Yesterday, a line slipped by almost everyone. It was nine words. It came from the mouth of the United States Ambassador to Israel, on camera, in a conversation with Tucker Carlson, and it was so staggeringly reckless that I rewound it four times to make sure I had heard it correctly. I had.
What Huckabee said in those nine words has the potential to detonate fifty years of American diplomatic architecture in the Middle East, validate the ambitions of a faction of Israeli religious nationalists who have been quietly building toward a world war, and signal to every Arab government that has taken Washington’s assurances at face value that those assurances are worth exactly nothing.
Insight to Incite was created because I was sitting on the bench, watching news cycle after news cycle go by, while my fellow evangelicals were completely missing the things that shouldn’t be missed. That’s no fault of their own. The news comes at us so quickly these days, it’s easy to miss the little details that are actually huge details. Sometimes, news stories are thrown at us as a distraction, sort of a “Look, over there!” diversion so that we never see the things that matter - and before we know it, we’ve moved on to a new news cycle, and it’s gone for good. And yesterday, one of those little details was missed by almost everyone.
And first, let me say that I’m eager to write about things at I2I that are not Israel-related. If it’s getting old to you, just know it’s getting old to me, too. But this little, aforementioned detail in the news is just too important not to explain and expound upon. It’s so incredibly newsworthy, but the people who decide what the news is on any given day will overlook this and do anything in their power to keep you from seeing it. But here it is…
GOING NATIVE
The news story of the cycle is Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ambassador Huckabee at the Ben Gurion Airport in Jerusalem. It was at Ben Gurion Airport because the ambassador refused to provide Tucker with security. This is prescient because Israel has murdered more journalists than you can shake a stick at, routinely intimidates and harasses them - according to many high-profile journalists at many high-profile American publications - and has failing grades from every international organization that ranks nations on their treatment of journalists and reporters. Not to mention, Israel assassinates more high-profile critics and non-combatants deemed “enemies” than any nation on Earth, including Russia (I wrote about this at NXR in the article, Israel’s History of Harassing, Threatening, and Murdering Critical Journalists).
The decision to stay at the airport was made when Huckabee also refused to give Tucker an embassy tag-along, a common courtesy for embassy guests almost anywhere in the world. If Israel were going to target Tucker while in the country, a tag-along would make it far less likely. Refusing it is a huge, huge red flag. And so, not leaving the airport was the best bet. If that seems over-the-top, I’ll just ask you to read the article I linked above, and realize that Israel routinely admits to “accidents” that lead to dead journos. Oopsies…another dead critic of Israel. Nothing to see here…move along.
The interview was wild, no doubt. A lot stands out. Huckabee tried to act like he was barely familiar with Jonathan Pollard, the spy he happily greeted for a private reception at the Israeli embassy, who just happened to pop in and thank him for offering him condolences when his wife passed away. When Tucker pointed out that Huckabee lobbied Washington for more than a decade to commute his sentence before his term was up, Huckabee feigned ignorance, saying, “If I did that,” he must have had friends who asked him to. Amazingly, Huckabee admitted knowing that Pollard was continuing, until this very day, to encourage Jewish Americans to spy on the United States, but seemed crazily unconcerned at this fact, as though it was some kind of irrelevant trivia.
Huckabee also seemed unconcerned about Israel being “base” in a global game of pedophile freeze tag, in which any Jew on earth caught molesting kids can return to Israel and live a happy life without fear of extradition to the United States. Huckabee also feigned ignorance about anything at all related to Jeffrey Epstein or the released Epstein Files. That’s weird, but it’s believable. But then, his ignorance on those matters made it harder for Huckabee to explain why he’s gone onto social media to ardently defend Mossad from accusations that Epstein was working with them. Defending Israel’s intelligence apparatus seems like a strange thing to do for someone who admittedly knows nothing about Epstein. If anything, it showed that the U.S. ambassador has a deep, instinctual loyalty for his host country that most people reserve for their own.
All of those things are the standout peculiarities about that interview, and there are many more. Overall, it appeared that Huckabee was serving as a foreign minister for Israel, there to defend the Israeli state against any and all criticism. That’s bizarre, but it’s happened before. It’s called “going native.”
