I reblogged a post fact-checking Mike Huckabee’s claim that people who oppose Israel should surrender a small pile of modern conveniences, including cell phones, car navigation, USB drives, cherry tomatoes, and seedless watermelons. Apparently the produce aisle is part of the diplomatic corps now.
The clip comes from a speech Huckabee gave at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s Atlas Award ceremony in May. He told Israel’s critics, in effect, that rejecting the country should mean giving up everything it had supposedly invented. The list has continued circulating because it is an unusually pure example of a familiar political maneuver: take a complicated history, put little national flags next to each object, and then present grocery shopping as a binding referendum on foreign policy.
There are two problems here. The obvious one is that several claims are wrong. The more interesting one is that even the claims containing a piece of truth do not prove what Huckabee wants them to prove.
the watermelon has declined citizenship
The modern seedless watermelon was developed from triploid breeding work by Japanese plant scientist Hitoshi Kihara beginning in the late 1930s. The National Watermelon Promotion Board traces it to Kihara’s research in Japan, and the University of Illinois Extension explains the chromosome trick that makes the fruit mostly sterile.
Israel has absolutely done important agricultural research. That does not cause Professor Kihara to vanish in a puff of patriotic PowerPoint transitions.
the cherry tomato contains a smaller, more annoying truth
Cherry tomatoes existed centuries before the state of Israel. Tomato domestication reaches back through Indigenous agriculture in the Americas; the historical record is complicated, but it is not hiding a surprise origin story in a Jerusalem laboratory. A USDA-indexed review describes the competing South American and Mexican domestication histories, while a scholarly history of the specific Israeli claim found references to cherry-shaped tomatoes going back hundreds of years.
Israeli scientists Nachum Kedar and Haim Rabinowitch did make an important contribution. They bred varieties with better flavor, longer shelf life, and qualities that made cherry tomatoes easier to sell commercially. Hebrew University’s own profile of Kedar’s work emphasizes long shelf life, taste, and disease resistance. That is real work. It is just not the same sentence as “invented cherry tomatoes.”
This is how the myth stays alive: a meaningful improvement gets promoted into immaculate conception because “helped turn an existing crop into a global supermarket product” will not fit on the bumper sticker.
the USB drive has several fathers and would like them to stop fighting
The USB flash drive is the claim where the corrective reblog also becomes too tidy. Israel’s M-Systems filed a 1999 patent for a USB-based flash disk, and Dov Moran is often credited as one of its inventors. Singapore’s Trek 2000 was the first company known to sell a product under the ThumbDrive name. IBM engineer Shimon Shmueli submitted a competing invention disclosure, and China’s Netac filed its own patent claim. IEEE Spectrum and the National Library Board of Singapore both tell the story as a genuine dispute, not a clean national trophy presentation.
And the object itself depended on Japanese flash memory, the multinational development of the USB standard, semiconductor manufacturing across countries, and years of engineering that do not become less important because one patent arrived first.
innovation is a terrible loyalty oath
Car navigation is the same sort of category error. The underlying GPS network is a U.S.-owned system operated by the U.S. Space Force. Japanese automakers pioneered early in-car navigation systems. Israeli-founded Waze later made an enormous contribution to turn-by-turn, traffic-aware navigation. “Car navigation” is not one invention sitting in a glass case with one flag behind it. It is a stack.
Cell phones are a stack, too. So are computers, medical tests, crops, and nearly every other thing politicians like to assign to a country when they need history to perform a little unpaid public relations.
But suppose Huckabee’s entire list were accurate. Suppose one country had single-handedly invented every object on it, plus the air fryer and the little plastic table that keeps pizza boxes from touching the cheese. That still would not settle a political argument about what a government is doing now. A useful invention is not a moral gift card that can be redeemed against criticism forever.
My phone can contain Israeli technology, American technology, Japanese technology, Chinese manufacturing, Taiwanese chips, and code written by somebody in Poland who has not slept since Tuesday. None of those facts requires me to outsource my conscience to the supply chain.
The most honest version of this story is also the least useful for propaganda: people in different places built on one another’s work, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, and usually messily. The watermelon is Japanese science grown from an African crop. The tomato is Indigenous American agriculture reshaped by breeders around the world. The USB drive emerged from overlapping claims across Israel, Singapore, China, Japan, and the United States.
Huckabee wanted a shopping list of reasons criticism should stop. What he accidentally assembled was a pretty good argument against treating human knowledge as national property.
Source note: The speech was delivered in May 2026; contemporary context is available from Middle East Eye. Featured image: official 2025 portrait by the U.S. Embassy in Israel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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