Article on Mike Huckabee’s spiritual journey re: Israel

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Mike Huckabee’s journey to becoming the U.S. ambassador to Israel began 50 years ago.
The former Arkansas governor, presidential candidate and Fox News host first visited Israel with a friend on a tour of the Middle East not long after graduating from high school. “This is a place I’d never been, but I felt at home,” Huckabee said in a podcast interview at the National Religious Broadcasters convention earlier this year, about his experience as a teen.
“I felt an overwhelming spiritual reality of understanding this is the land that God has given to the Jews,” he told Paul Lanier, board chair of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, for the “Nourish Your Biblical Roots” podcast.

Huckabee said he began hosting his own tours of Israel in the 1980s and has visited the country more than 100 times. He’s a longtime supporter of pro-Israel groups like IFCJ — a nonprofit that seeks to strengthen ties between Christians and Jews and does humanitarian work in Israel — and has helped raise money for the group.

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In his conversation with Lanier, Huckabee compared the origin of Israel to the founding of the United States, saying both were started by people who moved to a new land to find peace and security. He also said the growth of Israel since 1948 is like biblical prophecies come true.
“I’ve seen Scripture come to life,” he said. “The desert has bloomed before my eyes.”

If confirmed by the Senate, Huckabee may be the first political appointee — as opposed to interim career foreign service officers — to come to the U.S. Embassy in Israel from a group known as Christian Zionists, who back Israel for theological as well as geopolitical reasons. (The current U.S. ambassador is Jack Lew, an American Jew who served as secretary of the Treasury under Barack Obama.)

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Many Christian Zionists are pre-millenialists — they view the creation of the modern state of Israel as a necessary precondition for the second coming of Jesus and the apocalyptic purification of the world in the end times. Israel, along with the occupied territories it captured in 1967, is considered given by God to the biblical patriarch Abraham, who is told in the Book of Genesis, “God will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”

Huckabee’s own biblical approach to Israel shows up in his habit of referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” — a way of signaling a belief that the land has always belonged to the Jewish people.

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