US Ambassador Mike Huckabee is under fire this week from supporters of Israel for describing violent West Bank settlers as terrorists, a phrase he used on Saturday during a visit to Turmus Ayya and again in August after an attack on the village of Qusra. For Israelis who followed his first months in the job, it is not the first time he has put public pressure on the government that welcomed his appointment.
In July 2025, roughly three months into his posting, Huckabee sent Interior Minister Moshe Arbel a letter that ranks among the sharpest a US ambassador has directed at an Israeli minister. He wrote that he was deeply disappointed that an earlier meeting in Arbel's office had failed to resolve what he considered a simple matter, the routine issuing of visas to Christian organizations and their workers as had been the practice for decades. He warned that if the situation continued he would order the embassy to apply reciprocal measures to Israeli citizens seeking American visas, and that he would say publicly that Israel no longer welcomes Christian groups.
The letter was dated July 16 and leaked to Hebrew media the following day. Copies had gone to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana.
At issue was a change in how the Interior Ministry handled visa applications from evangelical Christian organizations. According to Huckabee, from the beginning of 2025 the ministry's visa department stopped following the recommendations of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and opened investigations into several groups with long histories in the country, among them the Baptist Convention in Israel and the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The organizations were asked to complete detailed questionnaires covering their religious beliefs, their activities and their assets in Israel, and their applications for religious workers were held pending the outcome.
Huckabee framed the dispute in terms of Christian tourism and friendship rather than mission work. Speaking to The Media Line shortly after the letter surfaced, he asked why Israel would want to hurt its friends, arguing that the groups affected were among the country's most reliable American supporters. His own history supports the framing. Huckabee has led roughly 100 tours of the Holy Land since the 1980s and built much of his political identity around organized Christian travel to Israel.
Israeli officials saw a different question underneath it. Proselytizing is legal in Israel except when it targets minors without parental consent, and counter-missionary organizations have pressed for years for closer official scrutiny of evangelical bodies operating in the country. The ministry that opened the investigations was headed by Arbel, a member of the haredi Shas party.
Arbel's reply, obtained by Israeli outlets, was cool. He said he had been taken aback by the letter, that the route Huckabee chose exceeded ordinary diplomatic practice, and that his office had handled every request brought to his attention within a short time frame. He noted that he had already appointed a team led by his chief of staff to process the applications, and objected to the letter being circulated to senior officials before he had been approached directly.
The dispute closed almost as quickly as it opened. Within days Huckabee announced on X that the matter had been fully resolved after meetings with Arbel and Netanyahu, writing that he had explained to the Prime Minister's Office how damaging the delays were to Israel's relationship with the American evangelical community. A Prime Minister's Office spokesman said a solution had been reached and that evangelical organizations active in Israel would receive the visas they needed through a streamlined process.
Reporting at the time suggested the problem was as much administrative as ideological. Fox News cited sources describing a leadership vacuum at the Population and Immigration Authority, where the top post had turned over repeatedly and sat vacant, leaving the head of the visa section to make decisions without oversight.
The episode drew little sustained attention in Israel once it was settled. It is worth revisiting now because it establishes something about the ambassador that this week's argument tends to obscure. Huckabee's loyalty is to a constituency, American evangelical Christians, and he has been willing to spend diplomatic capital against the Israeli government when he judges that constituency to be poorly served. That was true when the subject was visas, and it is the same instinct at work when he speaks about settlers.
