Trump Tabs Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel, and Far-Left J Street is Not Amused

Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump’s choice to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, “loves Israel and he loves the people of Israel,” as Trump has said. Yet J Street is enraged: “American Jewish Organizations React to Trump’s Choice for US Ambassador to Israel,” by Jack Elbaum, Algemeiner, November 13, 2024:

…J Street also opposed the choice, writing in a statement that “Huckabee, a right-wing, evangelical minister with a long history of championing settlement expansion, annexation, and a radical ‘Greater Israel’ agenda, holds principles and espouses views that — if now implemented — would shatter the foundations on which a healthy and strong US-Israel relationship has been built over the past 75 years.”

J Street is a far-left Jewish group that thinks it knows better what Israel should or should not do than the Israelis themselves. It darkly describes “settlement expansion” — but why shouldn’t Israelis build settlements in Judea and Samaria, that were always supposed to be included in the Jewish state (see the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine)? Why shouldn’t existing “settlements”(villages, cities) be “expanded” to accommodate a natural growth in population? And for that matter, why shouldn’t Israel build new settlements on state and waste lands, or on land bought from Arab owners? There are now more than 500,000 Israelis who in the view of J Street are “settlers in the West Bank.” Does J Street think that uprooting them, or halting any further settlement by Jews in the West Bank, will bring peace? Would pushing Israel back within the 1949 armistice lines, leaving it with a nine-mile wide waist between Qalqilya and the sea, sate Arab appetites, or would it, more likely, whet their appetite for making yet another full-scale assault on a much-reduced Israel, in the hope of finally destroying it and replacing it with a 23rd Arab state?

J Street deplores Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, even though that sliver of land, when possessed by Syria, was used by the Syrian army to do one thing — rain down fire on Jewish farmers far below. Israel has a right to keep territory that had been used only for war-making by a country that is still a belligerent.

J Street is having a conniption fit. How dare this Bible-belt Christian proclaim that Israel has a right to hold onto Judea and Samaria, deny that the “Palestinian people” exist, and insist that the Jews certainly have a right to retain all of Jerusalem as “the eternal capital of the Jewish people”!

J Street on Monday urged the Biden administration to withhold offensive weapons from Israel as part of a partial arms embargo, arguing that the United States needs to hold Israel accountable for alleged human rights “violations” before Trump takes office….

The Biden administration has already announced that Israel has fulfilled 15 of the 19 conditions it had requested be met by mid-November, and the administration was sufficiently satisfied that Israel was now making a good-faith effort to fulfill the remaining four, so that there was no need to limit Israel’s access to American weapons. J Street, of course, is furious; it shows its support for Israel in the most peculiar way, by insisting that the embattled Jewish state be deprived of weapons it needs if it is to survive as it fights a seven-front war.

As our ambassador to Israel, Huckabee sounds to me like an inspired choice. He dares to note that the West Bank was the name given by the Jordanians in 1950 to Judea and Samaria, territory that they had seized in the 1948 war, in an obvious effort to efface the Jewish connection to the land, just as the Romans had long ago changed the name of the Kingdom of Judah to “Palestine.” He refuses to call Judea and Samaria, or east Jerusalem, as “occupied.” He has said, in a recent interview with a podcaster, that he did not believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.” “There really isn’t such a thing,” he said. “It’s a term that was co-opted by Yasser Arafat in 1962 [sic].”

A Daniel come to judgment? Well, we needn’t go that far. But what a relief to hear an American official, and especially one who will now be our ambassador to Israel, who is willing to firmly let the air out of the whole “two-state solution-occupied-West-Bank-Palestinian people” balloon.