"Without Israel, there would be no America": Huckabee's West Bank speech and the theology of US empire

On the evening of 16 June 2026, in a conference hall in the occupied West Bank, the United States ambassador to Israel told his audience that the country he represents could not exist in its present form without the Jewish state. The venue was the International Conference on Israeli Heritage in Judea and Samaria — a settler-heritage gathering held in territory captured by Israel in 1967 and still claimed as ancestral Jewish homeland by the organisers. The speaker was Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist pastor whom President Donald Trump installed in Tel Aviv in 2024. The line, captured on video and circulated by regional outlets within hours, was: "Without Israel, there would be no America."

A day earlier, the inverse formula had come from the other end of the relationship. The same week, Trump himself told reporters that without the United States there would be no Israel — a more familiar formulation, deployed by every US president since at least Harry Truman to remind an Israeli audience who holds the bigger arsenal. The pairing, in 24 hours, captured the full spectrum of how Washington now talks about the alliance in the second Trump term: a strategic argument about dependence balanced against a theological one about shared destiny. The two sentences are not contradictory. They are the same sentence, in two directions.

A theology of empire, spoken aloud

The Cradle, the Beirut-based outlet that distributed the conference video, framed Huckabee's remarks as part of a wider settler movement's effort to anchor the US relationship in covenant rather than in cold-war realpolitik. That framing is not hard to defend. Huckabee is not a career diplomat. He is a former chairman of the National Governors Association, a two-time Republican presidential candidate, the host of a Trinity Broadcasting Network talk show, and — by his own description — a "biblical literalist" who has spent four decades in Baptist pews and on Baptist platforms. His appointment in 2024 was itself the message: Washington was sending to Tel Aviv not a negotiator but a witness.

The conference setting reinforced the point. "Heritage in Judea and Samaria" is the settler movement's preferred term for the West Bank — a deliberate echo of the biblical names used in Jewish scripture for the heartland between Jerusalem and the Jordan River. Holding an international conference on that heritage, in that geography, with a US ambassador as the headline speaker, is itself an act of diplomatic signalling: the United States is prepared to be seen celebrating Israeli civilian and cultural life on land that the rest of the world treats, formally, as occupied territory subject to a two-state framework.

The line itself is more interesting than the venue. "Without Israel, there would be no America" is not a foreign-policy argument. It is a claim about the moral constitution of the United States — a country founded, in Huckabee's telling, on a covenantal premise that requires Israel as its proof. Versions of that claim have circulated in American evangelicalism since at least the postwar period, when premillennial dispensationalists began reading Cold War politics as a continuation of biblical prophecy. In that reading, the regathering of Jews in the Holy Land is a precondition for the Second Coming; the United States, as the most powerful gentile state, has a divinely appointed role as protector of that regathering. The premise of a 2026 ambassador saying this from a settlement-stage lectern, on camera, is that the theology has migrated from Bible-belt pulpits into the diplomatic core.

What "without Israel" actually means, in plain numbers

It is worth setting the rhetorical claim against the material relationship, because the two have drifted sharply. The United States is, by every available measure, the senior partner. Israel receives roughly $3.8 billion a year in annual Foreign Military Financing under the 2016 memorandum of understanding — that figure was renewed in the early months of the second Trump administration. The US is the sole permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to vote consistently against scrutiny of Israeli conduct in the occupied territories; it has used the veto on related resolutions more than fifty times, more than on any other single question. American weapons and American diplomatic cover are, by any honest accounting, what allows Israel to maintain the settlement enterprise that the conference was celebrating.

The reverse claim — that Israel sustains the United States — does not survive contact with the balance sheet. The US economy is roughly 45 times the size of Israel's. US global defence spending exceeds the next ten national defence budgets combined. Israel is, however, a force multiplier: a partner with first-rate intelligence services, an air force that has conducted strikes across the Middle East without US loss of life, a defence industry that has become a top-tier arms exporter, and a domestic political consensus in Washington that resists almost any pressure to condition aid. In material terms, the dependency runs one way. What the covenantal framing substitutes for that asymmetry is a different kind of legitimacy — one that cannot be voted down in Congress and cannot be costed in the Pentagon's spreadsheet.

The two-state language is gone — but so is the annexation language

The disappearance of two-state language from official US diplomacy is the most consequential domestic-political fact of the last three years. The Trump administration's first term produced the Abraham Accords — the normalisation agreements between Israel and four Arab states — and left the Palestinian question formally unaddressed. The second term has accelerated that. The US has not pushed for a Palestinian state in any recent multilateral setting; the language has not appeared in joint statements with European partners; the Palestinian Authority is treated, when it is treated at all, as a security subcontractor rather than a negotiating counterpart.

