International condemnation of Israel for its nearly two-year-long war in Gaza is growing. Outrage over starvation in the enclave has led to calls from Israel’s allies for a Palestinian state. The U.N. secretary general said the situation was “a moral crisis that is challenging the global conscience.”
And yet there are few more passionate defenders of the country right now than Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a Baptist minister and the first evangelical Christian to serve in the role.
Even after his boss, President Trump, broke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza, Mr. Huckabee did not.
“There is hunger and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed,” Mr. Huckabee said this past week at his official residence in central Jerusalem. But, he said, “it’s not like Sudan or Rwanda or other places where there has been mass starvation.” The Gaza Health Ministry has said scores of people, including many children, have died of malnutrition. It is not clear how many also had other illnesses.
Mr. Huckabee defended the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an aid group led by his longtime friend Johnnie Moore, another evangelical Christian. The group, backed by Israel and run largely by U.S. contractors, has been widely criticized for shootings by Israeli troops near its food distribution sites.
Despite that, Mr. Huckabee, a former presidential candidate, said “the process has actually been quite successful.” Like the Israelis, he blamed the United Nations for not trucking in more aid, while the United Nations blames Israeli miliary restrictions for hampering its ability to operate in Gaza.
On Friday, under heavy security, Mr. Huckabee accompanied Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, on a visit to a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site to “learn the truth” about its food distribution in Gaza, he said in a post on social media. He said he and Mr. Witkoff were briefed by the Israeli military and “spoke to folks on the ground,” without clarifying who.
Local health officials estimate that more than 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, in figures that do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killed nearly 1,200 people, and roughly 250 people were taken hostage.
“Where’s the outcry for Hamas?” Mr. Huckabee said at his residence. Last week, he termed it “disgusting” that more than two dozen nations, including American allies, condemned Israel’s “drip-feeding” of aid to Gaza.
He dismissed waning support for Israel as “not long term” among some evangelicals and Republicans, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the first Republican in Congress to describe the situation in Gaza as a “genocide.”
‘Worm Food’
Mr. Huckabee, who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses as a conservative who did not appear to be angry at anyone, was affable and relatively forthcoming in an hourlong interview last month in his office at the spartan U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Grayer than in his presidential candidate days and sporting a white beard, Mr. Huckabee, 69, spoke about Israel, his new job and his faith.
“I mean, what is the purpose of life, if, when it’s over, we just become worm food?” he said. “I’d like to think that there’s a little more to it than that. If there’s such a finality and there’s nothing beyond this life, then all of our attempts to live with a moral code, with a sense of owing other people our best, not our worst, then it has no meaning.”
Mr. Huckabee’s first trip to Israel was with a friend in 1973, when he was 17 and, as he remembers it, there were still old Russian cars on the roads and sheep and donkeys in Jerusalem.
The country, decades away from the economic powerhouse it would become, had an instant hold on the awed teenager from Hope, Ark. “It was spiritual for me,” Mr. Huckabee said, “to be in the places that I had read about my whole life from the Bible.”
Over the next half-century, he joined the ministry, served as governor of Arkansas, ran twice for president and made 100 more trips to Israel, many as the leader of Christian groups with packed Holy Land itineraries. “We ran where Jesus walked,” Mr. Huckabee said.
Today, his appointment is a triumph for America’s Christian conservatives, a powerful part of Mr. Trump’s political base, who have long embraced Israel as the land that God promised to the Jews in the Bible. Many also see Israel as central to a biblical prophecy they believe will usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
Mr. Huckabee tends to them. In mid-July, he sent an angry letter to Israel’s interior minister complaining about a bureaucratic holdup of visas to Israel for American evangelical groups, which, Mr. Huckabee noted, were “responsible for contributing millions of dollars to combat antisemitism and tangible support for Israeli causes.” The situation was resolved after he threatened “reciprocal treatment” for Israelis seeking visas to the United States.
Mr. Huckabee is also something of a gift from the Trump administration to Mr. Netanyahu, who is facing ever greater pressure to end the war in Gaza.
Two weeks ago, he turned up at Mr. Netanyahu’s corruption trial and, in an unusual intervention that he called “an act of friendship,” accused the judges overseeing the trial of bias.
“It’s an unprecedented thing that in the midst of holding office, during an incredibly tense time, that you would spend a lot of your time — as our president had to do — sitting in a courtroom, often before judges who are totally unfair,” he said. (Last month, Mr. Trump posted on social media that Mr. Netanyahu’s trial should be “CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY.”)
Mr. Huckabee, who has long supported Jewish settlements in the West Bank and who said in 2008 that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” has made some attempts to reach out to Palestinians.
He recently met with Hussein al-Sheikh, the No. 2 leader of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’s rival, which administers parts of the West Bank. He has also called on Israel to investigate the death of a 20-year-old Palestinian American citizen in a clash with Israeli settlers. Mr. Huckabee termed the killing a “criminal and terrorist act.”
Through it all, he has been careful to massage his audience of one.
“God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential president in a century—maybe ever,” Mr. Huckabee wrote in a text to Mr. Trump that the White House released five days before the president made the decision to bomb nuclear facilities in Iran. “You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice.”
Nowhere Else to Go
Mr. Huckabee arrived in Israel in April after a near party-line confirmation vote (only one Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, supported him) for what has always been one of the more stressful U.S. ambassadorships.
He spent an hour recently on the phone with the mother of one of the hostages still held in Gaza. She talked to him about her son. “I can’t fix it,” Mr. Huckabee said. “I wish I could.” The least he could do, he said, was to “listen, just listen.”
