“It would be fine if they took it all.”
These words came flying out of the mouth of Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, during his two-hour-plus conversation with Tucker Carlson last week. Huckabee was responding to Carlson, who was quoting Genesis 15, where God promises the descendants of Abraham all the land “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.”
Look at the map.
These rivers bookend land in modern-day Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Carlson asks him if Jewish people are entitled to all of this land.
Mike Huckabee answers matter-of-factly.
It would be fine if they took it all.
What the Huck?
At the beginning of the interview on the first day of Lent, Huckabee explained that a big part of what it means to be a Christian is believing that “all of the bible is the word of the living God.” He is an ordained Southern Baptist minister - which means that he is a bible-believer scripted by supremacy. Not just Christian supremacy in America, but also Jewish supremacy in the Middle East. He claims, as all Zionists do, that Jewish people are entitled to this land because the bible says so.
When Carlson pushes back, Huckabee blurts out this completely asinine question:
If Jews do not have the right to this land, do they have a right to any land?
The only way this sentence could start to make any sense is if Jewish people did not actually have the right to own property in places like New York, L.A., South Florida, and all over the Western world.
Of course, Palestinians had been living on the land now called “Israel” for as long as history has been recorded. So Carlson wants to know if Huckabee believes thatpeople other than Jews are entitled to a homeland too. Carlson asks if the modern-day Irish have a right to Ireland. Huckabee hesitates and says, “As long as they can defend it.”
In Huckabee’s worldview, winning wars is proof that God is on your side. When he says that Israel had to invade Muslim-majority countries in 1956 and 1967 because the Jewish people were attacked, he is lying. Of course, he also does not mention the Nakba of 1948, and with it, the Israeli massacres of dozens of Palestinian villages.
In an attempt to keep Huckabee accountable, Carlson brings up the bible again. This time, he takes issue with Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech a month after October 7 where he extensively quotes I Samuel 15, the story of God commanding the nation of Israel to utterly destroy every Amalekite man, woman and child.
In the genocidal story of Amalek, God punishes Saul for sparing some of the lives of their enemies. Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership have been hellbent on making sure that they do not follow the same path as Saul.
When Carlson brings up the topic of genocide, Huckabee dismissed it. He told Carlson that the IDF has always done everything it can to protect civilians and children. He claimed that the IDF is the most humane military in the history of urban warfare. He said that, if the Israelis really wanted to commit genocide, they could have done it in two-and-a-half hours.
Tucker Carlson could have easily countered this nonsense by citing the report based on classified Israeli military intelligence that came out last summer. It said that 83% of those murdered in Gaza have been civilians.
Having a 17% accuracy rate with the most powerful weapons the world has ever seen – subsidized by US taxpayers – is not humane. It is not even a war. It is what dozens of well-respected human rights organizations call a genocide.
Amalek is a biblical text of terror written by a community constantly oppressed by ancient empires. Scholarship tells us that this story found its final form centuries after the Jews immigrated to the land of the Canaanites. Its revisionist history has an obvious agenda. It comes from one faction of ancient Jewish folks with a highly questionable theology. They worship a might-makes-right god of entitlement.
This is the god of Mike Huckabee and Benjamin Netanyahu, and every other Zionist, Christian, Jewish, or otherwise.
This is the manifest destiny deity codified in the Doctrine of Discovery, the 1493 Papal proclamation that gave European Christian explorers the right to take land from Indigenous peoples all over the world – and to murder them if they resisted.
This is the god of Southern plantations, Nazi concentration camps and South African Bantustans.
This supremacist theology is biblical. Its perspective comes out in passages like I Samuel 15 that are hinged to human hierarchies of value.
This supremacist theology, however, is confronted, throughout the biblical canon, by a multitude of prophetic texts that call the faithful to care, share and bear witness to the truth, particularly when it comes to the most vulnerable people on the planet. There are literally thousands of scriptures that follow the path of living justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with Something Else.
The Zionist god worshipped by tens of millions of American Christians is totally incompatible with the life and teachings of Jesus, who told his disciples that if they truly wanted to be great, they would need to join the least and the last - and tell so much truth to power that they would probably get crucified.
For those of us committed to intimately engaging with the world against this prophetic biblical backdrop, the story of Amalek is sacred. It waves the warning flag and blows the whistle. It holds up a mirror and interrogates us, asking, “Is this you?”
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I watched this entire interview while fasting on the fifth day of Ramadan because I was very curious about what would come up in their conversation. I also watched it so that you wouldn't have to. The whole thing is highly problematic. Both Huckabee and Carlson are Christo-Fascists and American exceptionalists. They are also racist and Islamophobic.
In the interview, they bond over their adoration of Trump, their veneration of Western civilization, and their grave concern that dark-skinned immigrants are taking over.
They have a back and forth – a couple times actually – where they both swear up and down that they believe that every human being is equally a sacred child of God, no matter where they were born or what they believe.
But their claims are absurd. Because for the rest of the interview, it is so obvious that Christians and Americans and white people matter way more than everyone else.
Tucker Carlson started speaking out against Israeli genocidal violence last summer at Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA conference. This was twenty months into the genocide. By then, it was clear that a lot of younger conservatives, including Charlie Kirk, were no longer drinking the Kool-Aid that Mike Huckabee and other Christian Zionists were pouring them.
