Spencer Ackerman and Josh Smilovitz note that Huckabee has already stated publicly that he doesn’t believe that Palestinians exist as a nation. Ackerman also professes amazement that a high-profile major party politician can say these things. He concludes:

If ever anyone started to make dubious historical arguments to deny the historical roots of Zionism — let alone that ludicrous historical assertions undermine the right of Israelis to live in their own state — as a plot against the Arabs, he would be run out of the political discourse. In this country, he gets a Fox News TV show and a shot at the GOP presidential nomination [bold mine-DL].

Well, no, not exactly, and I think Ackerman understands this perfectly well. When someone makes dubious historical arguments to deny the rights and national identity of Palestinians, he gets a FoxNews TV show and a shot at the Republican nomination. Of course Huckabee denies that Palestinians are a nation. This is such a commonplace on the right that I have lost track of how many times I have read it. It is of a piece with the standard, Mark Twain-quoting, “Palestine was empty” nonsense that circulates freely among “pro-Israel” conservatives. The rejection of Palestinian nationhood ironically relies on all of the standard assumptions of 19th century ethnonationalism, according to which a given modern nationalist movement is merely reawakening or restoring an ancient people to its rightful place. In this view, if a distinctive Palestinian identity does not predate the last century or two it doens’t count, and in any case its claim must be trumped by the older, more authentic claim of the descendants of previous inhabitants.

The idea that national identity is something that comes into existence at a particular moment in time is utterly foreign to people who say these things, and even if they acknowledged the existence of Palestinian nationhood they would still say that the recent construction of this identity renders it insignificant. In the process, Huckabee and those like him who make arguments that take for granted an undifferentiated, united Arab nation are endorsing claims from an old pan-Arabist ideology that scarcely any Arabs still accept, but they are doing so to achieve the opposite of what the pan-Arabists desired, which was the political unification and empowerment of Arabs against foreign interference and domination. Huckabee here is dusting off an old fiction of a single Arab nation to help make sure that a particular group of Arabs remains disenfranchised and without power. More to the point, he is using this argument to defend the status quo, even though this is barely threatened by Obama’s slightly firmer line on settlements.

In practical terms, Huckabee is just demonstrating the extent of his support for maximally hawkish policies in Israel-Palestine. As with Cantor, whose remarks about “Judeo-Christian principles” informing U.S. policy in the region caused a small stir earlier this summer, Huckabee happens to be giving voice to what a huge number of Republicans believe and frequently say among themselves and put into print. One could come away from this with an even stronger conviction that the leaders in the GOP are incapable of intelligent foreign policy thinking, but I’m not sure what else is so amazing about what Huckabee said. Appalling and ridiculous, of course, but it is anything but amazing. It is the standard reckless rhetoric unmoored from reality that passes for foreign policy discourse on much of the right.