mitt Romney held a fundraiser in Jerusalem. Huckabee just outdid him with Shilo. Netanyahu has been called the Republican senator from Israel. Huckabee, in what has become a Republican campaign tradition, staked out a position that would put him on the far right in Israel—somewhere beyond Danny Danon, the Likud hardliner whom Netanyahu has just appointed as Israel’s representative to the United Nations.
New construction in the settlement of Shiloh
Shilo is also an esoteric choice for fundraising. The Upper East Side or Beverly Hills it is not. Its population is just over 2,000; its middle-class exurban look owes something to government subsidies. Contrary to American stereotypes, most West Bank settlers are not American. Shilo’s attraction, Huckabee explained, is that it was the site of the Tabernacle—the moveable sanctuary that the Bible describes as preceding the Temple in Jerusalem. Asked if he had qualms about campaigning in the occupied West Bank, at a settlement considered illegal under international law, Huckabee rejected the terms illegal, occupied and West Bank. Americans, he said, should “show support for Israelis and their capacity to build neighborhoods in their own country.”
Somehow, it was not a surprise that a Republican candidate in 2015 did not see denial of the right to vote as a violation of the democratic values that he insisted Israel and America share.
Mike Huckabee is a frequent visitor to Israel which for him includes the West Bank – above, at the settlement of Beit El near Ramallah in 2009. Photo by Gali Tibbon / AFP, Getty
If he regarded the West Bank as part of Israel, he was asked, how did he feel about the fact that the Palestinian population doesn’t have the right to vote in Israeli elections? “That’s a decision for the Israeli government,” he answered. Somehow, it was not a surprise that a Republican candidate in 2015 did not see denial of the right to vote as a violation of the democratic values that he insisted Israel and America share.
Before he exited, Huckabee got in a defense of Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer’s lobbying of Congress against the Iran deal. “The whole purpose of an ambassador is to represent his or her country’s interest to the country where they’ve been assigned,” he said.
Well, not precisely in the way Huckabee described. The job is to represent one government to another. The criticism of Dermer is that he has become a participant in the partisan politics of the host country, during the present debate and before. Neither Netanyahu nor the GOP has shown much concern about the difference between those roles.
Netanyahu’s choice of three new Israeli envoys in recent days underlines the point. The appointment of Danon appears bizarre at first glance. Danon—currently minister of science and chair of the central committee of Netanyahu’s Likud Party—has been a critic from the right and open rival of the prime minister. The easy explanation is that Netanyahu has decided to exile him to an obscure position in New York, showing contempt for the United Nations in the bargain.
Yet Netanyahu held the same position in the 1980s. It gave him a high profile as a spokesperson for Israel in America, and was his springboard to the leadership of Likud. Danon is likely to be an excellent envoy to those GOP voters who can’t see why Netanyahu even pays on-again, off-again lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state.
Argentinian-born Dani Dayan, former leader of the settlers’ Yesha Council and now an MK for Jewish Home, the far-right coalition partner of Likud, embraces his party leader Naftali Bennett. Photo by Marc Israel Sellem / JPost.
To Brazil, with a burgeoning and politicized Evangelical movement, Netanyahu is sending Dani Dayan, the former chair of the council of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The new ambassador to Rome, another political appointee, is Fiamma Nirenstein—who moved to Israel two years ago immediately after serving as a member of Italy’s parliament, representing ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing People of Freedom Party. Predictably, Italian Jewish leaders are reportedly worried that the appointment will stain their community with dual loyalty.
The concern presumes a distinction between two polities, and between domestic conservatism and support for Netanyahu. Netanyahu—as a good Republican, one might say—doesn’t respect such distinctions.
