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My organization, the Vulnerable People Project, is doing everything it can to draw U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s attention to the plight of Palestinians in the Holy Land, where Israeli extremists have been brutally attacking them, and in Gaza, where Israel’s campaign threatens to snuff out all that’s left of one of the world’s most ancient indigenous Christian communities.
Our petition asking Huckabee to visit Taybeh in the West Bank, where the fifth-century Church of St. George was threatened after radical settlers set fire near a nearby Christian burial ground, gained thousands of signatures; an open letter calling his attention to the cries of Taybeh’s three priests for his intervention received millions of views on X and seems to have made a difference as well.
Huckabee did visit Taybeh last week. What’s more, he issued an official statement calling the crimes against Palestinian Christians in the West Bank terrorism.
“One thing that we strongly agree on is that any desecration to a holy place – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a church, a mosque, or a synagogue – it’s unacceptable,” Huckabee stated. “To commit an act of sacrilege by desecrating a place that is supposed to be a place of worship, it is an act of terror, and it is a crime. There should be consequences, and it should be harsh consequences because it is one of the last bastions of our civilization, the places where we worship.”
Readers can find the rest of his statement here.
It took tremendous bravery for Huckabee to make that statement. He is, from all accounts, a Christian Zionist surrounded by Christian Zionists—adherents to an ideology hostile to the claims of the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land.
It’s “unacceptable,” he writes, to desecrate a holy place. An “act of terror” and a “crime” which should bring “harsh consequences.”
To make such an argument two days after Israel struck the only Catholic parish in Gaza—a crime that Catholic leaders from Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, to Pope Leo himself have treated as a deliberate act of terror—is more than brave. It’s a radical position to stake out, and one that has unmistakable ramifications that could spell the quick undoing of Israel’s whole campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.
There’s no mistaking how Huckabee’s statement applies to the July 17 attack on Holy Family Church. The strike killed three, wounded many (including the pastor), and left some in critical condition.
But it doesn’t stop there. The statement’s ripple effects could quickly lead the international community to recognize as “crimes” and “acts of terror” all of these atrocities as well:
An Israeli airstrike hit Al-Ahli Arab again just this year. The attack occurred at the beginning of Holy Week, on April 13, and destroyed part of the emergency wing. A child patient died during the evacuation, and there is no knowing the number who have died since as a result of the hospital losing much of its capacity to treat the wounded. In fact, one of the women seriously wounded in last week’s strike on Holy Family Catholic Church reportedly died at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, bleeding to death after the medical team told those who’d brought her there that there was “nothing” they could do for lack of resources.
What will be the “harsh consequences” for these and other crimes?
Huckabee has called for them. And on behalf of Palestine’s Christians, I urge him to be a man of integrity and see his statement through to its logical conclusion.