U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee spoke out Tuesday against what he called a terror attack against a Palestinian-American Christian by Jewish extremists who have clashed both with local Arabs and the Israeli military.
A rebuke from Huckabee — a friend of Israel who has said, before taking office, that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) should be annexed by the Jewish state — will draw attention from the Israeli government, which has been flummoxed by a recent outbreak of violence between Jewish settlers and a Palestinian Christian village.
There has long been an extremist fringe among Jews in Judea and Samaria — the so-called “hilltop youth,” who often start illegal settlements, confront Palestinian farmers, and clash with the Israeli military. Some refuse to acknowledge the Israeli flag or the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as legitimate.
They are arrested and sometimes prosecuted, but Israeli officials are often reluctant to pursue them because of the degree to which the rest of Israeli society feels embattled by the overall conflict with the Palestinians and Islamic terror.
Recently, local Christian leaders accused Israel of allowing the extremists to harass Palestinians. An Israeli judge slammed local police when they claimed not to have known about people being killed in local clashes.
In the past, there have been Palestinian-Americans who have been injured or killed in clashes with Israeli authorities, but in many of those cases, the deceased were participating in violent demonstrations. This does not appear to have been such a case.
Huckabee’s intervention — just days after participating in a celebration of U.S.-Israel relations at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — is the first major criticism of Israel he has offered, and is unlikely to be ignored, given the immense respect he commands there.
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.
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