How to understand Tucker Carlson’s criticism of Israel

In Tucker Carlson’s June 18 interview with Texas senator Ted Cruz, days before the United States’ attack on three nuclear sites in Iran and Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks on U.S. bases in Qatar and Iraq, the two men debated the more granular points of Trump’s foreign policy and its underlying values. Their finest points of contradiction were not only the idea of regime change in Iran, with Carlson opposed and Cruz in favor, but also the broader U.S.-Israel relationship. Clips from the interview circulated broadly, with one instance where Cruz finds himself unable to answer basic questions from Carlson regarding Iran’s demography going especially viral.

This has been taken by some as an example of Carlson rejecting the U.S.-Israel relationship altogether, part of a larger trend of supposed growing anti-Zionist sentiment on the right. Along with bipartisan (in the sense that they involve the populist wings of both parties in tandem) efforts in Congress to block Trump from declaring war unilaterally and increased criticism of Israel in the right wing media, moments like this have been argued to represent an increasing rejection of Zionism at the edges of both sides of the political spectrum.

In reality, the shifting ideological landscape of United States politics is much more complex, with even the standard argument about “isolationism vs interventionism” in the GOP ultimately falling by the wayside following October 7 and the rapidly shifting state of play in the Middle East. In fact, Cruz and Carlson agree at the start of the interview that the two schools of diplomacy are ultimately both foils for the point of view of a given interlocutor, and the distinction between the two is ultimately a false dichotomy. The circulating clips make it seem like Cruz and Carlson are strongly at odds, perhaps owing to the nature of digital media, but a full-length viewing reveals that their discussion was quite nuanced and open-handed. Truthfully, the narrative of rising anti-Zionism on the right is not supported by evidence. A cursory glance over the genuine shape of conservative criticism of the U.S.-Israel relationship brings the answer into sharp relief. 

It is certainly true that Carlson’s comments on the U.S.-Israel relationship, rather than representing a new trend in American conservatism, reflect a much older and deeper current of right-wing thought, one which predates the State of Israel itself. Indeed, suspicion about interventionism abroad and whether it serves the interests of “Americans” is a bog-standard Old Right position, along with rejection of Civil Rights laws and the welfare state, hostility to perceived elites and special interests, and what they term a focus on America’s Christian and European heritage. In particular, the Old Right and its descendants the “paleoconservatives” have pursued an ongoing line of argumentation which questions the extent to which the United States-Israel relationship serves the interest of the former, with a resurgence of this position among some factions of what more mainstream conservatives have labeled “the woke right”, which supposedly borrows grievance based identity politics and concerns about power relations and mainstream narratives from their leftist counterparts. Of course, this conflict has been oversimplified not only by its participants but outside commentators. Fundamentally, what must be understood is that the points of agreement between different factions in Trump’s coalition vastly outweigh their differences, and in fact their views on the U.S.-Israel relationship are much more aligned than even the position of a figure like Zohran Mamdani (favored by some polls to win the mayoral primary in New York) and the leadership of the Democratic Party.

The positions most critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship on the organized right have often been referred to as “right-wing anti-Zionism” and treated as a right-wing parallel to the rising Palestine solidarity movement and its incorporation into a broader United States left. This label is not only unsupported by the real political facts, but performs some amount of intellectual work to draw a false equivalence between genuine principled leftist anti-Zionism and right-wing criticisms of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This is to say that while the latter point of view may be intolerable from the perspective of Zionist commentators and groups within United States politics, it is much more accurately referred to as an indifference to Zionism. More importantly, it is just that: a point of view. While these critiques have attained much more prominence in the right-wing media sphere, there is no really existing organized right-wing force seriously dedicated to changing the shape of the U.S.-Israel relationship, regardless of which perspectives one might be able to hear on YouTube or Rumble. 

