Mike Huckabee nominated for ambassador to Israel

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has been nominated to serve as Ambassador to Israel. The nomination ahead of key cabinet posts, underscores how important Israel is to the incoming president, say observers.

“I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected former Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, has been nominated to be The United States Ambassador to Israel,” President-elect Donald Trump announced in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“Mike has been a great public servant, Governor, and Leader in Faith for many years. He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him,’ Trump said. “Mike will work tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East!”

Huckabee, 69, is a strong Evangelical Christian and ordained minister. He served as governor from 1996 to 2007 and ran for president in 2008 and 2016. His first trip to Israel came just before the 1973 Yom Kippur war after he finished high school. That began a lifelong love of Israel, including backing the Trump decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and fighting attempts to boycott Israel.

🔴 President #Trump nominates @GovMikeHuckabee as Amb. to Israel. You won’t find finer friend of Israel than Mike! And the fact that @realDonaldTrump made this appointment before even some of the key cabinet posts, only underscores how important the 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 alliance to him is! pic.twitter.com/a3DBS5ddqA

— Arsen Ostrovsky 🎗️ (@Ostrov_A) November 12, 2024

David Friedman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Israel in Trump’s first term, said he was “thrilled” by Trump’s selection of Huckabee.

Huckabee’s daughter and current governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, tweeted, “Unbelievably proud that @realDonaldTrump nominated my dad @GovMikeHuckabee to be US Ambassador to Israel! I went to Israel for the first time with my dad when I was eleven and it changed my life. There is no one President Trump could have picked with a greater love for the Israeli people and commitment to the unbreakable bond between America and Israel than him.”

Throughout the campaign, Trump has promised to be Israel’s strongest ally, and ensure that U.S. foreign policy is more closely with Israel’s safety and survival as it wages wars against the Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In December 2023, Huckabee was part of an evangelical pre-Christmas solidarity trip in which he described the experience of walking through the kibbutz — where dozens of the residents were murdered during Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 — as a “gut punch.”  The popular TV host stated the trip reinforced his resolve to promote American solidarity with the Israeli people.

“The evangelical community is, I think, overwhelmingly united in recognizing that Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself from those who try to question its existence,” Huckabee told The Times of Israel, adding that he felt he had to see the devastation with his own eyes.

“As governor, I walked through scores of communities that had been hit by tornadoes, ripped apart and leveled to the ground,” he recalled, explosions could be hear a few miles away in Gaza. “What I’m seeing here happened because people who claimed to be human beings acted like something other than human beings and did evil,” he observed, referring to the hundreds of Palestinian who poured in from Gaza behind Hamas fighters, inflicting their own path of death and destruction in Israel.

Huckabee will need approval from the new Republican majority Senate.

–Dwight Widaman