https://arab.news/bgj76
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, is a self-professed Christian Zionist who unconditionally supports the state of Israel. That is a large part of why he was considered by President Donald Trump as a candidate to be US envoy to Israel.
But for a short while this month, it seemed Huckabee had momentarily forgotten his hard-line ideological positions — including his refusal to use the term “West Bank” and his general denial of Palestinian nationalism. He has consistently referred to the Occupied Territories using the biblical term “Judea and Samaria.”
Yet when an American citizen was killed by violent Jewish settlers and a Palestinian Christian village came under settler arson attacks, Huckabee suddenly seemed to remember that he represents the US in Israel, not the other way round. His visit to the village of Taybeh prompted a surprisingly strong statement, in which he labeled the settler attacks as acts of “terrorism.”
Speaking to the mayor and a group of leading citizens — including Palestinian American businessmen Daoud and Nadim Khoury, founders of the Taybeh Brewery — Huckabee said that, as an American envoy, he represents all Americans. After learning that settlers illegally occupy 7,000 dunams of privately owned village land and regularly attack Taybeh, he called for a strong response to the settler violence. He also condemned attacks on houses of worship and urged that the settler criminals be “aggressively investigated … not just reprimanded, that’s not enough.”
