“It would be fine if Israel took it all”

The US Ambassador offered a toxic combination of religious fundamentalism and untruths

“It would be fine if Israel took it all.”
— Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel

By “all”, he meant the entire Middle East.

That wasn’t a fringe extremist preacher on a late-night cable show. That was the official representative of the United States to Israel - a man whose job is to shape and articulate American policy towards a state which depends on the United States for weapons, diplomatic cover, and political backing.

In an extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson, Mike Huckabee humiliates himself, ties himself in knots, fails to answer basic questions, and makes demonstrably false claims about the number of civilians killed in Gaza. But more than that, he reveals something far more important: how deeply embedded religious extremism and supremacist thinking are within the political architecture that underpins Israel’s actions.

Before going further, a note.

There are those who object to citing Tucker Carlson, long associated with the US far right. I profoundly oppose Carlson’s politics. But this is not about platforming him - it is about evidence relating to the worst crime it is possible to commit: genocide.

This interview is documentary and historical evidence of US complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We do not discard evidence because we dislike the journalist who obtained it. If anything, it is a damning indictment of Western media that it is left to someone like Tucker Carlson to extract these admissions.

Had Western media done its job - rigorously holding Western leaders to account - this catastrophe would not have been politically sustainable.

Christian fundamentalism at the heart of power

When Huckabee says it would be “fine” if Israel took the entire Middle East, he is speaking as a hugely powerful Christian fundamentalist who believes the land has been divinely granted.

Again, this is not some random religious crank on a street corner. This is a senior US official with immense influence in the most powerful country on earth.

It is worth considering the double standard.

Islamophobia - open prejudice and hostility toward Muslims - is socially acceptable across much of Western political culture. If a politician in a state hostile to the West invoked Islam to justify aggressive, illegal expansionism, they would be denounced as a dangerous extremist.

Where are the denunciations of Christian extremism?

It sounds strange even to say the phrase. That’s the point. We are dealing here with a Christian fundamentalist in a position of enormous global power, and that is barely even remarked on.

Endorsing military expansionism

Huckabee’s comments are not abstract theology. They offer support from Israel’s patron for its aggressive expansionism.

Israel:

• Illegally occupies the West Bank and has de facto annexed it.

• Occupies much of Gaza, and discusses colonising it.

• Occupies Syrian territory and repeatedly strikes Syria.

• Has repeatedly invaded Lebanon and continues to attack it.

• Has attacked Iran.

• Has carried out strikes in Yemen and committed multiple war crimes as it has done so.

Israeli leaders have explicitly invoked the idea of “Greater Israel.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank, once displayed a map of “Greater Israel” that included Jordan, and declared that Israel would eventually extend to Damascus.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of being on a “historic and spiritual mission” and expressed deep attachment to the vision of the Promised Land.

These are not marginal figures. They are central actors.

Now consider that US officials include those who believe - literally - that Israel has a God-given right to seize land beyond its recognised borders.

This is not fantasy. It is fundamentalist extremism backed up with huge power.

The death toll: what the evidence says

Huckabee claims Israel has killed fewer civilians proportionally than in other examples of urban warfare.

This is false.

The official Gaza Ministry of Health death toll is now over 75,000. But multiple peer-reviewed academic studies conclude that even that figure is a substantial underestimate.

A recent study published in The Lancet - one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals - conducted a population-representative household survey covering 2,000 households and nearly 10,000 individuals between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025.

Its findings:

• 75,200 violent deaths in the first 14 months alone.

• That equates to roughly 3–4% of Gaza’s pre-war population killed violently in just over a year.

• This compared to an official figure of 49,090 violent deaths for that period - over a third lower than the study’s central estimate.

• An additional 8,540 excess non-violent deaths — people who died due to war conditions and would not otherwise have died.

That totals 82,740 deaths in the first 14 months, excluding the months of violence that followed.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research produced a similar estimate for roughly the same period: approximately 78,000 violent deaths by the end of 2024, with a dramatic collapse in life expectancy - down 44% in 2023 and 47% in 2024. Their projection for the first two years ranged between roughly 100,000 and 126,000 violent deaths.

