The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. The Trump administration appointee and former Arkansas governor discussed with Carlson interpretations of Old Testament scripture within the US Christian nationalist movement.
Carlson – who recently made disputed claims that he was detained at Tel Aviv airport in Israel – asked Huckabee about a biblical verse in which God promises Abraham that his descendants will receive land “from the wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites”.
Carlson pointed out that this area in modern geography would include “like, basically the entire Middle East”.
“The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon – it’d also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said.
Huckabee said: “I’m not sure it would go that far, but it would be a big piece of land.”
He continued: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.”
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