Mike Huckabee saw Orthodox Jews for the first time at Jerusalem's Western Wall. Huckabee at home abroad in Israel

A parade of Republican presidential hopefuls is making its way to Israel, signaling the candidates’ seriousness about foreign policy and national security and their hawkish approach to terrorism. As POLITICO recently reported, “A stop in the Jewish state is becoming as critical as an early trip to Iowa or New Hampshire.”

But while Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour check the Israel box and move on, Mike Huckabee lingers. This month, the former Arkansas governor spent two weeks in Israel on his 15th trip to the Jewish state, during which his suggestion that the Palestinians go find their own state in some Arab country prompted a settler leader, Dani Dayan, to announce that he is praying Huckabee will be elected president.


Huckabee isn’t getting any votes in Israel. Republican Jewish activists marvel that he doesn’t even raise any money from American friends of Israel on his trips. Instead, the near-annual sojourns in the Holy Land are another anomalous feature of Huckabee’s unusual public life, mixing faith, business and politics for a man who — despite his position atop 2012 Republican polls and his Fox News gig — follows no known rules of American politics.

“He does things and says things when he’s here that no other top-tier American political figure will say and do,” said Charles Levine, an Israeli-American political consultant who has worked with Huckabee. “Others couch their phrases very diplomatically or stick to politically correct concepts or phrases. He does not do that.”

Huckabee first visited Israel when he was 17. After high school, he and a friend set out on what now seems to him a “pretty crazy” adventure for “an untraveled kid from Arkansas” — a monthlong trip that took him from Syria to Greece, with a week in Israel, which he found utterly “enchanting, inviting, mesmerizing and magnetic.”

Huckabee was set to enroll at Arkansas’s Ouachita Baptist University at the time, and visiting Israel “was like going to a place I’d never been — but a place where I felt at home,” he said in a recent interview from his office at Fox News.

“Since I was a little child, all these places where I was — these were places whose names I knew, whose stories I was familiar with,” he said.

Huckabee went to the Western Wall, where he saw Orthodox Jews for the first time.

“It was like something out of a book for me,” he recalled.

And he went down to the Jordan River, for a sight that, 37 years later, briefly left him mumbling like a 17-year-old again.

“We had stopped by to see where Jesus was baptized, and instead there were these great-looking Israeli girls in bikinis, just showing off and flirting,” he recalled.

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, visited Israel next in 1983 and soon began bringing members of his congregation along. Now when he goes, he simply e-mails his list. This year, 180 signed up to ride with him on tour buses around the country for a broadened traditional Christian tour that takes in Bethlehem and Nazareth, as well as Jewish sites such as Masada and the Holocaust museum. His family business, the MDH Group, serves as tour operator, charging $4,479, everything included.

“He’s there primarily as a pastor,” said Lauri Olson Elsass, an Ohioan who was on the tour in 2009 and again this year, when her husband’s company came to shoot a documentary.

In that spirit, Huckabee led the 180 pilgrims down the hillside outside the Old City of Jerusalem to the grave of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist credited with saving more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust, and started preaching as an aide filmed for posterity and YouTube.

Schindler had led a life of “drink and debauchery,” Huckabee reflected, his overcoat and checked scarf pulled tight on an unusually cold day. “His lifestyle would be the kind that would have him voted out of most churches, understandably, and if not voted out, certainly ostracized.”

Then he came to his moral: “None of us have done so much so wrong that we are beyond God’s grace,” he said.

The trips also have political lessons. Huckabee met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a committee of the Knesset on this trip, making headlines for his dismissal of the land-for-peace bargain that underlies the peace process and of the very idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

Such a state “can’t be on top of the same real estate that the Israelis control,” he told POLITICO. “There’s no such thing as a realistic hope of this two-state solution.”

He said demands that Israel rein in settlements have only encouraged Palestinian demands. Instead, he said, the U.S. should “encourage the Israelis to build as much as they can and as rapidly as they can.”

Huckabee also dismisses the concern that Palestinians might demand the franchise in a state that encompassed both Israel and the occupied territories — and in which Jews could eventually be a minority.

“The real answer is that there’s an aggressive interest in bringing Jews from around the world to the homeland,” Huckabee said.

Underlying Huckabee’s view of the situation is a long view of the land and peoples.

“This is not a battle of borders; this is one of worldviews,” he said. “It goes back to Isaac and Ishmael, and it’s not going to be changed by a couple of presidents or prime ministers.”

Huckabee said he views this not as a religious framework but as a historical one.

“Abraham was a very real person, and his sons were, and their offspring have fought from time immemorial to bring it to this day,” he said.

Some pro-Israel Jews view with suspicion Christian Zionists like Huckabee because of the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that gathering the Jews in the Holy Land will precipitate the Second Coming and the end of the world.

Huckabee wouldn’t directly describe his view on that belief but dismissed it as irrelevant.

“Even if there was nothing about eschatology involved, the reason this, as an American, matters to me is because freedom and liberty matter to me,” he said.

Huckabee’s latest tour, which included a speech at the groundbreaking of a controversial Jewish housing project in an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem, deepened his ties with his Israeli admirers.

A parliamentarian who backs Israel’s settlements, Danny Danon, told POLITICO that if Huckabee “had to get elected in the Knesset, I’m sure he would be the president of the United States.”

Daniel Seidemann, a member of Israel’s peace camp, however, denounced Huckabee’s speech, comparing the former governor to a “pyromaniac playing with matches.”

Huckabee sees no reason for Israel to give up any of the land it occupies. His tour took him to places such as the settlement of Ariel, whose cultural center is boycotted by left-leaning Jewish performers. The settlement would be handed over to the Palestinians under virtually any two-state agreement.

But while Huckabee’s views mirror those of the American Jewish right, he has few ties to the American Jewish pro-Israel community and hasn’t sought or found political support there.

“Huckabee’s strength has been to tap into the universe he knows best, which is the Christian evangelical community,” said a leading Republican Jewish activist. “His lack of success in tapping into Jewish circles of support has less to do with him and his positions — which would certainly be embraced by many — but, rather, his lack of a good political rabbi to help him.”

And Huckabee still occasionally plays the role of the untraveled kid from Hope he was 38 years ago.

He recently recalled a dinner with Jewish friends, “when I was the only goyim in the entire group.”

“If you’ve been around a lot of Jewish people, particularly from New York, they tend to be very opinionated, very animated,” he said. “I felt like I was sitting between Barbra Streisand and Woody Allen — it was really interesting; it was surreal.”