Fighting Carlson-Huckabee Interview Reveals American Right’s Divide Over Israel | American foreign policy

Parts of the Maga-Right may rail on Israel — but a hardline form of Christian Zionism appears to remain unofficial Trump administration policy, if a heated debate between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, is any indication.

On Friday, Carlson released a confrontational video interview with Huckabee, conducted at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, that starkly illustrated a gaping rift between two factions of the Republican party. On one side is a Christian nationalist current of the Maga movement, which views the United States’ close relationship with Israel with growing suspicion. On the other side is an older conservative Christian establishment that views that alliance as a totem of American foreign policy — and in some cases believes that Israeli Jews are a divine right to much of the Middle East, American public opinion be damned.

Call it the Brawl at Ben Gurion. During their more than two hours dialogueCarlson, the right-wing commentator, has repeatedly insinuated that Huckabee is more invested in defending the interests of Israel than those of the country he represents as a US official. In turn, Huckabee – a prominent Christian Zionist who believes that Israel is a Biblical law to the territory which his government and settlers claim – sharply disputed Carlson’s suggestions that Israel does not deserve the military and monetary aid it receives from the US.

The test interview highlights just how unresponsive the Trump administration is to growing American dissatisfaction with Israel, as measured by ballot of Americans opposite a variety of demographics — including a modest drop in pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans.

In one extraordinary moment during the interview, Carlson asked Huckabee whether Israel was entitled, according to a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, to claim much of the modern Middle East. Huckabee respond: “It would be good if they took it all.” (He backtracked a moment later, arguing that Carlson’s question was irrelevant because Israel had no such intentions.)

The interview takes place against the backdrop of the Israel-Gaza war, which continues to claim Palestinian lives despite a fragile ceasefire, and as Israel has recently moved to tighten control over Palestinian areas of the West Bank, in what an Israeli minister describe as a measure to “kill the idea of ​​a Palestinian state.”

The interview also comes as Trump threatens U.S. attacks on Iran — a prospect Carlson vehemently opposes, but which Huckabee has family play he may believe is necessary.

Carlson just noticed it around 20% of Americans, according to poll, support a war with Iran.

“We don’t live in a world where you have a poll taken to find out if our policy should be a particular direction,” Huckabee said, arguing that there are threats to the US the extent of which the American people may not understand. (He did not articulate any direct threat Iran poses to the US.)

Carlson also hammered Huckabee about his decision to meetlate last year, with Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted of spying on the US for Israel; about why an Israeli official could return to Israel after the police arrested him in Nevada last August for allegedly soliciting a minor for sex; about why the US can send money to a country that provides state-funded abortions to its citizens; and about links between Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel. (The official accused of a sex crime in Nevada has pleaded not guilty. Barak was not implicated in wrongdoing, saying he sorry Epstein ever knew.)

Israel “looks much nicer than our country. It has nicer roads than the United States,” Carlson said. “It’s like, OK, why are we sending all this money to a country that has a higher standard of living than ours?”

Carlson and Huckabee remained mostly civil, but sparred fiercely — often pausing to question the premises of each other’s claims. In fact, controversy and mutual antagonism continued the interview since before it even aired: earlier this week, Carlson claimed that he and his staff were subjected to a “bizarre” temporary detention at Ben Gurion Airport by security agents shortly after he interviewed Huckabee. In response, Huckabee took to social media ridiculed Carlson’s characterization, describing his treatment as a normal security process at the notoriously tight border. Carlson never left the vicinity of the airport.

Carlson, a one-time supporter of the war in Iraq, eventually came to embody the populist-nationalist wing of the Maga movement. Since leaving Fox News in 2023, he has criticized Israel and its American supporters with particular vehemence. Some critics have accused him from mainstream conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes.

Although Republican voters as a whole stay pro-Israel, younger conservatives are on the rise skeptical of US support for the country and sympathy with Carlson’s position.

“I think we’re reaching the end of a period, (which) reached its peak under George W Bush, when it could be taken for granted that national spokesmen of the Republican Party, or conservatism, would be favorable to Israel,” said Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of humanities at the University of Florida and the author of God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America.

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

“I think he reflects and appeals to doubts among younger Christians and conservatives about whether the enthusiasm for Israel displayed by their parents — and at this point, sometimes grandparents — makes political or theological sense,” Goldman said.

In recent decades, the Israeli right has cultivated close ties with the Republican party and conservative Christian groups in the US. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed that Christian Zionists would provide a more useful long-term ally to Israel than liberal-minded 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 Jewish allies of the right, understood that Protestant Christianity … is highly fluid,” said Eliyahu Stern, a professor of religious studies at Yale and the author of a forthcoming book titled Nowhere Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right 1977-10/7. Protestantism is a protean movement, he said, constantly changing with larger political and social forces.

As long as Trump is in power, however, Maga critics of Israel are likely to remain on the sidelines in deciding current US policy in Israel and the Middle East. But once Trump leaves office, the right’s internal divisions over Israel could pose serious problems for the cohesion of the conservative movement.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. “We’re at the beginning of something, not the end,” Stern said. “We don’t know where it’s going at this point.”