In February, President Donald Trump suggested evicting 2.2 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and rebuilding it as a luxury “riviera.” A few days later, Israel advanced plans to build 1,000 new homes for Jewish settlers in the West Bank, according to an Israeli peace group. And a few days after that, Israeli tanks rolled into West Bank refugee camps for the first time in decades, as part of military operations that have forced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes — with Israel’s defense minister saying they won’t be allowed to return anytime soon.
For those who wish to see a united Palestinian homeland, it was a month of nightmares. For Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, the moves fit perfectly into the maximalist vision of the Holy Land he has promulgated for decades.
In his long career as a politician and media personality, Huckabee has made his views on the Israel–Palestine conflict well known. He believes that, according to the Bible, only Israel has legitimate claim to the Holy Land and that Palestinians who can’t accept this should leave. Now, if he can be confirmed by the Senate, where he faced his first hearing before the Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Huckabee can bring his religious worldview to bear as the U.S. ambassador to Israel — and find allies in Trump’s White House.
Little attention has been paid to how Huckabee and others have inspired such fervent support for Israel among grassroots American evangelicals. Part of the answer lies in the cottage industry of evangelical pilgrimages to the Holy Land — led by religious leaders like Huckabee himself.
In all-inclusive package tours, Huckabee whisks pilgrims to dozens of sites around Israel and the West Bank. The journeys cover “the teachings, battles and miracles of the Bible,” according to a promotion on Huckabee’s Facebook page. Travelers learn about ancient Israel and trace its lineage to the modern, powerful state they see today. Then they fly home with a message imprinted on their souls: Israel is the Jewish homeland, blessed by God, and America must safeguard it.
“It’s like Disneyland on steroids,” said John Munayer, a Palestinian native of Jerusalem and theologian of Palestinian Christianity.
“It reaffirms everything they believe,” Munayer said of people who take the tours. “To them, everything is a fulfillment of prophecy.”
“This is a political pilgrimage using religion as a way to justify injustices.”
According to critics, among them seven tour guides interviewed by The Intercept, evangelical Christian tours in the Holy Land, attended largely by Americans, studiously avoid any exposure to the 5.1 million Palestinians who also believe they have the right to live there.
“Huckabee’s view is Palestinians have no right to be there,” said Jerusalem native Aziz Abu Sarah, co-founder of the U.S.-based MEJDI Tours. “I can trace my family history back hundreds of years. By what logic can you go to my dad who was born in Palestine and say, ‘You need to leave’? It’s an absurdity that’s done under the belief that this is a religious tour. This is a political pilgrimage using religion as a way to justify injustices.”
The Trump administration defended Huckabee’s record.
In a statement to The Intercept, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said, “Mike Huckabee will do an excellent job as United States Ambassador to Israel, with his depth of knowledge on regional and religious issues.”
Ambassador to Annexation
Trump’s nomination of Huckabee for U.S. ambassador was seen as a reward for his evangelical base. Some 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in November. Huckabee’s selection also highlighted the rising influence of a strain of evangelical thinking, called Christian Zionism, over U.S. policy. Huckabee is among the most prominent American politicians espousing Christian Zionist values; others include, from Trump’s first term in office, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Though many of these officials have expressed views on the Middle East significantly more hawkish than official U.S. policy, few have taken public positions as extreme and strident as Huckabee’s.
Huckabee refers to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms used by those who wish to annex the land, including Israel’s settlement movement and a raft of Israeli officials — most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Huckabee has also said that Palestinians are not under occupation because their land was promised to the Jewish people in the Book of Genesis; that Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories are therefore justified; and that dividing the Holy Land into Israeli and Palestinian states is unacceptable.
“When people use the term ‘occupy,’ I say, yeah, Israel is occupying the land,” Huckabee said last year. “But it’s the occupation of the land that God gave them 3,500 years ago. It is their land. The title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”
More recently, he’s said that Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks were worse than the Holocaust and that, under a Trump presidency, it is “of course” possible that Israel will annex the West Bank.
“Annexation does not mean displacement of people.”
In his Senate hearing, Huckabee said he didn’t support forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, but supported Trump’s proposal to entice their departure to “safe and secure” conditions elsewhere. He was also asked what would would happen to Palestinians in the West Bank if Israel annexes the territory.
“Annexation does not mean displacement of people,” he responded. “There would be security, there would be opportunity.”
