The Ambassador’s Explosive Claim: Is Huckabee Legally Right?

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By Rabbi Yair Hoffman | VIN News | Feb 24, 2026

Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Screengrab via Youtube

When U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Tucker Carlson last Friday that it would be “fine” if Israel “took it all” — referring to the vast biblical territory stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates — the Arab world erupted. Saudi Arabia called it “extremist rhetoric.” Egypt termed it a “blatant violation of international law.” The League of Arab States accused him of inflaming religious and national sentiments.

But here is the question that the outrage machine does not want to ask: Is Huckabee legally wrong?

A careful examination of international law — not theology, not sentiment, but cold, hard, binding international legal precedent — suggests the answer is that he is correct. And when one focuses specifically on the heartland of the controversy — Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria — the legal case for Jewish rights is not merely plausible. It is, arguably, overwhelming.

The Accusation That International Law Is Being Violated

The reflexive response from Arab governments was to invoke “international law” as though it were a trump card that self-evidently settles the matter against Israel. Egypt’s foreign ministry declared that “Israel has no sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territory.” The League of Arab States thundered about violations of “sound legal basis.”

But which international law, exactly? Because a serious reading of the actual treaties, resolutions, and legal doctrines that govern territorial claims tells a far different story.

One Thousand Years of Sovereign Possession

International law recognizes a doctrine known as uti possidetis juris — the last lawful sovereign retains legal title unless that title is legitimately transferred through a recognized legal mechanism. The Jewish people exercised continuous sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Land of Israel for approximately one thousand years — from King David’s establishment of Jerusalem as the national capital around 1000 BCE through the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. This included every attribute of statehood: centralized government, a functioning legal system through the Sanhedrin, minting of currency, foreign relations, and two national Temples.

No subsequent power — Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, or British — ever acquired the land through any legitimate legal mechanism. They took it by force. And that brings us to the second pillar.

Conquest Does Not Confer Title

This is not a controversial legal proposition. It is a jus cogens norm — a peremptory principle from which no derogation is permitted — codified in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and repeatedly affirmed by the International Court of Justice. Territorial acquisition by force does not create legitimate sovereignty. The Roman conquest of Jerusalem was an act of military aggression. Every subsequent ruler inherited a chain of title rooted in that original illegitimate seizure.

As the foundational maxim of property law states: nemo dat quod non habet — no one can give what they do not have.

This principle, applied consistently, cuts entirely against those who argue that centuries of Arab or Ottoman control extinguished Jewish claims. Those centuries of control were themselves built on illegal conquest.

The San Remo Resolution and the League of Nations Mandate: Binding International Law That Has Never Been Revoked

Here is where the legal argument becomes particularly powerful — and particularly ignored by those quick to cite “international law.”

In April 1920, the San Remo Conference — the supreme international legal authority of its time, comprising the Allied Powers that won World War I — incorporated the Balfour Declaration into binding international law. The resolution provided that Palestine would be placed under a Mandate explicitly for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” This resolution encompassed all of what is today Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It contained no reservations, no carve-outs, no exceptions.

Two years later, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine formally recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” The word “reconstituting” is legally critical. It acknowledged that the Jewish national home was being restored — not invented from nothing. The world’s nations, acting through their authoritative international body, confirmed the continuity of the Jewish legal claim.

These documents have never been legally superseded, revoked, or annulled. They remain on the books of international law.

The United Nations Itself Preserved These Rights

When the United Nations succeeded the League of Nations, Article 80(1) of the UN Charter — sometimes called “the Palestine Clause” — expressly preserved all rights recognized under existing League of Nations Mandates. The rights established at San Remo and codified in the 1922 Mandate were explicitly carried forward into the UN framework. Overriding them would require a Charter amendment approved by two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratified by two-thirds of Member States, including all five permanent Security Council members.

No such amendment has ever been proposed. The rights stand.

Jordan’s Occupation Was Itself Illegal

Critics of Israel point to the 1967 war as the original sin. But this framing conveniently erases the 19 years before it. Jordan’s seizure of the Old City and the West Bank in 1948 was an act of illegal military aggression. The international community — including the Arab League itself — refused to recognize Jordanian sovereignty over these territories. During those 19 years, every Jewish resident was expelled, 58 synagogues were systematically destroyed, and Jewish gravestones from the Mount of Olives were repurposed as paving stones and latrine floors. Jewish access to the Western Wall was denied in direct violation of the 1949 Armistice Agreement.

Because Jordan never held legitimate sovereignty, it could not legally transfer sovereignty to anyone else. The 1967 Israeli recapture of Jerusalem and the West Bank was, under international law, a recovery of territory from an illegal occupier — not a conquest.

The Right of Self-Determination

The Jewish people constitute a “people” under international law by every accepted criterion — common history, language, culture, religion, and continuous national consciousness across millennia. Their right to self-determination is not a political preference. It is a legal right enshrined in the UN Charter itself.

For Islam, Mecca and Medina are holier than Jerusalem. For Christianity, the primary sacred site is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For the Jewish people, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel are not one option among several. They are the singular, irreplaceable center of national and religious identity — referenced three times daily in prayer for two thousand years.

What About the “Occupied Territory” Argument?

Critics will note that UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 war, called for Israeli withdrawal from “territories” captured in that conflict. Several points bear emphasis here. First, Resolution 242 was deliberately worded without the definite article — it did not call for withdrawal from “the territories,” a formulation that was specifically rejected during drafting. Second, Resolution 242 itself called for “secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force” — explicitly acknowledging that the pre-1967 armistice lines were not those boundaries. Third, a Security Council resolution cannot override the prior binding legal framework established at San Remo and codified in Article 80 of the UN Charter itself.

The Bottom Line

Ambassador Huckabee’s rhetorical flourish may have been diplomatically incendiary. Reasonable people can debate the wisdom of a sitting ambassador making such statements publicly. And a distinction must certainly be drawn between the full biblical promise — which encompasses vast territories far beyond anything contemplated in current Israeli policy — and the specific legal claims to Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, which rest on solid, binding, never-revoked international legal instruments.

But the critics who respond to Huckabee by simply invoking “international law” are not engaging with international law. They are invoking a selective, politically convenient version of it — one that cites UN resolutions when they are useful and ignores binding treaties, League of Nations Mandates, and UN Charter provisions when they are not.

The complete legal argument — built on one thousand years of prior sovereignty, the prohibition on acquisition of territory by force, the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations Mandate, Article 80 of the UN Charter, the illegality of Jordan’s occupation, the right of self-determination, and the lawful recovery of territory in a defensive war — does not merely offer a colorable counterargument to the critics.

It is, on its merits, a stronger legal case than anything his critics have put forward.

The author can be reached at yairhoffman2@gmail.com