WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee to be ambassador to Israel will face a confirmation hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill as US and Arab mediators struggle to get a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas back on track after Israeli forces resumed the war in Gaza last week with a surprise wave of deadly airstrikes.
\nTrump nominated Mike Huckabee, a well-known evangelical Christian and vehement supporter of Israel, to take on the critical post in Jerusalem days after he won reelection on a campaign promise to end the now 17-month war.
\nIf Huckabee, a Republican, is confirmed by the Senate, his posting will likely complicate an already unstable situation in the Middle East as the former governor of Arkansas has taken stances on the conflict that sharply contradict longstanding US policy in the region.
\nHuckabee, a one-time presidential hopeful, has spoken favorably in the past about Israel\u2019s right to annex the West Bank and incorporate its Palestinian population into Israel. He has repeatedly backed referring to the West Bank by its biblical name of \u201cJudea and Samaria,\u201d a term that right-wing Israeli politicians and activists have thus far fruitlessly pushed the US to accept.
\nMost notably, Huckabee has long been opposed to the idea of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian people. In an interview last year, he went even further, saying that he doesn\u2019t even believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine as \u201cPalestinians.\u201d
\n\u201cThere really isn\u2019t such a thing,\u201d he said on the podcast show \u201cThink Twice\u201d with Jonathan Tobin. \u201cIt\u2019s a term that was co-opted by Yasser Arafat in 1962,\u201d referring to one of the early leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
\nDuring the same interview, Huckabee described himself as an \u201cunapologetic, unreformed Zionist.\u201d
\nAs the situation in Gaza has deteriorated with the recent collapse of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and hostage release deal, Israeli officials have begun to talk more seriously about re-occupation of the territory, something to which the Biden administration had been adamantly opposed.
\nTrump has made his own proposals about a potential US takeover of Gaza, which have attracted attention as well as strong criticism from Arab nations and others.
\nHuckabee will likely be asked about all of these points in addition to ongoing Israeli military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon and persistent threats to the country from Iran and Iranian-backed proxy groups, like the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
\nIn remarks prepared for his testimony, obtained by The Associated Press, Huckabee does not specifically mention either annexation or Trump\u2019s Gaza plan. But he can be expected to offer qualified praise of both, given that he blasts many past Mideast policies as \u201cfailed\u201d and speaks of the need to look \u201cat entirely new ways\u201d of promoting peace.
\nHe plans to reaffirm his strong endorsement of Trump\u2019s policies toward Israel during his first term in office, notably his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel\u2019s capital, his decision to move the US embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv, his recognition of the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory and his sealing of the Abraham Accords, in which several Arab nations normalized relations with Israel, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
\n\u201cPresident Trump\u2019s first term was the most consequential for Israel and the Middle East ever with his historic Abraham Accords, and finally moving our embassy to Jerusalem, the ancient, indigenous and biblical eternal capital of the Jewish people,\u201d Huckabee\u2019s prepared remarks say.
\nTrump\u2019s pick for ambassador to Panama also testifying
\nAnother nominee testifying before the committee on Tuesday is Kevin Cabrera, Trump\u2019s nominee to be ambassador to Panama, a country that has bristled at the Republican president\u2019s repeated calls for the US to retake control of the Panama Canal for national security reasons due to potential threats from China. The status of the canal was one of the top items on Secretary of State Marco Rubio\u2019s agenda when he visited Panama City on his first trip as America\u2019s top diplomat in February.
\n\u201cOne of the key aspects of our cooperation is ensuring the security of the Panama Canal, a critical international waterway that facilitates global trade and economic growth,\u201d Cabrera will say according to remarks prepared for the hearing.
\nHe plans to praise decisions by the Panamanian government to withdraw from China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative and to review contracts with a China-based company that is running ports at both ends of the canal. The company has preliminarily agreed to sell its interests in the subsidiaries that run the ports, but the deal is not yet complete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee to be ambassador to Israel will face a confirmation hearing Tuesday on Capitol Hill as US and Arab mediators struggle to get a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas back on track after Israeli forces resumed the war in Gaza last week with a surprise wave of deadly airstrikes. Trump …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78919,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78904\/revisions\/78919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}