During the 1930s, British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson was criticized for “internalizing German grievances” (recognizing the terrible ways Germany was treated after WWI) and for advocating appeasement toward Hitler. In the United States, McCarthy had to purge John Paton Davies Jr from ambassadorship, because he had grown sympathetic with Mao’s Communists. Ambassador Joseph Grew in Japan and George Kennan in the Soviet Union also both went native. While outright defections by ambassadors are rare, the historical record shows that it’s not unheard of for ambassadors to prioritize the host country’s interests over their own. Huckabee has obviously crossed that line a long time ago.
IT WOULD BE FINE IF THEY TOOK IT ALL.
But none of that is what led me talk it out with my faithful companion, Foxy (my Welsh Corgi farm dog). It’s when I heard this line from Huckabee that I stopped, backed up the video, and played it again. And again. Four times, I listened to it to make sure I was hearing it right, at which point I looked at Foxy and asked, “How the hell am I going to get people to see how big a deal that is?” She had no idea, and I’ve spent the last 24 hours thinking about it.
Huckabee said, “ It would be fine if they took it all.”
Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. I could not believe I was hearing that, out loud. I can’t believe Huckabee said it, out loud. On video. In an interview. Like it was no big deal!
Let me say this, with all seriousness, and not a bit of hyperbole. That statement from Ambassador Huckabee was the single most patently insane, dangerously irresponsible declaration that I’ve ever heard from an American official, at least, in the context of foreign relations. It takes the cake. A distant second might be Kamala Harris attending the Munich Security Conference in 2022 and announcing that Ukraine would join NATO - a repeal of promises made repeatedly ever since U.S. Secretary of State James Baker gave the assurance to end the Cold War - causing Russia to invade Ukraine only five days later and leading, thus far, to 1.5 million casualties on both sides. Potentially, Huckabee’s claim could cause far, far more.
Huckabee went on to argue, “That’s not what we’re talking about.” He alleged that “no one from Israel wants that.” And I’m here to tell you that Huckabee is a liar, there are many in Israel who want that, and they’re taking over Israel one election at a time.
DIPLOMATIC HOUSE OF CARDS
Before I get into the Greater Israel plan - which is what this article is mostly about - I want to explain the diplomatic situation in the Middle East.
Here is something that the average Fox News viewer, nodding along to Huckabee’s Greatest Israel theology, does not understand and has apparently never been required to think about for five consecutive minutes. American foreign policy in the Middle East does not run on military power alone. It runs on trust. Specifically, it runs on the carefully maintained, perpetually fragile, enormously expensive fiction that the United States is an honest broker, that when we sit down with Arab heads of state and tell them we want stability and peace in the region, we mean it, and that our word is worth something.
That trust is the entire architecture. Remove it and the whole structure falls.
Egypt has been a cornerstone of American Middle Eastern strategy since Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem in 1977 and made himself a target for the bullet that eventually found him. In exchange for that extraordinary act of courage and for the peace treaty that followed, the United States has provided Egypt with roughly $2 billion a year in military and economic aid for nearly 5 decades. What we buy with that money is not just a treaty signature. We buy the Suez Canal to keep it open. We buy Egyptian intelligence cooperation against terrorist networks that would otherwise metastasize across North Africa into Europe. We buy a moderating voice in the Arab League. We buy a government in Cairo that, whatever its domestic failures, keeps forty percent of the world’s seaborne oil traffic flowing without interruption.
Jordan has absorbed Palestinian refugees, managed the most sensitive border in the world with more grace than anyone had a right to expect, and served as a quiet intelligence-sharing partner with the United States on threats from Iraq, Syria, and Iran. King Abdullah has spent his entire reign walking a tightrope between his population, seventy percent of which is Palestinian or of Palestinian descent, and the demands of an American alliance that keeps asking him to absorb more and say less. He has done it because the alternative is worse, and because the United States has made certain assurances about what we are and are not trying to accomplish in his neighborhood.
Saudi Arabia controls the largest proven oil reserves on earth. The petrodollar arrangement, in which Saudi oil is priced exclusively in dollars, is one of the foundational supports of American economic dominance globally. When we need intelligence on Iranian nuclear developments, when we need overflight rights for military operations, when we need a Sunni counterweight to Tehran’s regional ambitions, we call Riyadh. The relationship has costs, and they are real costs, but the strategic value of a cooperative Saudi Arabia to American interests is almost impossible to overstate.