Huckabee’s religiously inspired political views used to be less common, said one scholar, but the broader right-wing publics in both the U.S. and Israel have caught up to his positions.
“His views have been consistent for 30 years. And 30 years ago, you could say they were to the extreme right,” said Daniel Hummel, a historian of American Christianity and director of the Lumen Center, a group of Christian researchers and educators serving the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “These views have become more accepted in American conservatism and Israeli politics. It seems those worlds are moving in his direction.”
“Bring the Bible to Life”
Huckabee, a Southern Baptist pastor and former Arkansas governor, estimates he’s brought tens of thousands of pilgrims to the Holy Land since he started organizing group tours in 1981. The current iteration, the “Israel Experience,” costs $5,950 for a 10-day voyage, including lodging, transportation, and all meals.
It’s one of many tours for evangelical Christians. Today 33 companies registered in Israel advertise themselves as offering tours catered to evangelicals. In 2019, a record year for inbound Israeli tourism, about 750,000 arrivals identified as Protestant — mostly evangelicals, according to tour guides.
Huckabee’s “Israel Experience” costs $5,950 for a 10-day voyage.
Guides who work with evangelical tours, though not Huckabee’s specifically, said his itineraries closely resemble the industry standard. Like many in the sector, Huckabee’s groups emphasize visiting sites referenced in the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. Visitors travel around the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus grew up and began his ministry, and to the Jordan River, where he was baptized.
A common stop for Huckabee and other evangelical tours is Megiddo, a hilltop where some believe the final battle between good and evil will take place, resulting in the Second Coming of Jesus.
Guides said that, in general, evangelicals are less interested in visiting churches than places that make them feel transported to biblical times.
“They want sites that can bring the Bible to life,” said one experienced guide, an Israeli national who asked to remain anonymous to protect their livelihood. “They’re hoping that the tour in Israel will be transformative, that they’ll be changed, not just educated, and know more about Israel and understand the Bible in a way that’ll affect their daily life. Most experience exactly that.”
Even though it’s not a biblical site, tourgoers also visit the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Many evangelicals link the persecution of Jews in biblical stories, such as by Pharaoh in Exodus, to contemporary antisemitism.
“As Israelis believe and evangelicals affirm, it’s a justification for having a Jewish state. When there is no Jewish state, we are persecuted,” said the Israeli guide. “The hate of the Jews is perceived by evangelicals as Satan fighting those that God has chosen and loves.”
Nothing to See Here
Though the groups comfortably flit across the line that divides Israel from the occupied West Bank, tour guides said their exposure to Palestinians is practically nil, aside from chance encounters with bus drivers and hotel staff.
Nor do tours like Huckabee’s devote time to observing the everyday experiences of Palestinian life under occupation: oppressively crowded refugee camps, military checkpoints that make travel miserable, or violence by Israeli settlers with impunity, sometimes even aided by the Israeli military.
At times, even biblical sites get passed over: Huckabee and other evangelical groups sometimes skip Bethlehem, Jesus’s birthplace. Getting into the city from Israel often requires transiting an Israeli checkpoint manned by soldiers with machine guns and flanked by roughly 20-foot-tall concrete walls. The city is controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Huckabee has quipped that his outspokenness on the conflict would make him unwelcome there.
The blinders worn by most Christian tour groups are particularly galling for Palestinian Christians, a dwindling community of about 50,000 in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
“They don’t really see us as legitimate Christians, which is kind of funny given the fact that Jesus comes from here,” said Munayer, the Palestinian theologian.
Munayer said he and other faith leaders have argued there is no biblical basis for the view that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs exclusively to any one people or nation.
“The whole point of the New Testament is that it’s not about who your parents are, or what’s your bloodline, that gives you access to God or to the land,” he said. “It’s your faith, your personal convictions.”
Abu Sarah, of MEJDI Tours, said much of the tourism in today’s Holy Land fails to capture what can make travel so powerful: the ability to open people’s eyes. MEJDI claims to be one of the originators of “dual-narrative” tours that are jointly led by local Israeli and Palestinian guides, each telling their sides of the story.
Abu Sarah said he once organized a two-night stay for a group of American Jews from Chicago in a Palestinian refugee camp.
“I picked them up two days later. Both the Palestinian families that hosted them and the Jewish travelers were crying,” he said. “I think when you take people and really introduce them to reality, it’s amazing what it’ll do.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
