(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claimed in an interview on Thursday that Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank were not illegal under international law, comments that came after Israel approved a major expansion of settlements.
Huckabee told Al-Arabiya that “it is not a violation of international law for Israelis to live in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the West Bank.
Historically, it has been the position of US administrations to oppose Israeli settlements, but that changed with the first Trump administration. In 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declaredthat the US no longer considered settlements illegal under international law, despite their clear prohibition under the Geneva Convention.
Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Both the US and Israel have signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
Huckabee, a Christian Zionist who believes God gave historic Palestine to the modern state of Israel, has a long record of supporting the Israeli occupation and takeover of the West Bank and even denies that Israel is an occupying power.
“I think Israel has title deed to Judea and Samaria,” Huckabee told CNN in 2017 while visiting a settlement. “There are certain words I refuse to use. There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighborhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”
Back in 2008, Huckabee was recorded saying that there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian” and argued the Palestinians should be expelled to other Arab states.
In his interview with Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Huckabee blamed the Western countries that recently announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state for Israel’s recent approval of the expansion of the E1 settlement, which will essentially cut the West Bank in two.
“I don’t know what the Europeans thought they were going to accomplish,” Huckabee said. “But through their actions, they are accomplishing something they didn’t want to: essentially give a green light to the Israelis to take more pieces of Judea and Samaria, either by sovereignty or annexation.”
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, has said that the E1 expansion will “erase” the idea of a Palestinian state. In an earlier interview, Huckabee said the US wouldn’t oppose the expansion.
“Whether or not there should be massive development in E1 is a decision for the government of Israel to make,” he said. “We would not try to evaluate the good and the bad of that, but simply just say that, as a general rule, it is not a violation of international law. It’s also, I think, incumbent on all of us to recognize that Israelis have a right to live in Israel.”
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
