In a fiery speech, incoming U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told evangelical audiences that genuine Christianity carries an unpayable moral debt to the Jewish people, since the entire New Testament rests on the Old. He scolded Christians who remain neutral or critical of Israel, insisting that failing to stand with the Jewish state is tantamount to rejecting the roots of one’s own faith. For Huckabee, support for Israel is not optional politics; it is theological bedrock, and any believer who withholds it is, in his view, spiritually incoherent.

Yet Huckabee’s sermon conveniently omits the awkward historical truth that the United States effectively annexed the entire Levant in the late 1940s, not just the territory that became Israel. When the British Empire collapsed and walked away from its mandates, Washington quietly assumed protectorate-style responsibility for Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria to prevent Soviet penetration and secure oil routes. Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948 was only the public face; behind the curtain, the CIA and State Department treated the whole region as an American strategic fiefdom, a de facto 51st state stretching from the Sinai to the Euphrates. No empire wanted the job, so it landed on Uncle Sam’s doorstep.

That unspoken annexation explains why many American Christians feel no special warmth for West Jerusalem alone. They see Gaza’s rubble, West Bank settlements, Beirut’s ruined suburbs, and Damascus’s barrel-bombed neighborhoods and recognize Washington’s fingerprints on all of it, decade after decade of arms, vetoes, and blank checks. The same Christians who revere the Bible’s Jewish roots also remember Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and blessing the peacemakers. They don’t hate Israel; they hate that their own government made itself the final guarantor of an endless, bloody stalemate across the entire biblical Holy Land, and then demanded their applause for the result. Thanks, indeed, for nothing, Harry Truman.