Former Governor Mike Huckabee is the new U.S. Ambassador to Israel. In this exclusive interview, Mike talks about his path to becoming the new ambassador, how he got the job, and why he decided to run for President Trump.
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00:05:08.000And so about the best thing I could do is say, now when is this going to be made public?
00:05:13.000He said, well, you'll have a little time to let your family know.
00:05:16.00030 minutes later, it's breaking on Fox News, but that's fine.
00:05:20.000The beautiful thing is, is that, Charlie, it is the only thing that he would have asked me to do that I just had what I call an Isaiah moment.
00:05:39.000So he calls you, you're kind of thrown into this, and it's a very, very high-stakes ambassadorship just by default.
00:05:48.000By definitionally, given all of the regional actors and the malevolence, but especially right now, given the high stakes post-October 7th, I'm sure you've had a fair amount of time to think and reflect on America's role and its representing American interests in Israel.
00:06:05.000Have you been to Israel since that phone call?
00:06:15.000I've never been through anything quite like it.
00:06:18.000I've talked repeatedly to families who were there, some of whom had family members murdered.
00:06:26.000Dealt with a lot of hostage families, talked with them, spent time with them.
00:06:29.000I have dealt with IDF soldiers who have been in the heart of battle in Gaza, as well as up on the Lebanese border in Hezbollah.
00:06:36.000I've been to both theaters of the war.
00:06:39.000And it's just hard for people to understand, and most Americans do not fully grasp, What Hamas did on October the 7th, how vicious, how savage, how absolutely uncivilized their massacre of innocent civilians really turned out to be.
00:06:57.000And I just don't want anyone to ever say, well, yeah, they did some bad things, they came over and they killed some people, but, you know, you can make peace with them and work something.
00:07:12.000They're not a legitimate organization of anything other than savages.
00:07:16.000And they've delighted in what they did to the point that the reason we know what they did is because they wore helmets with GoPro cameras, videotaped their slaughter of babies and women, and then celebrated it, openly celebrated it.
00:07:34.000And when they sent the word back into Gaza, there was dancing in the streets and celebration over it.
00:07:43.000So the president has been very clear that Hamas cannot govern Gaza again, and I appreciate that.
00:07:52.000His election certainly has broken open getting some of the hostages back, but the fact that it's taken over 480 days to move that needle is just heartbreaking.
00:08:04.000Are there still people that are still being held hostage?
00:08:44.000I think the pressure to get the hostages home is so intense that they feel like they have to get that done.
00:08:52.000But in the agreement that they made with the ceasefire, it's very clear that Israel has every right to continue their military operation if in any way Hamas changes the deal, doesn't fulfill the deal, and ultimately the deal has to be, That they're never going to govern Gaza again.
00:09:11.000And, you know, people talk about a Palestinian state, and I've said, well, we've had one.
00:10:57.000And it's something that some of the people in his first term never understood.
00:11:01.000They thought that they had been elected to something, and they were going rogue on his policies.
00:11:06.000So all of us who have been appointed by the president, and if we require Senate confirmation, as my position does, if the Senate confirms, then I do not go with, this is the Mike Huckabee policy.
00:13:30.000They're surrounded by totalitarian governments whose people do not have free speech, who cannot resist or disagree with the government, and who don't get to pick who leads them.
00:13:42.000This is a nation, the only real, genuine democracy between Africa and the Pacific that we can really count on as being reflective of a government that mirrors our own.
00:13:54.000It's also a government that shares with us military intelligence, technology, innovations.
00:14:01.000Most people don't realize that if it weren't for the Israelis, they wouldn't have a cell phone.
00:14:04.000You know, the whole idea of the SIM card, where did that come from?
00:14:20.000The camera that people swallow that lets the doctors look at their insides.
00:14:24.000Some of the most amazing medical technologies were created in what some will call the startup nation, Israel.
00:14:31.000They have more Nobel science prizes in Israel than any other country on earth.
00:14:37.000And if you think about this tiny little sliver of land the size of New Jersey, and it's only 16 million people, the whole country, and yet their innovations in science and technology are stunning.
