Former US presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said tyoday there is no room for a Palestinian state “in the middle of the Jewish homeland” and that Israel should be able to build settlements wherever it wants. Huckabee’s opposition to a Palestinian state puts him at odds with the accepted wisdom of both Democrats and Republicans – and to some degree even with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has come out in favor of a demilitarized Palestinian state.
Speaking to a small group of foreign reporters in Yerushalayim, Huckabee, seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.
“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic,” he said.
The politician, a Southern Baptist preacher and a two-time former governor of Arkansas, praised Israel for giving Muslims access to the Dome of the Rock, even though the presence of a mosque there “could be considered an affront.”
“Israel is a place where they’re going to allow other cultures and religions, but don’t ask the Jewish people whose homeland it is to completely yield over their ability to live within the context of their country,” said Huckabee.
President Barack Obama is calling for a complete freeze on settlement activity on lands the Palestinians claim for their would-be state.
Huckabee is being hosted by the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a group seeking to bolster the Jewish presence in east Jerusalem. Their activities, some of them funded by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, are aimed at blocking the division of the city as part of any future peace deal.
Huckabee said he welcomed a demonstration last night by anti-settlement protesters outside the Shepherd Hotel, the site of a planned housing project in east Jerusalem which the Obama administration has demanded be stopped and where the Moskowitz family hosted Huckabee for dinner.
He called the freedom to protest an “affirmation of everything that is wonderful and great about Israel and the United States.”
{Los Angeles Times/Matzav.com Newscenter}
it’s amazing that the most obvious thing is such big news, unless the news is that a politician actually realized this.
HUCKABEE has always said the same, has this been announced in all the headlines through the ARAB and EUROPEAN world? what do you think? He is speaking to the initiated.
Huckabee is willing to state the truth, the obvious truth. He had a lot of supporters during the last election even though he was shut out of most media — even with no coverage he got 500,000 votes in the Texas primary. Imagine what he’d have done with the chance to debate John McCain, as he wanted. I hope he continues, from strength to strength.
Politics and emet just don’t mix. It would be great if he became the next president of USA but his becoming president would be nothing short of a miracle, politics and truth just don’t mix.