US ambassador to Israel featured in “Greater Israel” song

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, was featured in a music video singing “Sweet Home Yerushalayim,” a pro-Israeli rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”, the Middle East Eye and agencies reported on October 15th.

Opening lines of the song included: “Torah scrolls keep on turning, just two days and we are through. Then we start from the beginning. Hashem’s holy words begin anew.”

This was followed by “[s]weet home Yerushalayim, where God’s words ring so true. Sweet home Yerushalayim. Lord, I’m coming home to you.”

Lyrics also praised US President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Trump previously gave credit to mega-donor Miriam Adelson for contributing towards the decision during an October 13th Knesset speech.

The performance, which also featured former US ambassador to Israel David Friedman and the comedian Elon Gold, took place in Jerusalem on October 12th and was part of an event organised by United Hatzalah of Israel, a volunteer emergency response group.

The event occurred during the Jewish festival of Sukkot, which celebrates harvest and unity, and is increasingly exploited by Israeli ultra-nationalists to terrorise Palestinian residents of the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Jerusalem.

Israel’s continued settlement expansion is recognised as illegal under international law and has been condemned by the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Like Huckabee, who reportedly said that “it is not a violation of international law for Israelis to live in Judea and Samaria”, Friedman was also a strong advocate of illegal Israeli settlement expansions in the Occupied West Bank when he served as the ambassador between 2017 and 2021.

Judea and Samaria are the biblical terms for the West Bank, a territory which Israel wants to annex by 82%. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also declared a plan which envisages 3,400 new homes for settlers, which make a territorially contiguous Palestinian state impossible. The controversial E1 settlement scheme was signed off by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The song’s message centred on the “Greater Israel” project, where Israel would expand its borders beyond those established after the 1967 Six-Day War into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and parts of Jordan and Syria. Netanyahu has declared that he is on a “historic and spiritual mission” in pursuit of a “Greater Israel.”

It was reported on June 12th, that Huckabee proposed that Muslim countries let some of their territories be used to create a Palestinian state, claiming that these nations had “644 times the amount of land that are controlled by Israel.”

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, was selected as the U.S. ambassador to Israel by the then-President-elect Trump, in 2024. Trump said: “He loves Israel, and the people of Israel, and likewise, the people of Israel love him. Mike will work tirelessly to bring about Peace in the Middle East!”

Middle East Eye staff and agencies, Maghrebi.org