00:15:45.000If you recognize that the Jewish people are unapologetically people of the book, people who believe that God gave them their land and their heritage and his law, then if you hate that law and you hate the idea that God really does exist and that we are to worship and obey him, then you hate the people who...
00:16:13.000That's the only conclusion I can come to, Charlie.
00:16:43.000Well, they didn't get it from God, who said there were two.
00:16:47.000So if you take the whole body of Jewish thought, Jewish faith, Jewish tradition, it all goes back to there is a God, and here's what he said, and if we live according to his rules...
00:17:43.000In this story, the twins learn about their rights, that true laws protect people, and that we should help others, and that stealing is always wrong.
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00:18:13.000Young Christians are also increasingly either neutral or, I want to say anti, but indifferent towards Israel.
00:18:20.000We could talk about why that is, or conjecture, but a better question is, why should biblically Christians care about Israel, which seems to be a rather simple answer.
00:18:33.000You know, Genesis 12 says, and I'm a person in the book, Charlie.
00:18:39.000It says, if you bless Israel, you'll be blessed, and if you curse Israel, you're going to be cursed.
00:18:44.000Now, there are a lot of people that don't believe the Scripture, or they don't believe that Old Testament passages still live for today, and that we can kind of pick and choose like we're going through the cafeteria line.
00:18:55.000But for those of us who are what I would call Bible-centered believers, We don't have the option of picking and choosing.
00:19:03.000We accept it because it's the Word of God.
00:19:07.000But what troubles me is that many young people have been raised in churches that kind of gave them a soft shoe on the Bible.
00:19:15.000They went to colleges and universities that told them that, yeah, these things were once important, but they're not anymore.
00:19:24.000And there also have been universities where Middle East studies programs have been fully funded.
00:19:30.000By Islamic nations who have spent billions of dollars brainwashing the little darlings whose parents sent them to college thinking they were going to learn some wonderful things about the world, but they basically turned into almost jihadists.
00:19:46.000And they're out now marching in the streets carrying Hamas flags and saying from the river to the sea, and they have no idea what they're even talking about.
00:19:54.000And I've often said a trip to Israel, seeing it for themselves.
00:21:29.000And frankly, back then, it was even far more graphic.
00:21:33.000They kind of toned it down because so many Jewish people were traumatized.
00:21:38.000By what they saw of what happened in the Holocaust.
00:21:41.000But I took Sarah and I walked her through and her mother and I decided that if it got too emotional for her, too overwhelming, that I would take her out.
00:21:51.000I wanted her to understand what happens when people utterly reject God, they become their own God, and what is it that they are capable of doing to other human beings?
00:22:03.000And up until October 7th, the Holocaust was the most...
00:22:07.000Graphic way of an educated, enlightened people.
00:22:09.000Let's not forget, these were not tribal people.
00:22:12.000The Germans who created the Third Reich, who did this to Jewish people and to others as well, they were the most advanced, scientifically brilliant people on the planet, more than folks in the U.S. The great theologians of the world were in Germany.
00:22:34.000This was not a depraved society, but they gave themselves over to depravity.
00:22:42.000And what they did to the Jewish people and to people of infirmity and people who maybe had an ethnicity they didn't want to experience, it's so unthinkable.
00:22:53.000Well, I took Sarah through there, and when we came to the end of Yad Vashem, having seen the pictures and just watched what happened, There was a guest book where you sign when you leave, and you put your name and address, and then there's a place for comments.
00:23:07.000She had reached up in my pocket, took the pen from my pocket, and she wrote in her 11-year-old scrawl of a handwriting, her name and her address, and then she paused, and where it said for comments, I watched over her shoulder to see, what would she say?
00:23:24.000Because I wanted to understand, did she get it?
00:23:43.000It was inconceivable to her as an 11-year-old child that these atrocities could happen and that people would simply look the other way and pretend that it didn't matter.