America First and antisemitism are the foundation of this conservative faction’s growing hatred of Israel. They are enraged that Israel is stealing resources from Americans. It seems pretty clear that Tucker Carlson finally got into this fight because he believes that the existence of Israel no longer benefits Americans and Christians. He believes that Israel has, in fact, taken over America and Christianity.
Tucker Carlson does not see how, for decades, Israel has been the faithful colonial middle-manager in the Middle East, faithfully serving Western interests like the weapons manufacturers, the oil industry, and the Christian Zionists who came to believe (through crazy interpretations of the bible) that Jesus will not return in rapturous glory until a third temple is built in Jerusalem.
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On the same day that Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee sat down for their tense conversation, an American teenager was shot and killed by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. His name is Nasrallah Abu Siyam and he was born in Philadelphia. He was coming to the aid of farmers being attacked by armed settler gangs. Israeli soldiers were right there, watching it all happen.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam was the sixth American citizen murdered by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023.
The next line I write might be cliché and predictable, but it must be written:
How would Western journalists cover this murder if the victim was a Jewish-American, or a white Christian?
I am grateful that Tucker Carlson is spending serious time and energy on exposing the pathetic lies of Zionists, and centering Palestinian voices like Fares Abraham. At least someone with a large platform is.
I just wish popular liberal pundits like Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Heather Cox Richardson, Ezra Klein and the guys from Pod Save America would do the same. The fact that they haven’t – and won’t – is telling.
Many, if not most, American liberals are Zionists too. They might be less patriarchal, less homophobic, and want more diversity, equity and inclusion, but they also believe in Jewish supremacy in the Middle East.
I will never forget when Bill Clinton came out to Michigan a week before the 2024 election to urge Democratic voters not to let the genocide in Gaza dissuade them from voting for Kamala Harris. Clinton said that Jewish people are entitled to Palestinian land because they were there first. He referred to bible stories to justify his claims.
Last week, Tucker Carlson made Mike Huckabee look like the corrupt fool that he is. This is a good thing. But those of us cultivating spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage in this season of escalating authoritarianism need more compelling sources that are actually committed to telling the truth and collective liberation.
We can pay close attention to reports from Palestinian journalists like Mariam Bargouti, Bisan Owda and Abubaker Abed.
We can tune in to independent journalists like Ali Abunimah, Brihana Joy Gray, Marc Lamont Hill, Chris Hedges, Nick Estes, Alan MacLeod, Max Blumenthal, Katie Halper, Krystal Ball, Caitlin Johnstone, Jeremy Scahill and those bantering anti-Zionist Jewish brothers on the Bad Hasbara podcast.
We can also take our cues from Palestinian Christians like Hammam Farah, who fled Gaza during Israel’s illegal blockade and is now working as a therapist in Toronto. His family’s orchards were bulldozed by Israeli soldiers, and his great Aunt was sniped by the IDF a month after October 7.
Let's just say that Hammam Farah's testimony holds a lot more weight than Mike Huckabee's. It's unfortunate that Huck gets all the headlines.
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On the same day that Nasrallah Abu Siyam was murdered, Palestinian Christian Alice Kasiya posted pics to social media of graffiti sprayed on the entrance wall of the Church of St. John in Ein Karem, the birthplace of John the Baptist. The graffiti said “The Messiah (for Jews only)” and “Revenge – King David.”
Alice Kasiya made it clear in her post that these extremist acts do not represent Judaism, but a radical fringe with an alternative, destructive agenda. Palestinian Christians like Alice Kasiya possess the spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage to differentiate. Some of her neighbors who are not Palestinian are committed to a path of living justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. Unfortunately, a lot more of her neighbors are convinced that it would be fine if they took it all.
Rev. Munther Isaac, a Palestinian pastor in Bethlehem, recently said that studying I Kings 21 can help us clarify the painful contrast between how Palestinians and Zionists understand “the Holy Land.” In the bible story, King Ahab covets Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth won’t leave the land. Because the land is an inheritance.
Naboth is entrusted to it.
The land does not belong to him. He belongs to the land.
King Ahab takes the vineyard through power and violence – and God sends the prophet Elijah to confront him. Like Naboth, Palestinians have a relationship with the land that is about stewardship, memory and belonging. Like King Ahab, Zionists are guided by a sense of supremacy, of entitlement, of might makes right.
Pastor Munther points out that Zionists are not just random individuals. We are dealing with a whole system, a whole structure, a whole network of powerful institutions built on an ideology steeped in domination and displacement.
This is not just about Huck and Bibi and other bad actors.
The whole system of Zionism must be confronted and dismantled.
The good news is that Judaism and Christianity are contested concepts. They always have been. Even way back when their scriptures found their final form. The debate over divinity is contained in the canon.
It makes zero sense to say that you believe that all of the bible is the word of the living God. The faith of every Jew and Christian is defined by intention, selection and interpretation. Because the bible is not some sort of self-evident truth.
A lot of Jews and Christians quote the text to support their supremacy stories.
But some Jews and Christians - following the prophetic tradition of Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, John the buck wild baptizer and Jesus of Nazareth - read every single text through the lens of collective liberation.
Because they are committed to living for Something Else.
