US Senator calls on ambassador to Israel to resign immediately

US Senator Chris Van Hollen said that US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee must resign, accusing him of repeatedly turning a blind eye to the mistreatment of American citizens by Israeli authorities and becoming an apologist for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government.

“It’s time for our American ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, to resign. The job of an American ambassador is to defend and protect the interests of the United States of America. Ambassador Huckabee has failed to do that. He’s become an apologist for the extremist government in Israel,” the Democratic Senator for Maryland said in a video message posted on social media.

He added that American citizens have faced arbitrary detention and mistreatment at the hands of Israeli security forces, while Ambassador Huckabee has continuously refrained from condemning these practices or demanding accountability for those responsible.

Huckabee attacked Huckabee over the Israeli detention of Sama Safi, 20, and Adam Karakrah, 16, who are both American citizens.

“On his watch, we continue to see American citizens mistreated, wrongfully detained. In fact as we speak we have a 20-year-old American student who is being wrongfully detained, a 15 year old American boy wrongfully detained. We witnessed an 82-year-old Palestinian-American man beaten bloody by the IDF.”

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Van Hollen noted that he and 30 other US senators previously “urged Ambassador Huckabee to hold the government of Israel accountable for the killings of more than nine Americans over just the last four years” by either violent settlers in the occupied West Bank or Israeli security forces.

“And yet, there is no accountability, no justice,” Van Hollen added.

Furthermore, the senator criticized Huckabee over what he described as a stark contradiction between his expressions of sympathy for Palestinian Christians and his passive stance on the surge of settler attacks targeting Christian villages in the West Bank.

Van Hollen pointed out that violent assaults on Christian villages have escalated and that the perpetrators are acting “with impunity.” He recalled Huckabee’s dismissal of a question regarding these attacks, where the ambassador simply remarked that he is a Christian and is “doing OK here in the Holy Land,” which, according to van Hollen, “exposes the entire problem,” where Christian visitors on tours in the Holy Land are being treated well while “the Christians who have lived in the Holy Land for thousands and thousands of years; what about them? Mr. Huckabee, he simply doesn’t care. He’s become a complete apologist for the most extreme Israeli government in history.” 

Van Hollen ended his video message by reiterating that Huckabee “should resign today.”

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