When the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, sat down with Tucker Carlson and floated the idea that it would be “fine” for Israel to “take it all”, he was not offering policy. He was offering permission. A kind of diplomatic indulgence, stamped with a religious seal, then waved over a map as if borders are mere pencil marks and the lives inside them are administrative clutter.
This is the familiar performance of Christian Zionist politics: turn ancient texts into modern property documents, treat conquest as destiny, and present expansion as moral clarity. The punchline, of course, is that the people who actually live on the land, especially Palestinians, are expected to disappear politely so the theology can look tidy on television.
A “Promise” That Sounds Like a Threat
According to reporting, Carlson raised an Old Testament claim about land stretching from “the river of Egypt” to the Euphrates, and Huckabee largely nodded along, describing it as a “big piece of land” and suggesting it would be acceptable if Israel seized it.
This is not faith. This is a political argument dressed up as a revelation. It is a worldview where Palestinians are not a people with rights, but an obstacle in a story someone else wants to tell. It is also a worldview that asks the Middle East to accept a foreign religious reading as the basis for regional borders, as if the region is required to treat an American evangelical interpretation as the constitutional order of Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad.
That alone should be scandal enough.
The Double Standard Everyone Is Expected to Pretend Not to See
Here is the part that does not require any complicated analysis, only honesty.
When Palestinians say “from the river to the sea”, Western officials and media often rush to frame it as inherently extremist, as if a slogan can erase a people’s right to live free from siege, occupation, and apartheid structures. Yet when an American diplomat entertains a “Nile to Euphrates” imagination for Israeli dominance, the language suddenly softens into “controversy”, “uproar”, “provocative remarks”, and then moves on.
So one phrase is treated like a threat to civilisation, while the other is treated like an awkward opinion from a respectable man in a suit.
That is not moral reasoning. That is brand management.
Colonialism With a Bible Cover
Huckabee’s argument, as presented in the coverage, leans on the claim that Israel is land “given by God” to a “chosen” people.
Even if one brackets the theology, the political implication is blunt: power decides, and divinity is invoked to make it sound clean. This is what colonial language has always done. It does not announce itself as theft. It announces itself as an inheritance.
The problem is that international law does not recognise land acquisition by religious citation, and the modern world does not get to outsource human rights to a televised sermon. “God said so” is not a policy framework. It is an evasion of accountability.
And for Palestinians, accountability is not an abstract debate. It is the difference between having a home and being made homeless, between having a future and being told your existence is negotiable.
The Diplomat’s Job Is to Prevent Fire, Not Pour Petrol
Ambassadors are meant to lower the temperature, not encourage fantasies of domination across “much of the Middle East”. Yet these remarks were widely interpreted across the region as inflammatory, and they landed at a time when the Middle East is already saturated with instability, military escalation, and political brinkmanship.
If a senior American official implies that a vast territorial seizure would be “fine”, it signals something more dangerous than personal belief. It signals a willingness to normalise expansionism, and to treat the region’s sovereignty as optional.
That is how wars are marketed before they are launched: first as inevitability, then as righteousness, then as “security”.
What Palestinians Hear in This
Palestinians do not hear “biblical history” in these claims. They hear a threat dressed as certainty.
They hear a world saying, again, that their rights are conditional, their homes are temporary, and their displacement can be made palatable if someone recites the right verse. They hear the same old logic that has accompanied land grabs for decades: that the suffering is unfortunate, but the plan is sacred.
The truth is simpler and more human.
No people need to earn the right to remain in their own land by passing a theological test imposed from overseas. No nation’s security is built by erasing another nation’s dignity. And no peace is possible when officials speak as if domination is a moral option.
The Real Test: Equal Standards, Not Sacred Excuses
If Western governments want to be taken seriously when they talk about rules, order, and stability, they cannot keep one set of standards for Palestinians and another for Israeli maximalism.
If a slogan is treated as dangerous incitement, then explicit talk of seizing an entire region should not be waved away as personal eccentricity. It should be confronted as what it is: an endorsement of expansionist thinking that has already cost the region dearly.
A Middle East governed by rights is not built on televised theology. It is built on ending occupation, stopping dehumanisation, rejecting supremacist logic in any language, and recognising Palestinians as a people entitled to freedom, safety, and self determination.
That is the baseline. Everything else is propaganda with better lighting.
