Israel’s war with Hamas and rising antisemitism in the U.S. are a “battle between good and evil,” Mike Huckabee, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Israel, told attendees on Thursday evening at the One Israel Fund 30th anniversary gala at Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City. “It’s not a political battle, not an economic battle, not an educational battle, not a geopolitical flight, not the liberals [versus] conservatives or Democrats versus Republicans.” 

“That is why we must fight antisemitism and stand with the Jewish people,” said Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a Christian Zionist who has long been vocal about his support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a territory he refers to by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria. “The greatest friends that the Jewish people and Israelis have are often those of us who are Evangelical Christians,” he said. 

At the sold out-dinner, One Israel Fund, which supports the estimated 500,000 Jewish Israeli residents living in settlements, announced a $10 million donation for the first major medical facility in the West Bank, slated to open in December 2026. The hospital will bear the name of its supporters, the Nanasi family, it was announced at the event. The facility, which will be located 10 minutes outside of the borders of Jerusalem — in the Binyamin region, will service 200,000 residents, according to One Israel Fund. Currently, the closest hospital for residents of the Binyamin region of the West Bank is Shaarei Zedek in Jerusalem — about 25 miles away. 

If the Senate confirms Huckabee to the post, it would signify a shift from recent ambassadors to Israel, all of whom were Jewish — Dan Shapiro, David Friedman, Tom Nides and Jack Lew. (The previous non-Jewish ambassadors to Israel — James Cunningham and Richard Jones — were career diplomats, unlike Huckabee who has never held a diplomatic post.) Huckabee said he has visited Israel more than 100 times over the course of five decades, reflecting on his first trip as a teenager as “magnetic.” 

“Israel has been there a lot longer than 1948,” Huckabee said as the crowd erupted in applause. “It has been there for 3,500 years when God told Abraham this is your land, and folks, it’s been that way ever since.”  

“It’s the responsibility of every person to recognize the homeland [of Israel] because the Jewish people had been through something that no human beings should ever have had to endure in the Holocaust,” Huckabee said. 

The event came as the Biden administration earlier this year implemented sanctions on Jewish settlers in the West Bank that it determined to be a threat to the stability of the region. In sideline conversations, attendees — a primarily conservative group, many of whom were overheard delighting in Trump’s victory — pondered whether the president-elect will revoke those sanctions when he takes office next month.

Scott Feldman, executive vice president of the Long Island-based fund, acknowledged in a speech that leading mainstream American Jewish groups don’t necessarily promote Israeli settlements in the West Bank, but rather it is sometimes seen as a “quirky right-wing appeal.” 

“Tonight I look at this room,” Feldman said, “[and] tonight Judea and Samaria goes mainstream. It’s okay to come out and say, ‘I support the heartland of Israel and it should remain the land of the Jewish people.’”