00:23:55.000That shaped her in a way that I watch almost every day as her tenure as governor goes forth, and I'm thinking that spine, that sense of courage, that sense of clearly delineating right versus wrong, I know where that came from.
00:24:13.000And it happened in that day in Yad Vashem when she was 11 years old.
00:24:16.000Can you speak to just some of the people you've brought to Israel?
00:24:27.000I've seen people who came having lost a spouse or a child within the year, and it was a point of closure.
00:24:35.000And one of the things I've always been amazed by, and I'll tell the group when I get them there, somewhere along this trip, there's going to be a moment, and it'll be different for each one of you.
00:24:53.000But somewhere on this trip, God is going to show up in your life, and He's going to get all over you, and it's going to be a transformational moment.
00:25:03.000I don't know why He's going to show up when He does and what He's going to be telling you.
00:26:52.000My daughter was working at the White House as press secretary.
00:26:55.000President Trump announced he was going to move the embassy.
00:26:58.000Every world leader, and I mean every world leader, no exceptions, Begged him not to do it.
00:27:05.000Everyone in the State Department begged him not to do it.
00:27:08.000Most of his staff begged him not to do it.
00:27:11.000Members of Congress who publicly said they wanted to move the embassy, oh, yeah, move the embassy, quietly and privately went to him and said, don't do it.
00:28:10.000With President Donald Trump now back in the White House, we're all excited about big changes ahead, which will make America great again.
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00:29:32.000You going into this role, there are existential forces that want Israel to be eliminated from the face of the earth.
00:29:39.000Iran being one of them, but not limited to them.
00:29:43.000And so I really believe that in some ways your life's work is almost culminating in this role.
00:29:48.000Do you feel that, that it has been almost a secret preparation for you for this?
00:29:53.000Not something that you were intentionally striving for?
00:29:55.000Yeah, it wasn't I fill out an application.
00:29:58.000But quite frankly, since my childhood, I mean, I can now look back and see this pathway.
00:30:04.000And I really feel like that it is a God thing.
00:30:33.000And it took us a few weeks to kind of get used to the idea we're going to be packing up and moving.
00:30:40.000Halfway around the world and figuring out how to get our dogs over there, you know, the important things.
00:30:46.000But then there was a moment at which it was very clear God just turned our hearts and set our hearts toward Jerusalem and toward this mission, and that's how we both see it.
00:30:57.000We are being sent on a mission from our country that we love, from our president that we love, to a land that we have come to love and respect and appreciate.
00:31:07.000And feel a biblical sense of place for.
00:31:11.000So all of those things that have come together, and especially after these many visits of 52-plus years.
00:31:18.000The last thing I want to talk about a little more broad is looking more at America and less about Israel.
00:31:49.000He's gotten more done in 100 hours of his first few moments than most presidents do in 100 days or, my gosh, for their entire four-year, eight-year term.
00:32:00.000But here's what I think people are missing.
00:32:03.000If President Trump had been re-elected in 2020, And I think he should have been, and perhaps he was.
00:32:10.000But let's just say, had he been, the extraordinary pressure that had already been pushed on him, the nonsense of impeachments and criminal indictments and all of this stuff, it would have been a tough row to hoe for those second four years.
00:32:40.000These are people who did things that even sane Democrats looked at and said, that's crazy.
00:32:45.000What do you mean that a boy, 18, can go into a girl's locker room, take his clothes off, and the girls are supposed to take theirs off in that same locker room and not feel like that's strange?
00:32:57.000I mean, we were living in crazy times.
00:33:00.000Inflation out of control and the government telling us, it's great.
00:33:27.000The second thing, President Trump has four years to plan, to envision, to develop the kind of government will turn this around and get America back on track.
00:33:37.000And suddenly the America First concept of stopping the insanity of open borders, transgenderism, endless wars, schizophrenic foreign policy that one day says to Israel, we're with you 100% the next day, you better do it our way or we pull our support from you.
00:35:43.000And I said, if you look for him to be on the horizontal spectrum, left, right, and where on that spectrum, you're going to miss the whole thing.