Combative Carlson-Huckabee interview reveals US right’s chasm over Israel | US foreign policy

Some of the Maga right may be disgruntled with Israel; But if the heated debate between Tucker Carlson and the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is any indication, a hard-line form of Christian Zionism appears likely to remain the unofficial policy of the Trump administration.

On Friday, Carlson released a confrontational video interview with Huckabee, conducted at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, that vividly showed the rift between the two factions of the Republican party. On the one hand, there is the Christian nationalist current of the Maga movement, which views the United States’ close relationship with Israel with increasing suspicion. On the other hand, there is an old Christian conservative establishment that sees this alliance as a totem of US foreign policy and, in some cases, believes that Israeli Jews have a divine right to control much of the Middle East, US public opinion be damned.

Call it the Fight at Ben Gurion. During their journey lasting more than two hours dialogueRight-wing commentator Carlson has repeatedly implied that Huckabee, as a U.S. official, is more focused on defending Israel’s interests than those of the country he represents. Huckabee is a prominent Christian Zionist who believes that Israel has political power. biblically accurate to the area His government and the settlers’ claim strongly opposed Carlson’s suggestions that Israel does not deserve the military and monetary aid it receives from the United States.

This scathing interview reveals how unresponsive the Trump administration is to America’s growing discontent with Israel. voting Americans against Various demographics, including a modest decline in pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans.

In an unusual moment in the interview, Carlson asked Huckabee whether, according to a literal interpretation of biblical texts, Israel has the right to claim much of the modern Middle East. Huckabee replied: “It would be nice if they took them all.” (After a while, he backtracked, claiming that Carlson’s question was inappropriate because Israel had no such intention.)

The interview took place against the backdrop of the Israel-Gaza war, which continues to claim Palestinian lives despite a fragile ceasefire, and at a time when Israel has recently moved to tighten its control over Palestinian areas in the West Bank. described As a measure to “kill the idea of ​​a Palestinian state.”

The interview also came at a time when Trump was threatening the United States with an attack on Iran; Carlson vehemently opposes this possibility, but Huckabee defends it. implied He believes it may be necessary.

Carlson noted that only around According to the poll, 20 percent of Americans support war with Iran.

“We don’t live in a world where you take a poll to find out whether our policy should be a certain way,” Huckabee said, arguing that there are threats to the United States that the American people may not understand the extent of. (He did not say that Iran posed a direct threat to the United States.)

Carlson was also harsh on Huckabee about his decision. to meetwith Jonathan Pollard, who was found guilty of spying for the United States on behalf of Israel late last year; About why an Israeli official was able to return to Israel after police in Nevada last August arrested him for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor; Why the United States would send money to a country that provides state-sponsored abortions to its citizens; and about links Between Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. (Official charged with a sex crime in Nevada pleaded not guilty. Barak was not involved in the crime and regrets I never knew Epstein.)

Carlson said, “Israel looks much more beautiful than our country. Its roads are more beautiful than the USA.” “Well, why are we sending all this money to a country with a higher standard of living than ours?”

Carlson and Huckabee were mostly civil, but they argued violently; They often interrupted each other to question the basis of each other’s claims. In fact, arguments and mutual hostilities were stubborn interview since then before it was even published: Carlson earlier this week alleged He said that shortly after meeting Huckabee, he and his team were subjected to a “bizarre” temporary detention by security guards at Ben Gurion airport. In response, Huckabee took to social media ridicule Carlson’s description of his treatment as a normal security process at the famously hard border. Carlson never left the airport’s vicinity.

Once a supporter of the Iraq war, Carlson eventually came to represent the populist-nationalist wing of the Maga movement. Since leaving Fox News in 2023, he has been particularly fierce in criticizing Israel and its American supporters. some critics accused his dissemination conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes.

Although Republican voters as a whole stay behind Young pro-Israel conservatives are increasingly skeptical of U.S. support for the country and sympathetic to Carlson’s point of view.

“I think we are coming to the end of an era. [which] “This peaked under George W. Bush, when it could be taken for granted that national spokespeople of the Republican Party or conservatism would be in favor of Israel,” said Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida and author of God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.

Goldman noted that there is a “clear generational element” to the Carlson-Huckabee debate. Huckabee, 70, is part of a generation of American Christians who see Israel as a pillar of shared Judeo-Christian civilization. In addition, many evangelical Protestants believed that there was a biblical obligation for American Christians to support the Jewish state. By contrast, Carlson, 56, has followed the rise of the isolationist and Christian nationalist Maga movement.

“I think he both reflects and speaks to doubts among young Christians and conservatives about whether the enthusiasm their parents (and sometimes grandparents, at this point) display for Israel makes political or theological sense,” Goldman said.

In recent years, the Israeli right has developed close ties with the Republican party and conservative Christian groups in the United States. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu it was believed That Christian Zionists would be a more useful ally for Israel in the long run than liberal-leaning Jewish Americans, and that an alliance with the right was worth the risk of alienating other segments of American support.

But “I don’t think many Jewish groups, especially their Jewish allies on the right, understand that Protestant Christianity is quite volatile,” said Eliyahu Stern, a professor of religious studies at Yale and author of the upcoming book Nowhere to Go: Jews and the Global Right 1977-10/7. He said Protestantism was a multifaceted movement and was constantly changing with larger political and social forces.

But as long as Trump is in power, Maga’s critics of Israel will likely remain on the sidelines of deciding real US policy towards Israel and the Middle East. However, when Trump leaves office, the right’s internal divisions over Israel could pose serious problems for the cohesion of the conservative movement.

What will happen then is anyone’s guess. “We’re at the beginning of something, not the end,” Stern said. “At this point we don’t know where this is going.”