The United Arab Emirates has become the most important American military hub in the Gulf. There’s the Al Dhafra Air Base, port access, and intelligence infrastructure. The Emiratis have made themselves indispensable to American military projection across the entire region.
Every one of those relationships, and a dozen others like them, depends on those governments being able to tell their populations, with a straight face, that the United States does not actually support the territorial dismemberment of the Arab world. It requires them to believe that whatever Israel does unilaterally, America’s stated position is peace, stability, and the sovereignty of existing borders. That fiction has been strained before, badly, but it has held together because no senior American official has ever looked into a camera and said something as retarded as what Mike Huckabee just said.
And Mike Huckabee just said the quiet part loud, to Tucker Carlson, on a podcast with millions of viewers. And those viewers are not the only ones who watched it. Every intelligence service from Cairo to Riyadh to Ankara has already clipped that footage, translated it, and presented it to a head of state who now has to decide what to do with it. Every Arab government that has spent years explaining to its population why cooperation with Washington is worth the domestic political cost just had that argument kicked out from under it by a Baptist minister from Arkansas who cannot help himself.
The damage is not hypothetical. It is already done. The only question is how much more Huckabee intends to do before someone in Washington with actual authority tells him to sit down and be quiet. Given that no one has done so yet, the answer appears to be: quite a bit more.
GREATER ISRAEL
Before I introduce you to the cast of characters pushing this agenda, let me tell you what Greater Israel actually is, because Huckabee used a lot of theological language in that interview, and most Americans heard it as background noise. It was not background noise. It was a blueprint.
Greater Israel is a territorial and theological vision held by a significant and growing faction of Israeli religious nationalists who believe that God promised the Jewish people a specific piece of real estate in Genesis 15, and that the modern State of Israel has not yet collected what was promised. The boundaries of that promise, read literally, run from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River, which flows through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Everything between those two rivers belongs, in their view, to the Jewish people by divine right. Not eventually. Not symbolically. Actually. Physically. With the current occupants either subordinated, expelled, or dealt with by whatever means history requires.
That territory, to be clear about the geography, includes all of modern-day Palestine, all of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, significant portions of Iraq, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and depending on where you plant your flag on the Euphrates, chunks of Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well. We are talking about the sovereign territory of a dozen modern nation-states, home to hundreds of millions of people, that a particular faction of Israeli religious nationalists believes is theirs by biblical deed.
The faction that holds this view is no longer fringe. It is no longer marginal. It is in the cabinet. It is writing the coalition agreements. It is administering the occupied territories. It is gaining seats in every election cycle. And it has a plan that goes well beyond political rhetoric, which I will get to in a moment.
Now. Let me introduce you to some of the people pushing it.
Bezalel Smotrich is the Israeli Finance Minister. He stood at a podium in Paris in 2023 behind a map of Greater Israel that included Jordan and told the audience that Jerusalem is destined to expand to Damascus. He wants Israel to govern itself as it did under King David and King Solomon. He is not speaking poetically. He means the borders. He means all of it. He is currently the de facto civilian administrator of the West Bank, which means he is not a man shouting about this from the political wilderness. He is a man with his hands on the levers right now, today.
Itamar Ben Gvir leads a party called Jewish Power, which is the direct political descendant of a movement the United States government formally designated as a terrorist organization. He was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting terrorism before Israeli politics decided that was a perfectly acceptable background for a cabinet minister. He regularly leads marches of ultranationalist settlers onto the Al-Aqsa compound, the third holiest site in Islam, because provoking a civilizational religious confrontation is, for these people, not a risk to be managed but an outcome to be accelerated.
Daniella Weiss, one of the most prominent settler leaders in Israel, said on camera in 2024, without a tremor of embarrassment: “We know from the Bible that the real borders of Greater Israel are the Euphrates and the Nile.” She meant it as a policy statement. And Mike Huckabee repeated that crap.
And Netanyahu himself told Israeli television in August 2025 that he is “very” attached to the Greater Israel vision and considers himself on “a historic and spiritual mission of generations.” The coalition agreement currently governing Israel states that Jewish people have an “exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” That is the signed governing document of a nuclear-armed state.
These are not the people shouting outside the building. These are the people running it. And they have been preparing for this moment with a level of logistical seriousness that most people, when they hear about it, assume must be an exaggeration.
