Huckabee: Israelis Were ‘Marched at Gunpoint’ Out of Gaza
Israelis should never have to go through again what they went through as they were “marched at gunpoint” out of their homes in Gush Katif during the disengagement in 2005, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Sunday.
Addressing some 35 members of the Jewish community at a fundraiser in Brooklyn, NY, on Sunday, Huckabee said, “I’ve seen the film of Gush Katif. You see good Jewish families taken at gunpoint out of their own home and marched out of Gush Katif.”
He said that he wept when he saw that since he didn’t think that “we are going to see Jews marching – by gunpoint – anymore from their own homes. Surely, what they experienced with the Nazis should’ve taught us that must never happen again, and this time that the guns were being held by Israelis.”
Huckabee called the disengagement of Gaza “one of the biggest failures of Israeli governments’ policy” in giving land over to the Palestinians to show them good faith and to show an attempt to bring peace.
This is not the first time Huckabee used an Holocaust analogy to decry agreements with enemies of the State of Israel. Back in July, after the P5+1 signed the nuclear deal with Iran, Huckabee said that Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”
Huckabee went on to explain why the U.S. policy on a two-state solution is irrational. “Two governments, even two governments who get along, can’t govern the same piece of real estate,” he asserted. “When there are two governments and one of them does not believe the other has a right to exist, it becomes, absolutely, laughable that we would even propose such a completely unsupportable notion. And I think it’s ‘happy talk’ on the part of diplomats and our politicians to pretend that there’s something to negotiate toward dividing up Jerusalem or giving parts of Judea and Samaria over to people who, with whatever land they had, have only used it as a launching ground for acts of terror and war against the rightful owners of the land of Israel.”
With this, Huckabee echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who earlier Sunday told a gathering at Brookings/Saban Forum in DC (via satellite), “The question of settlements is not the core of the conflict. In Gaza, nothing changed. In fact, instead of getting peace, we gave territory and got 15,000 rockets on our heads. We took out all the settlements; we disinterred people from their graves; and did we get peace? No. We got the worst terror possible.”
Netanyahu added, “The Palestinians have not yet been willing to cross that conceptual bridge, that emotional bridge, of giving up the dream, not of a state next to Israel, but a state instead of Israel.”
But Huckabee took a step further in declaring, “You’ll never hear me use the term ‘West Bank.’ I don’t think there is such a thing.”