Even The Economist, which supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught, estimated between 77,000 and 109,000 violent deaths by May 2025 - excluding indirect deaths.

In proportional terms, we are looking at 4–5% of the population killed violently in two years.

For comparison:

• In Syria - a war universally regarded as catastrophic - around 2% of the population died over 13 years.

• In Iraq, around 1% over 20 years.

The scale and speed of killing in Gaza has no precedent in these 21st century wars.

No, Israel has not protected civilians

Huckabee goes further. He claims Israel has protected civilians better than any other army engaged in urban warfare - even more than the United States.

There is no evidence to support this.

Airwars — a hugely respected monitoring organisation — examined 606 incidents of civilian harm in the first 25 days of Israel’s genocide.

Their most conservative estimate:

• At least 5,139 civilians killed in those 606 incidents.

• Evidence of Hamas casualties in just 4% of those cases.

• Between 32 and 60 militants killed in total across incidents that killed thousands of civilians.

Huckabee also invokes Kabul as a comparison. There was no equivalent sustained, high-intensity urban battle in Kabul comparable to the bombardment of Gaza - or anything like it. The heaviest fighting in Afghanistan took place in rural provinces.

This is not serious analysis. It is the empty rhetoric of a fundamentalist extremist who has no evidence to back up his assertions, and who is plucking claims out of thin air.

Indeed, leaked Israeli military data reported in Israeli media indicated that approximately 83% of those killed in certain phases were civilians.

The contradictions of religious Zionism

Huckabee discusses the ideological foundation of the state itself - that is God has promised the Jewish people this land. He cannot answer why someone like Benjamin Netanyahu has a right to the land despite being unable to trace his family lineage back to the land, or and not having strong religious conviction.

If the justification for violently displacing Palestinians is that Jewish people have a religious right to the land, you immediately encounter contradictions.

Is the claim religious? Ethnic? Genetic?

If religious - which is Huckabee’s position then what of Jewish Israelis who are secular or atheist?

Roughly one-fifth of Jewish Israelis identify as atheist or non-believing. A substantial proportion never attend synagogue. Only around 30% say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Would such individuals have been recognised as meaningfully “Jewish” under earlier religious definitions? Almost certainly not.

Modern Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity as well as religion. But Huckabee’s argument rests explicitly on theology - that is, a divine, biblical promise. That logic does not sit comfortably with secular Jewish identity.

Then there is history.

Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion himself believed many Palestinians were descended from ancient Jews who had converted over centuries to Christianity and Islam.

Israeli historians such as Shlomo Sand have challenged the idea of a singular, mass exile and emphasised conversion as a central mechanism in Jewish demographic history. In other words, many of today’s Jewish people are descendants of people who converted to Judaism in the Caucasus between the 4th and 13th centuries - not in Palestine long before that.

He notes that Jewish communities existed across the Mediterranean long before the fall of the Second Temple, and many inhabitants of the land remained and later converted.

As a piece headlined ‘Most Palestinians Are Descendants Of Jews’ published by The Times of Israel discussed a decade ago:

The Palestinian Arabs, who are descendants of Jews, are very close to Ashkenazi Jews in their gene makeup.

One Israeli historian interviewed in the Jerusalem Post back in 2009 even said “that he can declare with certainty that nearly 90 percent of all Palestinians are descended from the Jews”.

Once you move away from theological absolutism, the terrain becomes historical, demographic, and messy.

Which is precisely why the argument retreats into divine commandment.

What this interview really reveals

This interview is revealing not because Huckabee is uniquely extreme.

It is revealing because he is not marginal.

He represents the power on which Israel depends: the United States.

What we see is:

• Religious extremism embedded in US state policy.

• Indifference to the worth of Palestinian life.

• A belief in ethnic and religious supremacy.

• A willingness to distort empirical reality to defend it.

And if we want to understand how this catastrophe has been enabled - militarily, diplomatically, ideologically - we have to understand the dynamics within the US elites.

This interview does not simply embarrass Mike Huckabee.

It clarifies what we are up against.