U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee during an interview with Reuters in Jerusalem, on Sept. 10, 2025.Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
To understand why any meaningful progress toward peaceful relations in the current Israel-Palestinian talks is highly unlikely, don’t even bother looking at the bad-faith actors on the U.S.-run “Board of Peace.” Instead, endure the long and inflammatory Feb. 20 interview between Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Tucker Carlson, the right-wing broadcaster.
Both Americans said things that provoked headlines this week. That’s because those things represent two alarmingly popular forms of delusion that have poisoned dialogue in, and about, the region.
Mr. Carlson spent a large chunk of the interview questioning the ambassador on the seemingly abstruse question of whether European Jews are genetically Middle Eastern in origin, and can be proven through DNA testing to be “descendants of Abraham.” This was to support the factually incorrect claim that most Israeli Jews are European in origin, and the equally incorrect claim that there is no indigenous historical basis to Israel’s Jewish population.
I hope I don’t need to explain why it’s alarming to hear American conservatives questioning the racial purity of Jews or suggesting that they are invaders. Worse, he used this argument to make the case that Israel does not have a “right to the land” within its legal borders.
The ambassador countered by strongly suggesting that the Palestinians don’t exist as a people at all, only as undefined subjects of governance. He referred to their legal territory as “Judea, Samaria, or the West Bank – call it whatever you want,” using the biblical terms popular with Israeli annexationists. And he referred to Palestinians as “certain people living in the Palestinian Authority under their very corrupt government” who might be “better off if the Israelis were the governing authority.”
U.S. ambassador Huckabee stirs backlash by saying Israel has right to much of the Middle East
The interview was subject of considerable media outrage in the region, including condemnation from 15 Middle East governments – Mr. Huckabee because he seemed to be siding with the most extreme annexationist factions within Israel and undermining his own country’s interests, leading to a clarification from the White House; Mr. Carlson because he seemed to be rehashing antisemitic fictions.
The problem is that both men, prominent figures in U.S. conservatism, were expressing theories of ethnic and national illegitimacy that are increasingly widely held not only within the United States but in the Middle East. These weren’t two idiosyncratic individuals, but prominent representatives of ideological ecosystems whose tendrils have overgrown much regional dialogue.
Mr. Carlson is part of a sizeable faction of Republicans and their organizations who promote dark conspiracy theories about Jews, including the claims of Jewish disloyalty or antisemitic “great replacement” theories.
But the myth he promoted in the interview – that Israel is a settler-colonial project by European Jews and has no legitimate existence – is a core belief among Hamas leaders, and is also popular among some Palestine-rights protesters on the left. A big reason why that movement failed to gain a mainstream following, despite its central messages of two-state autonomy and an end to violence being widely popular, is because a number of those shouting “end the occupation” were referring not to Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank but to Israel’s very existence.
U.S. says ambassador’s comments on Israel, Middle East taken out of context
Mr. Huckabee’s views questioning the existence of the Palestinian people and supporting annexation are shared by other “Christian Zionists,” whose theological reasons for backing an expanded Israel should not exactly be welcome news to the Jewish people.
But similar arguments have a long history on the Israeli right, from former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s 1969 claim that “There was no such thing as Palestinians,” to current PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s much stronger version of that claim, made in his 1993 book A Place Among the Nations and in speeches and interviews since then, suggesting that Palestinians are predominantly recent immigrants from other Arab states. A number of ministers in his right-wing cabinet have also said that Palestinians, as a people, do not exist. Unfortunately, these are often the figures who are representing their country in talks.
There is no factual basis to either of these positions. The territory of Palestine, including Jerusalem, contained substantial Muslim, Jewish and Christian populations throughout its British and Ottoman occupations, with city-sized Jewish populations and its own Arab people and culture long before Zionism. The majority of Israel’s Jewish population after 1948, and today, are not European-origin but descendants of Middle Eastern and African Jewish populations, most expelled from countries such as Morocco and Syria during their decolonization – Israel would have been inevitable even without the Holocaust. Despite the acts of violence and expulsion in their founding, both are legitimate, authentic peoples.
Any settlement between them will involve painful compromises. But no such settlement will be possible if both sides, as well as the U.S. mediator, are dominated by people who believe the other doesn’t really exist.