Muslim-majority bloc compels US envoy to retract Israel aggrandisement claim over Arab region
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US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has been compelled to retract remarks that exposed his entrenched Christian Zionist convictions and implied connivance with Israel’s occupation and projected aggrandisement across the Arab world, after a concerted remonstration by Arab and Muslim-majority states led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia coalesced into uncompromising diplomatic censure.
The controversy erupted after Huckabee, in an interview with conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson, asserted that it “would be fine if it took it all” when asked whether Israel had a biblical right to expand its borders across what he described as “essentially the entire Middle East,” invoking Old Testament scripture that promises land to the descendants of Abraham between the Euphrates River in Iraq and the Nile River in Egypt.
Such a cartographic reimagining would subsume modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and swathes of Saudi Arabia, and it provoked immediate consternation across the region, where governments construed the remarks as incendiary, revisionist and inimical to the principles of sovereignty enshrined in international law.
In a joint statement dated February 22, foreign ministries from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and the State of Palestine expressed “strong condemnation and profound concern,” while the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council endorsed the démarche.
The signatories argued that the ambassador’s pronouncement contravened the Charter of the United Nations and imperilled regional stability, while also contradicting the de-escalatory vision previously articulated by US President Donald J. Trump and the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, which they said rests upon the creation of a political horizon culminating in an independent Palestinian state.
Confronted with the diplomatic backlash, Huckabee sought to disavow the absolutism of his language, contending on social media that the version posted online had been selectively edited and that his remarks were hyperbolic rather than programmatic; yet his attempt at mitigation was undercut by his reiteration that territorial acquisition in the aftermath of war would constitute “a whole other discussion,” thereby leaving ajar the aperture for expansionism.
The envoy further inflamed tensions by asserting during the interview that “Area C is Israel,” a formulation that appears to repudiate longstanding US opposition to annexation of the occupied West Bank, of which Area C comprises roughly 60 per cent, and whose occupation has repeatedly been deemed illegal by multiple United Nations resolutions and international court rulings.
Rights advocates, including Raed Jarrar of the US-based group DAWN, characterised the comments not as a gaffe but as an ideological exposition incompatible with established US policy, arguing that the ambassador’s continued tenure would corrode American credibility and attenuate its capacity to function as a constructive interlocutor in a region already fraught with volatility.
