Huckabee says 2 states in Holy Land 'unrealistic'

Former U.S. presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that there should be no Palestinian state in the West Bank and endorsed Israeli settlements there, sharply disagreeing with Washington and much of the world.

A three-day tour of Israel, hosted by a far-right group of religious nationalists, is taking Huckabee to some of the most contentious hotspots in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including a West Bank settlement outpost that even Israel's hard-line government considers illegal and an east Jerusalem housing project that the Obama administration has demanded be halted.Huckabee's opposition to a Palestinian state puts him at odds with the accepted wisdom of both Democrats and Republicans — and to some degree even with conservative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has come out in favour of some form of Palestinian independence (a demilitarise state)

Speaking to a small group of foreign reporters in Jerusalem, Huckabee said the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.
"The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

The politician, a Southern Baptist preacher and a two-time former governor of Arkansas, praised Israel for giving Muslims access to Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock — also once the site of the ancient Jewish temples — even though the presence of a mosque there "could be considered an affront."

"Israel is a place where they're going to allow other cultures and religions, but don't ask the Jewish people whose homeland it is to completely yield over their ability to live within the context of their country," Huckabee is being hosted by the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, a pro-settler group seeking to bolster the Jewish presence in traditionally Arab east Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope will serve as their future capital.Their activities, some of them funded by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, are aimed at blocking the division of the city as part of any future peace deal.

During his tour, Huckabee visited the site of a planned neighbourhood near Jerusalem that has also drawn U.S. ire and which Palestinians say will slice their future state in half. He also travelled to Hebron, the traditional burial place of the Biblical patriarch Abraham and the focus of particularly acute tensions between Muslims and Jews.