Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee reaffirmed America’s “unbreakable bond” with Israel and warned that Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon,” speaking during a keynote address at the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem on Sunday.
Introduced by JNS CEO and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Alex Traiman, Huckabee opened his remarks by reminding the audience that his first speech as a new ambassador last year was at the inaugural JNS Policy Summit. He joked that he checked Trump’s social media “to make sure that this isn’t my last speech.”
Speaking to policymakers, journalists and supporters of the Jewish state, the former governor of Arkansas sought to ease concerns about U.S.-Israel ties, emphasizing that President Donald Trump remains firmly committed to the Jewish state’s security and maintains a close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The one thing that I’ve always heard him say, always, and I’ve always seen him do, is that America has an unbreakable bond with the State of Israel, and I trust that he means what he says,” Huckabee said of Trump, adding that the president has been consistent in pledging to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities and to curb its support for regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Huckabee pointed to past Trump administration decisions, including recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy to the city and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, as evidence of that commitment.
Addressing the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Huckabee that the best way to counter Tehran’s regional terror proxies is to “turn off the spigot at the source.”
The ambassador said that “if we can get peace, wonderful, but even this afternoon the president issued very clear understandings to the Iranians that if they think that the United States is going to fold and collapse and let them have their way, he has made it clear that he will do it [go to war]. And what he said, well, it’s words that, I don’t use those words, folks, even in private, and certainly not in public.”
Huckabee recalled being in Washington recently and being confronted by “pro-Hamas crazy people,” and after exiting the situation, saying, “I can’t wait to get out of this crazy town and get back to Jerusalem where I feel safe.”
He called Israel’s capital a “remarkable city” that he is “grateful” to live in as he represents the U.S.
In discussing illustrations of the profound U.S.-Israel ties, he cited examples such as founders of America wanting to put the parting of the Red Sea as the seal of America and that in the House of Representatives there is a marble bas-relief portrait plaque of Moses. “Our history is tied more to Mount Sinai than it is Athens or Rome. It’s tied to neither of them. It’s tied to Israel,” he said to applause.
Huckabee, a Baptist minister, said that the 3,800-year continuity of the Jewish people “from the time God said to Abraham I’m going to make you a great people, through you the world will be blessed. When our founders understood, they understood it in such a way that even in our Declaration of Independence we made very clear that rights don’t come from government, they come from God. They come from the creator.
“And where did they get that notion? They got it all the way back to this very city in Jerusalem. They got it clearly from the time of an unbroken history of the Jewish people, having been connected to God and being a light to the world.
“And I want there to be no misunderstandings. Americans, whether they understand it or not, need to be grateful to God for the Jewish people and the foundation upon which freedom and the sanctity of the individual was founded, because that is what separates our values from the values of totalitarianism and dictatorship. I want no part of that. I like freedom and the heart, the soul, the genesis of that came from right here in this land. Let us never be apologetic for it,” Huckabee said.
