Mike Huckabee says that he wants an independent Palestine to be “outside the boundaries of the nation of Israel,” but he doesn’t mean what most people would take this statement to mean. After all, any two-state solution would necessarily create a Palestinian state outside the boundaries of Israel, and it would firmly establish where Israel’s borders with the new state are, but that isn’t what Huckabee has in mind. He went on to say this:

There’s plenty of land in the world where we can find a place and say, ‘Okay, let’s create a Palestinian state.’ But not within the confines of a secure Israel.

This shows just how bizarre and fanatical Huckabee’s position is. He believes lands currently inhabited by Palestinians to be “within the confines” of Israel when they are anything but that. So he takes it as a given that these lands fall within Israel’s boundaries, and therefore an independent Palestine has to be created somewhere else entirely. If put into practice, that would imply the forced relocation of millions of people to some other place, which is abhorrent. It confirms that his lip service to creating a Palestinian state is just that. At the very least, it would imply Israeli annexation of the territories. This is consistent with what Huckabee has said before, but as far as I know this is the first time since he announced his candidacy that he has stated this obnoxious view. This has never caused Huckabee any problems before, and I doubt it will now. Implicitly endorsing population transfer of an entire people would normally be the sort of thing that would doom a person’s political career, but in this case it probably helps Huckabee with his target audience and mostly elicits a shrug from the press.