Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be ambassador to Israel, has long rejected a Palestinian state in territory formerly occupied by Israel and has repeatedly signaled his strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Huckabee, a former TV host and Baptist preacher, frequently visits Israel and once said he wanted to buy a vacation home there. He has argued over the years that the West Bank belongs to Israel and recently said that “the title of ownership was given by God to Abraham and his heirs.”

His argument for the so-called “one-state solution” contradicts long-standing official US support for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.

He described the October 7 attack by Hamas as “horrendous” and “beyond anything I have ever witnessed in my life” and argued that the US must stand firmly behind Israel.

Here are some things Huckabee has said over the years about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He is firmly against a two-state solution

Huckabee has never supported a two-state compromise, even when Netanyahu championed the idea in 2009.

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. The Palestinians want those territories for a future state and see them as parts of a single country now under military occupation.

The US, along with most of the international community, supported the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines as the cornerstone of a peace agreement. Even Israel’s hardline prime minister once supported a two-state solution while rejecting a return to Israel’s pre-1967 lines. Netanyahu now rejects the creation of a Palestinian state.

Huckabee has never advocated any solution that would require the uprooting of Israeli settlers.

In an interview with The Associated Press in 2015, Huckabee, then running for the GOP presidential nomination, said recognizing the West Bank as Israeli would be his administration’s “formal position.” He criticized Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and described settlers evicted by Israeli forces as being “marched at gunpoint”.

“I feel we have a responsibility to respect the fact that this is land that has historically belonged to the Jews,” he said.

He once compared the Iran nuclear deal to the Holocaust

In 2015, Huckabee compared the Iran nuclear deal to Israelis marching “to the oven door,” a reference to the crematorium at a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Huckabee was critical of then-President Barack Obama for his role in the deal the US and other world powers reached with Tehran. Republicans at the time were united in their opposition to the deal, arguing that it did not address Iran’s support for terrorism. Trump during his first administration withdrew from the deal, in which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

The comment was denounced by Democrats, but Huckabee stood by it.

He does not accept Palestinians as a term and criticizes “radical Muslims”

In a recent interview with a podcaster, Huckabee said he does not believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.”

“There really is no such thing,” he said earlier this year on “Think Twice” with Jonathan Tobin. “It’s a term that was co-opted by Yasser Arafat in 1962,” referring to one of the early leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

During the same podcast, Huckabee described himself as an “unapologetic, unreformed Zionist.”

In defense of Israel, Huckabee said he wanted people to understand that “this is an extraordinary oasis in a country of totalitarianism surrounded by tyranny.”

The former governor also said that many “radical Muslims want to take us back to the seventh century”.

“I don’t want to go back there,” he said. “I like modernity.”

He expresses his outrage at the October 7 attack by Hamas

Huckabee described the October 7, 2023 attack as “horrific” and “beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed in my life.” He was outraged by the way Hamas broadcast images of the killings on social media.

“As terrible as the Nazis were, they didn’t post their atrocities on social media or try to trumpet what they were doing to the world,” he said in an appearance with the International Association of Christians and Jews. “Which makes this horrible thing that Hamas has done so much, to me, worse, because they want everybody to see what they’ve done.”

Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostages. Israel responded with one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, killing more than 43,000 people, Palestinian health officials say.