Who is Mike Huckabee, the 'extremist' new US ambassador to Israel?

Amid a flurry of new appointments for the new administration, US President-elect Donald Trump has chosen former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to become the new US ambassador to Israel.

The announcement, which came on Tuesday, will see Huckabee take up the post when the new administration is sworn in in January.

An official statement from Trump read that Huckabee "loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him".

"Mike will work tirelessly to bring about peace in the Middle East," it added.

Support for Israel's annexation of the West Bank

Huckabee has a history of staunch support for Israel and has taken part in Evangelical Christian tours to the country since 1981. Many of his statements in support of the country resurfaced online and in the media following the announcement.

During his 2008 run for the US presidency, he claimed that the Palestinian people didn't exist, with CNN quoting him as saying their identity was "a political tool to try and force land away from Israel".

Huckabee has even denied that the West Bank as an occupied territory existed, with CNN footage from 2017 resurfacing online of him saying that "there is no such thing as the West Bank – it's Judea and Samaria".

Judea and Samaria are the biblical names used by the Israeli government and far-right settlers to refer to the West Bank.

He further claimed that "there is no such thing as settlements – they're communities, they're neighbourhoods, they're cities. There is no such thing as an occupation."

In 2019 Huckabee called on Trump to endorse an Israeli annexation of the West Bank prior to the announcement of the Abraham Accords, which saw Israel normalise ties with several Arab states, according to Haaretz. 

According to Al-Monitor, during a visit to Israel in 2018 Huckabee expressed interest in buying a holiday home in the occupied West Bank settlement of Efrat, south of Jerusalem.

Israeli extremists welcome; Palestinians, liberal Zionists denounce

Huckabee's appointment as Israeli ambassador was hailed by extreme-right figures within the Israeli government, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who posted on X "Mike Huckabee" with a heart between the Israeli and American flags.

Extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who on Monday announced his intention to annex the West Bank in 2025, also congratulated Huckabee on X, saying that with him, Israel would reinforce its hold over all occupied territories.

On the other hand, Palestinian priest Munther Isaac questioned on the social media platform X whether Huckabee, as an evangelical Christian, knew "that these settlements [in the West Bank] make the lives of Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, a living hell?"

"Does he care about us to begin with?" Isaac added.

In the US, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the liberal Zionist organisation J-Street said on X that the appointment "stands in stark contrast to the definition embraced by the overwhelming majority of Jewish Americans," of a liberal, democratic and secure Israel which can only exist with Palestinian self-determination.

"The cementing of a Trump/Bibi [Netanyahu]/Huckabee/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich alliance - enabling Israel's continued descent into a non-democratic and ethnonationalist future - is a recipe for disaster for Israel, for a bipartisan US-Israel relationship and for the Jewish people around the world," he added.