Remarks by Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, prompted a storm of condemnation from Arab leaders over the weekend after he suggested that it “would be fine” if Israel took lands stretching across the Middle East from Egypt to Iraq.
Mr. Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and a staunch supporter of Israel, made the comments during a two-hour interview with the provocative right-wing podcaster Tucker Carlson, which aired on Friday.
The ambassador quickly went on to qualify the remarks, and the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem later said they had been taken out of context.
In his conversation with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Huckabee said he believed that God had given the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Mr. Carlson pressed him on exactly what land he was talking about and where its borders ended.
He questioned Mr. Huckabee about Genesis 15, the biblical chapter that promised the descendants of Abraham the lands from Egypt to the Euphrates River, in modern-day Iraq.
Asked if Israel had the right to that land, Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, replied, “It would be fine if they took it all,” spreading out his hands as if to encompass it.
“But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today,” Mr. Huckabee added. “They don’t want to take it over, they’re not asking to take it over,” he added.
Arab governments erupted in fury.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry called the remarks “irresponsible,” saying they “constitute a violation of international law, the Charter of the United Nations and established diplomatic norms.” It called on the U.S. State Department to “clarify its position.”
Jordan’s foreign ministry described Mr. Huckabee’s statements as “absurd and provocative.” Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the secretary general of the League of Arab States, said they contradicted “logic and reason” as well as longstanding U.S. government positions, and that they “serve only to inflame sentiments and stir religious and national emotions.”
The Qatari foreign ministry said 14 Arab and Islamic countries, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, had condemned Mr. Huckabee’s suggestion “that it would be acceptable for Israel to exercise control over territories belonging to Arab states, including the occupied West Bank.”
In the wake of the uproar, the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem said there had been no change in American policy.
“The narrative was based on an edited portion of a response,” it said in an emailed statement to The New York Times. “If one listens to the full context, Ambassador Huckabee clearly says that Israel has no desire to change their current boundaries,” the embassy added.
Mr. Huckabee has long supported Israel taking ownership of the occupied West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In 2017, before he became ambassador, he said that Israel had “title deed” to Judea and Samaria, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names.
“There is no such thing as a West Bank,” Mr. Huckabee said at the time, adding, “There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
President Trump has said he opposes Israeli annexation of West Bank territory. Most of the world considers Israeli settlement in the territory to be a violation of international law.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in 2024 finding Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territory to be “unlawful.”
Mr. Huckabee has made clear that it is Mr. Trump who sets the policy on Israel, not the ambassador. He partially walked back his statement on the biblical vision of a greater Israel when Mr. Tucker sought clarification, but he remained vague about Israel’s borders.
Asked whether he was saying that Israel had a moral right to take over other countries such as Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Mr. Huckabee said, “No, I didn’t say that.” He said he was “not sure it would be” legitimate for Israel to claim those countries.
“Now if they end up getting attacked by all these places and they win that war, and they take that land, OK, that’s a whole other discussion,” he said.
Mr. Carlson has been sharply critical of Israel and has accused it, among other things, of dragging the United States into Middle Eastern wars.
During the podcast, Mr. Carlson suggested that Mr. Huckabee was more interested in representing and defending Israel than the United States.
Mr. Carlson pitched the interview on social media as exposing “the truth about America’s deeply unhealthy relationship with Israel.” He and Mr. Huckabee sparred more over the topic on social media this weekend.
Mr. Carlson posted a short clip from the interview, ending with Mr. Huckabee saying that it would be fine if Israel took all the land. In response, Mr. Huckabee reposted a longer, five-minute clip showing his full response to what he described as “Tucker’s ridiculous line of ‘interrogation.’”
In a longer post on Saturday, Mr. Huckabee described the podcast as “a very twisty and frankly confusing discussion about the meaning of Zionism.”
Isabel Kershner, a senior correspondent for The Times in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
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