The US’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has contended to the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Israel has a biblical right to take over the entire Middle East – or at least the lion’s share of it. “It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said to Carlson during an interview posted on Friday. Carlson pointed out that this area in modern geography would include “like, basically the entire Middle East”. “The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon – it’d also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said. Huckabee responded to another aspect of the Carlson interview on Saturday in which, Huckabee wrote on X, Carlson “seemed to be insinuating that the Jews of today aren’t really same people as the Jews of the Bible”.

Source: The Guardian February 21, 2026 13:30 UTC