US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Thursday that he met with Israel’s new ambassador to the “Christian World,” as Israel is attempting to repair its global image among Christians.
The man assigned to the position, George Deek, was the first Christian to serve as an ambassador for Israel when he was appointed envoy to Azerbaijan, a role he held from 2019 to 2025, one of the darkest periods for Christians in the region in recent history.
During his time in Azerbaijan, Israel was arming Baku with drones and other military equipment amid its war to take over Nagorno-Karabakh, known to its former Armenian Christian residents as Artsakh, a historically Armenian territory that is within Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders, which were drawn by the Soviet Union.
The Israeli-supported military offensive led to the ethnic cleansing of the entire Armenian Christian population, more than 100,000 people, and the end of an ancient Christian community. Today, Azerbaijani authorities are destroying churches in the territory.
Israel appointed Deek to the new position after facing significant backlash over a photo of an IDF soldier smashing a statue of Jesus Christ taken from a crucifix in a Christian town in southern Lebanon. In response to the global outrage, Israel said that two soldiers, the one who destroyed the statue and the one who filmed him, were being jailed for 30 days.
The IDF also claimed that it worked in coordination with the local community to replace the crucifix, but it turned out that Italian troops in Lebanon, as part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping contingent, donated the real replacement and helped erect it.
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