Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, argued with podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to occupy the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.
“They better take it all,” Huckabee told Carlson in an interview posted Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed interpretations of Old Testament scriptures in the US Christian Nationalist movement with Carlson.
Carlson — who recently made controversial claims that he was detained at Israel’s Tel Aviv airport — asked Huckabee about the Bible verse in which God promised Abraham’s descendants “the land from the wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates — the land of the Kenites, the Kenezites, the Kadmonites. Hittites, Perigeetes, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites”.
Carlson suggests that in modern geography the region includes “basically the entire Middle East”.
“The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon — it also includes large parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said.
Huckabee said: “I’m not sure it will go that far, but it will be a big piece of land.”
He continued: “Israel is the nation God gave to his chosen people through Abraham, a people, a place and a purpose.”
When Carlson pressed him on whether Israel had a right to the land, Huckabee responded: “They’d better take it all.”
The interview with Huckabee was conducted during a trip to Israel when Carlson claimed he experienced “strange” treatment at Ben Gurion Airport. But Israeli and US officials say he is subject to general security questions.
Carlson increasingly questioned US support for Israel, moving him from the center to the fringes of the Make America Great Again movement.
Huckabee represents a more traditional pro-Israel conservative position.
After airing his claims about Carlson’s extraordinary treatment in Tel Aviv, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the former Fox News host “chickenshit.”
“And the next time he talks about Israel like some expert, remember this guy is a fraud!” Bennett said on X Post on Wednesday.
In his own post on X, Huckabee said: “Everyone coming in/out of Israel (every country for that matter) has their passports checked and asked the usual security questions.”
The Israel Airports Authority said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday: “Tucker Carlson and his entourage were not detained, delayed or interrogated.”