What has replaced the two-state language is not a one-state annexation plan. There is no formal US endorsement of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, and the conference speech — for all its theological freight — is careful not to say that. The shift is more subtle: a refusal to assign a clock to the occupation, a refusal to condition aid on settlement restraint, and a willingness to send the ambassador to the settlements as a guest of honour. The cumulative effect is to make the de facto permanent. The conference that Huckabee addressed is part of an architecture designed to normalise permanence — heritage claims, archaeological sites, tourism routes, cultural registers — so that when the de jure moment arrives, the ground has already been laid.

European and most Arab-state governments have so far declined to match that tempo. France, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission continue to refer publicly to a two-state framework and to oppose settlement expansion. Saudi Arabia, the prize of the next phase of normalisation, has tied any further movement to a credible Palestinian track — a position reiterated by Riyadh at the most recent Arab League summit. The result is a transatlantic split inside the Western alliance on the language of the conflict that runs deeper than at any point since the 1970s.

The evangelical tail, wagging the foreign-policy dog

Huckabee's appointment was a deliberate answer to a domestic political question. The Republican Party's electoral coalition now depends, in decisive measure, on the roughly 60 million American adults who identify as evangelical or born-again Christian. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute and Pew has repeatedly shown that white evangelical Protestants are the most reliably pro-settler, pro-annexation demographic in the US — more so even than Orthodox Jewish Americans, who are themselves a small slice of the electorate. Sending a former Baptist pastor with a lifetime of end-times preaching to the ambassador's residence in Tel Aviv is a way of telling that coalition, in their own language, that the administration is serious.

The payoff is real but conditional. The same coalition is sceptical of foreign aid as a category, sceptical of multilateral institutions, and ambivalent about the wars Israel actually fights in Gaza and Lebanon. A theology of shared destiny is a better fit than a strategic-utility argument for the prime-time Fox News audience. But it carries a price. The State Department's professional cadres read Huckabee's conference appearance as a green light to disengage from the long-skeptical middle: the career diplomats, the Egypt- and Jordan-stationed officers, the interagency process that has historically produced 25-year frameworks rather than photo opportunities. The decline of that middle, the people who actually wrote the Camp David and Oslo architecture, is the under-acknowledged US contribution to the current impasse.

Stakes, over three horizons

The shortest-horizon consequence is diplomatic. Every US ambassador in the region now operates in a more polarised environment. The Palestinian Authority can credibly tell any future US administration that Washington has already chosen; the Arab states that have signed the Abraham Accords have less, not more, cover to expand normalisation; and the European allies that have run on parallel tracks are quietly building their own architecture in case the US one goes silent. The Conference on Israeli Heritage in Judea and Samaria was, in this reading, a multilateral event with bilateral costs.

The medium-horizon consequence is demographic and legal. Settler population in the West Bank now stands at well over half a million — present in clusters that are not contiguous and that no plausible territorial exchange can disaggregate. Every year of US ambivalence about the legal status of those communities is a year in which the two-state option loses a layer of feasibility and the one-state reality gains a layer of permanence. Huckabee's presence on a settlement-stage lectern, framed as it was in civilisational language, accelerates that process by removing one more layer of plausible US mediation.

The longest-horizon consequence is the one Huckabee was, in his own way, naming. A US foreign policy grounded in covenantal theology rather than national interest is a foreign policy that cannot be renegotiated by the next administration, the next Congress, or the next generation of voters. It binds. That is its appeal to the people who promote it, and it is the feature that should give pause to anyone who treats American foreign policy as the swing variable in Middle Eastern politics. The settlement project and the theology that protects it are now built to outlast the electoral cycle. Whether the wider American public — including the younger evangelical cohort now coming of age — shares that theology for another generation is the open question. The conference video is, in that sense, less an event than a milestone on a longer road.

— A note on framing: Monexus's coverage of Israel and Palestine treats the occupied West Bank as occupied territory under international law, reports Palestinian civilian harm and Israeli security concerns as first-order facts, and resists the false symmetry of a "both-sides" reading. This piece is a long read on a US diplomatic moment; it does not adjudicate the legal status of settlements, which the international community has addressed repeatedly. The Cradle's distribution of the conference video made the speech accessible to outlets that would not otherwise have covered a settler-heritage conference; mainstream wire coverage of Huckabee's appearance is thinner than the diplomatic weight of the moment would warrant.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/TheCradleMedia
• https://t.me/thecradlemedia
• https://t.me/DDGeopolitics