Mike Huckabee shared a text message he sent urging president Donald Trump to strike Iran, and an Israeli journalist and author said the ambassador's "Bible-thumping, messianic rhetoric" revealed the Christian right's dark ambitions.
Trump's ambassador to Israel called on Trump to join military operations against Iran, saying he was spared from an assassin's bullet by God to be the “most consequential President in a century — maybe ever," and Haaretz columnist Etan Nechin warned that Huckabee and other "Christian Zionists" are calling for war to usher in what they believe will be the end times.
"Huckabee believes deeply in Dispensationalist theology, which holds that modern Israel fulfills biblical prophecy and must be supported until the end of days. He's also not shy about it," Nechin wrote. "In April, standing atop the ancient walls of Jerusalem, the ambassador declared: 'We have the opportunity to be representatives not only of our government, but also representatives of Jesus Christ.'"
"[The ambassador's] text to Trump reads less like strategic counsel and more like the culmination of decades of evangelical doomsday politics toward Israel and the messianic turn of Israeli politics itself," Nechin added.
Israel has quickly intensified its assault on Iran and its officials are openly talking about regime change in Tehran, and Nechin warned that political leadership in both Jerusalem and Washington has fallen into the grips of religious extremism.
"The messianic language claiming to defend democracy heard from both Israeli and American politicians reveals a dangerous irony: They're not opposing theocracy, they just oppose the Islamic kind," Nechin wrote. "They just cloak their own religious fanaticism in terms like 'Judeo-Christian values' and 'the West.'"
Jewish religious Zionists have fused religion and nationalism, and they've come to see Israel as a vessel for redemption, Nechin argued, and they share Huckabee's apparent view that the Al-Aqsa must be destroyed so a third temple can be built, which they believe will usher in the Messiah.
"What's plain in the ambassador's text is this: the U.S. never was an honest broker, and was never meant to be," Nechin wrote. "It is, increasingly, the political wing of a Christian apocalyptic vision with Israel at its center."
"This war is a holy battleground," the columnist added, "and the people of Israel and Iran are a small price to pay for the kingdom of heaven on earth."