Huckabee arrives in Israel as new U.S. ambassador and visits the Western Wall

TEL AVIV, Israel — Newly confirmed U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee arrived in Israel this week, and his first order of business on Friday was to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. He touched the wall and bowed his head in prayer.

Huckabee said President Trump instructed him to insert a prayer written by the president into the wall — the last remaining part of a Jewish temple destroyed by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago. Some Jews traditionally place pieces of paper with prayers into the cracks of the ancient wall, hoping they ascend to God.

The paper read “For peace in Israel” and was signed with the initials D. T., which Huckabee said stood for Donald Trump.

“What an honor it is for me to come on behalf of the president of the United States, President Donald Trump, and to present a prayer that he handwrote, gave to me last Thursday at the White House, with the instruction that my first act as ambassador would be to take his prayer — praying for the peace of Jerusalem — and to bring it to the wall, and to pray that there would in fact be, peace in the land,” Huckabee said.

In 2017, Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital, a controversial move as Palestinians say the eastern part of the city that Israel occupied in 1967 should be a Palestinian state’s future capital.

Huckabee is a longtime supporter of Israel and has previously spoken out against efforts to negotiate a ceasefire deal with Hamas to end the war in Gaza. He called unauthorized settlements in the occupied West Bank “communities.”

A former Arkansas governor and once a presidential hopeful, Huckabee was a Baptist minister and has regularly led “The Israel Experience” trips that take tour groups to sites with Biblical and historical significance, like the Sea of Galilee, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Old City of Jerusalem.

“There are certain words I refuse to use,” he said in 2017. “There is no such thing as a West Bank — it’s Judea and Samaria,” he said, using Biblical terms for the West Bank. “There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities. They’re neighborhoods. They’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”