Mike Huckabee ignites diplomatic firestorm with remarks on Israel during Tucker Carlson interview

(LifeSiteNews) — When U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee tweeted Tucker Carlson on February 4 with a challenge to interview him in Israel, he probably didn’t expect to spark an international diplomatic uproar by the comments he ended up making in the viral conversation that aired last Friday.

At the time, Carlson had just released interviews of Christian leaders in the region reporting significant mistreatment by the Israeli government that is even more severe in their occupied Palestinian territories.

Additionally, the popular host emphasized the irony of Christians in the U.S. being left in the dark regarding how their government’s virtually unconditional support for Israel is oppressing their fellow Christians in the region.

This apparently struck a nerve with the former governor of Arkansas, causing him to post on X, “Hey @TuckerCarlson instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me?  You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?”

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and ordained Southern Baptist minister, explicitly espouses the destructive ideology and heresy of Christian Zionism, which misconstrues sacred scripture as demanding Jewish control of Middle East lands, serving to fuel ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine over the last several decades.

In this regard, Catholics have always understood that due to the old covenant being completely fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the Church itself — the Mystical Body of Christ — is the reconstituted, elevated and fulfilled Kingdom of Israel until the end of time.

Contrary to this perennial teaching, Ambassador Huckabee instead proposed that the modern apartheid state of 1948 Israel has biblical legitimacy due to God’s promises in the Book of Genesis, which Catholics understand to have always been a preparation for fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

“God gave (the land) through Abraham to a people that he chose. It was a people a place and a purpose,” Huckabee recalled, claiming these promises maintain biblical and divine legitimacy for 1948 Israel today.

Huckabee: ‘It would be fine if they took it all’

Based on these assertions, Carlson sought to probe the U.S. Ambassador regarding the geopolitical implications of his theology by citing Genesis 15:18, which defines the lands promised to Abraham’s descendants to be from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq.

“That would include basically the entire Middle East,” Carlson noticed. “That would be the Levant,” which includes present-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and also “big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.”

“Does Israel have the right to that land?” Carlson asked.

In response, the ambassador declared, “It would be fine if they took it all.”

⚡️🇺🇸🇮🇱BREAKING:

U.S Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee tells Tucker Carlson that ISRAEL HAS THE BIBLICAL RIGHT TO TAKE OVER ALL OF THE MIDDLE EAST.

“It would be fine if they took it all.” pic.twitter.com/NH0ktjPGGv

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws1) February 20, 2026

He then tried to deflect from the relevance of his religious position by asserting, “but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”

“It’s exactly what we’re talking about today,” Carlson retorted. “Do you think it would be fine if the state of Israel took over all that territory?”

But instead of denying the supposed biblical justification for such a crime, the U.S. ambassador to Israel indirectly confirmed it by indicating that while such an ambition is not currently in effect, it may be in the future.

“I don’t think in this particular day and time they’re asking for it,” he responded, suggesting there may be a date and time in the future when they will.

14 nations issue ‘nuclear bomb’ condemnation of Huckabee statements

As described by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, the diplomatic firestorm these statements set off “was like detonating a nuclear bomb,” with 14 nations issuing a sharp rebuke.

These included Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, nuclear-armed Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, Palestine, as well as the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Organization of Islamic States, and the Arab League.

These nations expressed “their strong condemnation and profound concern regarding the statements made by the United States Ambassador to Israel, in which he indicated that it would be acceptable for Israel to exercise control over territories belonging to Arab states, including the occupied West Bank.”

The statement asserted Huckabee’s comments constitute “a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the Charter of the United Nations and pose a grave threat to the security and stability of the region.”

Furthermore, these foreign ministries “reaffirmed that Israel has no sovereignty whatsoever over the Occupied Palestinian Territory or any other occupied Arab lands. They reiterated their firm rejection of any attempts to annex the West Bank or separate it from the Gaza Strip, their strong opposition to the expansion of settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and their categorical rejection of any threat to the sovereignty of Arab states.”

Expansionist ‘Greater Israel’ project supported in Israeli government

Johnson commented that these nations were outraged because Huckabee’s statements “really pulled the mask off” revealing “the heart of this Zionist project” that is “to take the land from the people who’ve lived on it (for many centuries) and to use it only for the benefit of Israel.”

Even from the movement’s origins, early Zionist founder Theodor Herzl visualized a Jewish state “from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates,” which was also reaffirmed by Rabbi Yehuda Fischmann in his 1947 testimony before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.

This expansionist “Greater Israel” project remains supported in the Israeli government even as their military is now occupying parts of Lebanon and Syria while maintaining an illegal 58-year occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Additionally, the Israelis continue to expand their colonies (“settlements”) in these Palestinian regions.

Furthermore, this vision of ongoing expansionism is often represented in symbols of maps, including on one occasion in early 2023 when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at a podium in France displaying such an image, sparking a sharp rebuke from the government of Jordan.

Other such images have been spotted on the uniforms of Israeli soldiers, indicating a confirmation of this expansionist intent firmly remaining in the Zionist vision.

«Really?! So what does THIS patch on an IDF soldier’s uniform mean? A map of “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates—swallowing parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia!

Just a “religious symbol”? Or a blatant declaration of expansionist… pic.twitter.com/s8kXzSI1II