THE GREATER ISRAEL TO-DO LIST
Since 1987, the Temple Institute in Jerusalem has been quietly, methodically, and with extraordinary attention to detail, manufacturing every single ritual object required to resume Jewish Temple worship. Not as museum pieces. Not as historical artifacts for educational display. As functional equipment for actual use, on an actual Temple Mount, in an actual Temple that they intend to build on the exact spot where the Dome of the Rock currently stands.
The priestly garments are finished. The High Priest’s full ceremonial wardrobe, including the breastplate adorned with twelve precious stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel, has been completed and is in storage. The flaxen thread had to be imported from India because the domestic supply did not meet biblical specifications. The correct shade of crimson for the trim, mandated by scripture, required sourcing mountain worms from a supplier in Istanbul. The Balm of Gilead, a plant that had gone extinct in the region during the Jewish exile, was tracked down through a global botanical search and reportedly smuggled out of Middle Eastern nations that had no interest in helping Israel reconstitute its Temple pharmacy. The sacred oils, the frankincense, the myrrh, all of it has been obtained, prepared, and stored.
The vessels are finished. Every golden implement, every silver instrument, and every copper basin required for Temple service have been manufactured to biblical specifications and are ready for use.
The cornerstone is ready. The Temple Mount Faithful had six-ton stones cut with diamond tools rather than steel because the Bible specifies that no metal tools are to be used in the construction of a Temple of peace. Those stones were consecrated with water drawn from the Pool of Siloam, as described in the Bible. Every year, the Temple Mount Faithful attempt to carry those cornerstones to the Temple Mount. Every year, Israeli police stop them. Not because the Israeli government considers the goal illegitimate. Because the Israeli government has looked at the math and decided this is not quite the right moment to hand a billion and a half furious Muslims a reason to march.
They are not waiting for the right theology. They are waiting for the right moment.
The altar of burnt offering has been built. It was designed specifically to be disassembled, transported, and rapidly reassembled on the Temple Mount so that animal sacrifice can resume without delay the moment the site is available. They have a portable altar in storage. Flat-packed and ready, like the most catastrophically consequential piece of furniture in human history.
The Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court that serves as the governing religious authority for Temple law and ritual, was formally reconstituted in 2004 after a two-thousand-year absence. It exists. It is convened. It is ready to provide the legal and religious oversight required to govern Temple operations the moment operations can begin.
The priests are in training. More than three hundred men with DNA-verified Levitical lineage are currently enrolled in active training programs covering sacrificial procedures, ritual purification, Temple music, and the precise ceremonial use of every vessel and instrument the Temple Institute has manufactured. They have been training since 2014. They practice on replicas. They are not hobbyists. They are not enthusiasts. They are men who fully expect to perform these functions in their lifetimes, in a real Temple, on the Temple Mount.
And then there are the red heifers. Five of them, bred to biblical specification on a ranch in Texas, were flown to Israel in September 2022. Numbers 19 requires the ashes of a flawless red heifer for the purification ritual, without which no Jew can enter the Temple Mount in a state of sufficient ritual cleanliness to resume worship. The heifers have been in Israel for over two years. The clock is running.
Every prerequisite has been addressed. The garments are ready. The vessels are ready. The altar is ready. The priests are trained. The Sanhedrin is convened. The legal framework exists. The cornerstones are cut.
There is only one item left on the to-do list.
The Dome of the Rock has stood on the Temple Mount for thirteen hundred years. It is the third holiest site in Islam. About 1.8 billion Muslims consider it sacred. And it is sitting on the precise spot where these people intend to build their Temple.
They are not waiting for God to move it. They have a plan. And they have people in the cabinet.
GOD ALMIGHTY ISN’T COMING TO THE RIBBON CUTTING
There is a theological problem with this entire enterprise that none of the red heifer breeders or portable altar engineers or DNA-tested priests in training seem to have worked through, and it is not a small problem. It is the whole problem.
The Temple was not a building. Herod built buildings. Solomon built buildings. What made the Temple the Temple, what separated it from an exceptionally expensive and elaborately decorated religious facility, was the presence of God Almighty dwelling in the Holy of Holies. The Shekinah glory. The manifest, consuming, terrifying presence of the living God descended and dwelt among His people. That is what the Temple was. That is the only thing that made it matter. Without the presence, you do not have a Temple. You have a very expensive room with an un-torn curtain.
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