The Palestinian Authority has been waging a demonization campaign against U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, with the latest round of attack coming from Bethlehem’s governor against the diplomat’s remarks about Jews’ rights to the Land of Israel, Palestinian Media Watch said on Wednesday.
The P.A.-run Al-Hayat Al-Jadida daily reported on March 13 that Bethlehem Gov. Muhammad Taha Abu Alia inaugurated an intellectual seminar titled “From Religious Text to Diplomacy: Huckabee and Biblical Israel,” according to the Israel-based watchdog group.
During the event, Abu Alia emphasized his opposition to recent statements made by the U.S. ambassador regarding “the Jews’ right in Palestine,” the report read.
The governor also said that “refuting the Zionist narrative from a religious, historical, and political perspective is among the most important duties of struggle imposed on the Palestinian intellectuals and politicians,” according to the P.A. daily.
Palestinian Media Watch noted that the lecture was sponsored by the anti-Israel NGO International Academic Campaign to End Occupation and Annexation, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that promotes the financial suffocation of the Jewish state.
An “Israeli affairs expert,” Fayez Abbas, appeared on the P.A.’s Palestine This Morning show on Feb. 26, describing Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir as “fascists,” yet “not as extremist as the U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv,” the Palestinian Media Watch statement read.
On Feb. 22, Mahmoud al-Habbash, an adviser to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas, attacked Huckabee on his Facebook page.
The American official’s statements regarding Jews’ right to Israel “are not just a repetition of outdated myths. More than that, they are an expression of moral and political bankruptcy, which again proves the impossibility of achieving peace or stability in the region as long as these patterns of thinking exist, which are saturated with lies and myths that have no connection to truth or history,” al-Habbash wrote, according to Palestinian Media Watch.
The concerted campaign against Huckabee came on the backdrop of his in-person interview with anti-Israel American conservative media figure Tucker Carlson on Feb. 20.
In the interview, Carlson asked Huckabee, a devout Christian, if he believes that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews as promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. The diplomat answered affirmatively, though he later clarified that he was answering from a theological perspective, not according to official U.S. policy.
