Ambassador Mike Huckabee told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that a map of the Middle East was essential to understanding the problem with a “two-state solution” to the ongoing conflict.
A member of the Breitbart Fight Club — the members-only subscription service giving viewers exclusive access to live interviews, including the ability to pose questions — asked Huckabee about what the U.S. saw as the “end state” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Huckabee noted that what many Palestinians wanted was a map free of Israel, “from the river to the sea.”
He said:
So when people ask, what is the end game? I’ll tell you what it is, let Israel have the little sliver of land and let them live in it in peace. Quit trying to kill every last Jew. Quit yelling things like from the river to the sea, because when you say that, what you’re saying is, annihilate the Jewish people. Get rid of them. In my office at the embassy, I have a map that was taken out of a fifth grade classroom in Gaza. It is a Hamas map that kids study in Gaza. And it’s a map of we would call it Israel. They would call it Palestine. And on that map, there is no Israel, because it is the map that people are screaming for, from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, the only thing that exists on that map is a Palestinian state. So when you hear people talk about the Palestinian state, what most people who say that want, it’s not that they want part of a land to be theirs. They want none of the land to be Israel, and in 1973 [Prime Minister] Golda Meir made a statement that’s very, very profound. She said, we will have peace in the Middle East when Arab mothers love their own children more than they hate ours. That sounds harsh, but here we are, 52 years later, and you have to think she was pretty much spot on.
Pollak then posted a map of the Middle East, showing the tiny proportions of Israel relative to the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. “There you see little Israel in the center … it is a tiny sliver — a very important sliver that we all care about, but it is, in terms of land, very, very small,” Pollak concluded.
Huckabee responded by saying that the map made the strategic reality of the Middle East “as vivid as it can get.” It was important, he said, that people understood “how small the land [of Israel] is.
“Israel has given up land. They have turned things over. Every time they do, they get less land, and less peace,” he observed.
He said that a “solution” in which Israel would give up land in the hope of peace clearly “isn’t working out,” especially in the wake of the October 7, 2023, terror attacks, which were launched from Gaza, from which Israel had withdrawn in 2005. The ambassador joked that if France believed in creating a Palestinian state, it should do so along the French Riviera. “They could enjoy some of the prettiest real estate on earth,” he said.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Read the full article here