So far, though, Italian politicians don’t campaign in Israel or in Israeli settlements. The blurring of lines is worst in the U.S.-Israel case. The strains that the GOP-Netanyahu relationship have put on U.S. Jewry do not need repeating here. The tradition of a bipartisan policy toward Israel is beginning to look like history. Instead, Israel is one more issue on which Republican candidates appear ready to compete in extremism for the next awful 15 months. If only it were possible to brief the next Republican political pilgrim that neither Gaza nor the West Bank is part of Israel, and that Israel itself is a country apart from the territory of GOP fantasy.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas at a news conference near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Shiloh. Photo by Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
In Jerusalem, Mike Huckabee Calls West Bank Part of Israel
First Draft, NY Times
August 19, 2015
JERUSALEM – Staking out the most extreme position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the crowded field of Republican candidates – one to the right of even Israel’s conservative government – former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas said Wednesday that the entire occupied West Bank was part of Israel, leaving no room for a Palestinian state there.
Actually, Mr. Huckabee rejected both the terms “occupied” and “West Bank,” repeatedly calling the territory by its biblical name, “Judea and Samaria,” and said all Americans should visit the area, as he did the day before for a fund-raiser in the Israeli settlement of Shiloh.
Other Republican candidates for president, including former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, have criticized the Obama administration for pressing Israel to negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinians. But Mr. Huckabee more clearly disavowed the two-state solution that has been the cornerstone of American foreign policy for years.
Though Mr. Huckabee has previously said if Palestinians want a state of their own they should go elsewhere, on Wednesday he ducked the issue of what should become of the 2.5 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank, saying, “That’s a question for the Israelis and the Palestinians to negotiate.”
Mr. Huckabee, who is so far gaining less traction than in his 2008 presidential bid, is the latest in a series of Republican hopefuls to make the pilgrimage to Israel. It is, in a way, part of an invisible primary to win the heart – and wallet — of Sheldon Adelson, the megadonor who has questioned the existence of the Palestinian peoplehood.
Score one for Mr. Huckabee on terminology. Last year, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey referred to his helicopter ride over the “occupied territories,” a phrase anathema to Zionist hawks, and ended up apologizing to Mr. Adelson.
On Wednesday, before answering a reporter’s question about whether the international community was wrong to consider the West Bank illegally occupied, Mr. Huckabee emphatically distanced himself from the terms “West Bank,” “illegal” and “occupied.”
“Israel has more of a connections to lands in Judea and Samaria – specifically Shiloh, where I was last night, 3,500 years of connections to that very piece of property,” he argued in a news conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Jerusalem. “In America, we have about a 400-year relationship to Manhattan. It would be as if I came and said, ‘We need to end our occupation of Manhattan.’ I’m pretty sure most Americans would find that laughable.”
Mr. Huckabee, who first visited Israel as a 17-year-old more than four decades ago and has been back dozens of times, also made a security argument for Israeli control of the West Bank.
“I cannot imagine that any American who comes here would somehow feel that the Israelis are out of line in wanting to have as safe a barrier between them and their sworn enemies as possible,” he said, though it was unclear exactly which “sworn enemies” he was referring to. Jordan, which abuts the West Bank, has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1994.
Like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida before him, Mr. Huckabee got a photo-op and meeting with Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu.
“He is a Churchill in a world full of Chamberlains,” Mr. Huckabee posted on Twitter afterward. He told reporters: “The prime minister in no way by his meeting endorsed me, but I have no problem endorsing him as a true leader in the fight against the Iranian deal.”
Mr. Huckabee repeated his vow to repeal the nuclear deal with Iran if elected, and stood by his comment last month that President Obama’s foreign policy “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven,” a Holocaust reference that many political rivals, American Jews and Israelis denounced as inappropriate.
He also inadvertently went back in time when denouncing Iran’s plan to buy new defensive weapons “from the Soviet …” before catching himself and correcting, “from the Russian government.”
Mr. Huckabee deflected a question about the popularity of Donald Trump – “the one thing I’m not going to do is help Donald Trump get any more publicity” – and said he said he was unconcerned with his low polling numbers.
Noting that those leading in polls in the Republican battles in 2008 and 2012 dropped out before the end of the winter contests, he quoted his campaign manager as advising, “If you’re hot when it’s hot, you’ll be cold when it’s cold.”