By Joel B. Pollak
Incoming U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee had a message for Israel on Thursday evening: “[Y]ou will never be alone again in your fight for freedom and to preserve the country and the land and the heritage that God gave you.”
The message resonated with his pro-Israel audience, given the widespread feeling that President Joe Biden had abandoned Israel in its fight against terror after initially showing support after the October 7, 2023, terror attacks.
Huckabee was addressing the annual gala dinner of the One Israel Fund, which advocates for Israeli sovereignty in the area of Judea and Samara, known as the West Bank.
Judea and Samara are the core of Biblical Israel, but were largely allocated to a future Arab state by the United Nations in 1947 in its partition plan for the British Mandate. Israel accepted the plan, but the Palestinian Arabs, and other Arab states, did not, and they attacked Israel in 1948 when the Jewish state declared independence.
For 19 years, Judea and Samaria were ruled by Jordan, which made no effort to establish a Palestinian state on that territory. In 1967, when the Six Day War broke out, Jordan defied pleas by Israel to stay out of the conflict, and began shelling West Jerusalem. In the subsequent Israeli counterattack, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took eastern Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria.
Israel annexed eastern Jerusalem, which included the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, but hesitated to do the same in Judea and Samara. When Arab states rejected negotiations for peace, Jewish settlers began establishing communities in the area — in some cases, returning to places from which Jews had been expelled in earlier conflicts.
But as the Palestinian national movement gained momentum, Palestinians demanded the area for their own state — though their leaders repeatedly rejected peace deals that would have given them nearly all of the territory.
Given the impasse, some Jews on the political right believe Israel should annex the territory, with Palestinians governing their own towns but Israel sovereign overall.
Critics warn that such an annexation would be seen as illegitimate by the international community, and could create practical challenges for governance, as well as a demographic challenge for Israel, where the Jewish proportion of the population would drop from about 80% to about two-thirds (presuming Gaza is still excluded from the population).
Huckabee, who would be the first evangelical Christian ambassador to Israel, has long argued that Israel should annex Judea and Samaria. Though he has cautioned that he will be bound by the incoming Trump administration’s own policy, he is seen by the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria as a powerful advocate for their cause.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.