Moving one step further, as the support base for Zionism in the United States and abroad has moved strongly to the right since the ascension of Begin’s Likud party in the late 1970s, Zionist groups themselves have become an indispensable part of Trump’s coalition, leading to a scenario in which Trump’s return to power has involved a strong element of Zionist support, necessitating a reevaluation of these relationships within right wing politics in the United States. Thus, groups connected to the settler movement, some Orthodox communities, pro-Israel donors and billionaire allies, and the like have increasingly joined with the populist right, forming a new conservative constituency. Thus, while the right-wing populists may be indifferent to Zionism conceptually, they have every reason to make common cause with right-wing Zionists practically. We see a similar dynamic playing out in the contradictions between the populist right and the “tech right.” 

In historical terms, to label right-wing populist critics of the U.S.-Israel relationship like Pat Buchanan as “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israel” misses the broader point that he was a historically strong supporter of Israel (especially during the Cold War when it was seen as a bulwark against Soviet power), and that he and his fellow travelers were also strongly critical of Castro’s Cuba, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Sandinista government, and the anti-colonial and Civil Rights movements at home which have traditionally taken up the Palestinian cause in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Labeling their political and intellectual descendants “anti-Zionist” misses the point to the same extent, in that while they may critique the U.S.-Israel relationship, they do so from an identity-based viewpoint rather similar to Likud’s populist Zionism in form if not content. 

Thus, the paleoconservative or “Woke Right” perspective, while it may at times borrow talking points or framing from the Palestine solidarity movement, is better understood as indifference to the issue altogether and a general suspicion of the U.S.-Israel relationship for reasons relating to the interests of the white Christian working class. Their suspicion in that area, based as it is in white Christian identity politics and an aversion to foreign wars, has little or nothing to do with the experience of Palestinians or the facts on the ground in Gaza. As we may see in the weeks and months to come, it will be difficult for the right to reconcile this populist anti-war sentiment with the demands of the more hawkish quarters of Trump’s coalition. 

Even today, as public opinion sharply shifts against Israel’s actions in Gaza and shrewd conservative commentators have adjusted their messaging to keep up, the organized base of right-wing power in the United States has yet to shift in any meaningful way beyond a few votes in Congress by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene against the codification of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and a few resolutions. Conversely, as the Palestine solidarity movement has surged in size and messaging power over the last 20 months, the legitimacy of Zionism within the broader U.S. left has been totally shattered, and even in the more mainstream quarters of American leftism, a long list of taboos and barriers have been broken. This same shift has not taken place on America’s organized right. 

In addition, we see that while the right wing’s relationship to the U.S.-Israel relationship may be complex in theory, they are necessarily the enemies of the actually existing Palestine solidarity movement in practice. This is obvious for two reasons: first, the Palestine solidarity movement’s objection to Zionism is based on the argument that Zionism is incompatible with standard leftist positions of universalist ethics and the notion of equality. Conversely, the organized right and its intellectuals ultimately oppose the concept of equality, viewing it as what Paul Gottfried (himself a holder of complex views on Israel) termed “an unhealthy obsession”. It is not obvious at all that any right wing critic of Israel or the U.S.-Israel relationship in fact objects to any of Israel’s policies at home or abroad on moral or ethical grounds, rather it is more accurate to say that they believe the United States should not subsidize these policies in Israel at the expense of its ability to pursue similar policies in its own backyard. Even the label “isolationist” is not especially useful, as many conservatives support different forms of intervention in different regions of the globe for different reasons, with some favoring intervention in the South China Sea while opposing it in Ukraine and the Middle East, and so on. Thus, labeling the populist right as “anti-Zionist” solely due to its departure from the Washington consensus is ultimately misguided. 

Escalation in the Middle East and the June 21 strikes on Iran by the United States complicate the picture further as Trump’s base recoils at the thought of another foreign war, while the more directly Israel-aligned factions within his coalition push for confrontation with the Islamic Republic. The turn of events wherein the populist wing of MAGA has joined forces with progressive Democrats like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to sponsor legislation in Congress blocking Trump from pursuing war with Iran has created an even stronger impression that a right-wing critique of the U.S.-Israel relationship can dovetail in some ways with principled left-wing anti-Zionism. In the short term this narrative may be impossible to avoid, however it must be understood going forward that the underlying motivations of both sides for opposing such a war are very different.