Two months after he arrived in Jerusalem, Israel launched airstrikes on Iran and the enemies fought a 12-day war. There were nightly air-raid alerts in Israel because of incoming missiles from Iran. Most were intercepted, but some got through, and 28 people in the country died. (Israel’s barrages on Iran were more intense and killed 610 people, according to Iran’s Health Ministry.)
Mr. Huckabee, like virtually everyone else in Israel, spent hours in a fortified safe room. His was the small laundry room of the ambassador’s residence, where he retreated often multiple times a night with his wife, security detail and two dogs. “I was a zombie,” he said.
As for Israelis, he said, “every morning they wake up knowing that people want to kill them.” He quoted Golda Meir, who as Israel’s prime minister was said to have told a young Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., just before the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, that Israelis had a secret weapon: “We have nowhere else to go.”
Critics of Israel have said the same of Palestinians in Gaza, whose movements were already heavily restricted before Oct. 7, and who have since been mostly prevented from leaving the enclave’s 141-square-mile strip of land.
In June, Mr. Huckabee told the BBC that it should be up to “Muslim countries” to create a Palestinian state on their territory in the Middle East because they “have 644 times the amount of land” than that controlled by Israel. The State Department’s spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said that Mr. Huckabee “certainly speaks for himself.”
In the interview at the embassy, Mr. Huckabee did not wade into the maelstrom. “I don’t know,” he said when asked where a Palestinian state should be. “It’s a tough question,” he added. “Are you going to put two people on top of each other?”
Mr. Huckabee has not been involved directly in the on-again, off-again Gaza cease-fire talks with Hamas that have included Mr. Witkoff and Ron Dermer, Mr. Netanyahu’s closest adviser. He said he deals regularly with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was his Florida campaign co-chairman during his 2008 presidential run.
His unique value as ambassador, at least in the view of his supporters in Jerusalem and Washington, is his close relationship with the Israeli leadership and his decades-long ties to the country. “He’s been bringing busloads of evangelicals to Israel twice a year,” said Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to Washington. “He’s more than a household name, he’s a household guest. That has engendered deep trust.”
Chip Saltsman, Mr. Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, said that when he was in Israel with Mr. Huckabee in 2015, he saw firsthand his longtime ties to the country. “It was akin to traveling with a B-level rock star,” he said. “We didn’t have all the trappings of motorcades and security guys, but wherever we went, people stopped him.”
Oded Revivi, who was the mayor of the Israeli settlement of Efrat in 2018 when Mr. Huckabee said he wanted to buy a “holiday home” there, remembered how a right-wing member of the Israeli Parliament asked him after a meeting with Mr. Huckabee, “Why don’t Israeli politicians talk with as much enthusiasm about the state of Israel as Huckabee?”
But the Rev. Jack Sara, an evangelical Palestinian who is the president of Bethlehem Bible College in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said he was disappointed he had not heard from Mr. Huckabee.
“We are not on his radar,” Mr. Sara said. “We feel ignored.”
In March, more than 65 leftist, faith-based and human rights organizations, including Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups, urged the Senate to reject Mr. Huckabee’s nomination as ambassador to Israel. They said that he was unfit to serve given “his extreme views supporting the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians,” and that “his appointment would embolden those who oppose peace and fuel further division, rather than encouraging constructive dialogue and understanding.”
‘Unholy Alliance’
Five years ago, in the documentary “’Til Kingdom Come,” the Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein explored what she called the “unholy alliance” between American evangelicals and religious Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Focusing on a church in Kentucky, Ms. Zinshtein showed how evangelicals lavish money and political support on the settlers, which she argued helps them in their takeover of the West Bank. In return, evangelicals come closer to fulfilling the End Times prophecy that the Second Coming of Christ cannot occur without the return of all Jews to the Holy Land.
The prophecy then envisions seven years of war or “tribulation,” after which Jews must accept Jesus or be condemned to hell. Evangelicals and right-wing Israelis are shown in the film agreeing to disagree on the End Times while engaging in a relationship of mutual self-interest.
In an interview, Ms. Zinshtein recalled how she was puzzled when American evangelicals told her they loved her until someone explained: “You are the key. Without you, Jesus won’t come back.”
Not all evangelicals believe in the prophecy, and Mr. Huckabee does not weigh in on it. “I knew a lot more about the End Times when I was 18,” he said. “But the older I get, the less I know, because it’s one of those things that’s a mystery of God.”
Michael Makovsky, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, shrugs off the prophecy. His view, he said, is that Israel needs all of the friends it can get, and American evangelicals are a potent source of philanthropic and political support.
In February 2016, Mr. Huckabee dropped out of his second presidential race after finishing ninth in Iowa. By the time Mr. Trump called in 2024 to tell him he wanted him as ambassador to Israel, Mr. Huckabee was the host of a television show on the Christian-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, appeared regularly on Fox and Newsmax and maintained a travel business that took people to Israel.
He and his wife, Janet, lived outside Little Rock, Ark., close to their two sons and a daughter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is now governor of Arkansas.
“It was a good life,” Mr. Huckabee said. “I didn’t need a federal job.”
But Israel was different. That job he wanted. “I feel like I’m getting an opportunity to serve my country, and even serve my faith,” he said.
Of course, there is the precarious nature of the work.
“I tell people every day I wake up and I look at the president’s tweets,” Mr. Huckabee said, “to see if I’ve been fired.”
Adam Rasgon and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
Elisabeth Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The Times. She was most recently Washington bureau chief. Previously she covered the Pentagon, the White House, the 2008 McCain campaign and City Hall for The Times.
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