Charlie Kirk’s death has revealed Israel is as polarizing on the right as it is on the left

One of the themes in coverage of Charlie Kirk’s murder is that the 33-year-old MAGA activist’s support for Israel was waning as many of his young followers expressed horror at war crimes in Gaza. And concerns about Kirk’s changing message caused anxiety in the Israel lobby. 

Kirk, an evangelical Christian who is credited with mobilizing young voters across the nation to put Donald Trump into office last year, generally parroted the pro-Israel line. 

For instance, he dismissed starvation in Gaza last month. “I hate being lied to and propagandized, and this weekend, there was an all-out propaganda campaign trying to make it seem as if Israel is intentionally starving the people of Gaza,” he said. He also dismissed Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty. “Kirk went so far as to cast doubt on the existence of Palestinians themselves, suggesting their ethnicity is fictitious and their true homeland lies in Jordan, or at any rate not in the West Bank or Gaza,” reports Andrew Day at the American Conservative.

But Israel’s image has soured everywhere, and the charismatic activist was under tremendous pressure from his own following to come out against the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel. In one forum, Kirk raised the idea of cutting off U.S. aid, asking whether young people would “think higher of Israel or at least stop talking about it so much” if Israel agreed to give up U.S. aid. 

Kirk gave a platform to voices who were critical of Israel. Notably, Tucker Carlson’s speech to Kirk’s Turning Point USA “summit” in Tampa last July became a flashpoint. 

Carlson faulted Israel advocates for their loyalty to Israel over the U.S., saying that Americans who serve in foreign armies, including Israel’s, should lose their citizenship (heads up Jeffrey Goldberg and Rahm Emanuel). And he said that Jeffrey Epstein was likely running “a blackmail operation on behalf” of Israel, and “by the way, every single person in Washington, D.C. thinks that.”

Carlson went on: 

“Where did all [Epstein’s] money come from? And no one has ever gotten to the bottom of that because no one has ever tried. And moreover, it’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches it that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government. Now, no one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that. There is nothing hateful about saying that. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about saying that. There’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that.”

Kirk reportedly encouraged Carlson to give his speech, and privately said he hates Netanyahu. 

An advocate for Israel who was a good friend of Kirk’s says that Kirk was holding the line against pressure from his base.  

“What people don’t understand is that upwards of 40 or 50 percent of the questions Charlie would receive, the challenges he received… were attacking Israel and attacking Charlie for being so pro-Israel… It drove him crazy that he got so many questions about Israel,” Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, explained in a YouTube remembrance of the conservative activist.

Wolicki, whose organization is backed by the Israeli government, says that with Kirk’s death, he fears for support for Israel among young conservatives. 

“Charlie spent a lot of his time defending Israel. …We see the younger generation in the politically conservative movement moving away from support for Israel, being affected by so much negative messaging and anti-Israel propaganda.. Charlie would hold the line… The Jewish community… the Israeli community… owes a great debt to this towering figure, who really defended us, who really held the line against a lot of anti-Israel hatred out there.”

Wolicki said that the critics so bedeviled Kirk that the night before he launched his last college tour, at the September 10 event at Utah Valley University, at which he was killed, Kirk held a Zoom call with Wolicki and a few other (unnamed) associates to get answers on Israel. 

“He was anticipating all the challenges and attacks, and he wanted to make sure that he had the facts,” Wolicki says. 

That meeting echoes another private meeting Kirk had in July with pro-Israel advocates at the behest of mega-donor Bill Ackman. That meeting in the Hamptons in New York set off a firestorm on social media. 

Kirk has been dependent on conservative donors since founding his movement 13 years ago, and Ackman is legendary for throwing his financial weight around on behalf of Israel.  

Candace Owens, a conservative critic of Israel’s human rights record who was a friend of Kirk’s, said that Kirk was becoming more and more critical of Israel. In a video that has gotten more than 8 million views, Owens cited unnamed “sources” and “conversations” in reporting that Ackman threatened Kirk over his views. She said that Kirk was offered a “ton of money” to go to Israel, and Kirk turned it down. “He declined to go to Israel… for reeducation camp.” Told that he needed to do a photo-op at the Holocaust memorial, “Charlie said No,” Owens said.

The meeting was rancorous, Owens said. “Ackman lost his mind on Charlie.” 

Max Blumenthal has reported at The Grayzone that Ackman “allegedly demanded Kirk rescind his invitation for Tucker Carlson to speak at his upcoming America Fest 2025 in December.”

And Netanyahu was also allegedly in the mix. “The Grayzone reported on September 12, citing an associate of Kirk, that Netanyahu had offered to organize a massive infusion of pro-Israel money into TPUSA, and that Kirk refused.”

Last week, Ackman published a lengthy statement hoping to dispel the idea that he was blackmailing Kirk. 

Ackman acknowledged that he paid for Kirk and other members of his organization to come to the Hamptons to meet at a restaurant, and that Israel has become controversial in Kirk’s base. But the meeting was cordial, Ackman says, and he published texts between himself and Kirk after the event to try and make that point. 

“Ask yourself whether Charlie sounds like someone who I threatened, blackmailed and/or was the subject of an ‘intervention’ about Israel or otherwise,” Ackman wrote. 

The texts are boilerplate thank-yous that won’t put the controversy to bed. 

Ackman’s long statement actually confirms the uproar over Israel—and says that Kirk “complained” to him about Israel advocates.   

“I am sure there are some Israel supporters of TPUSA who became upset with Charlie because he told me so,” Ackman wrote. “He complained to me that some pro-Israel advocates view any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and we both agreed that this is wrong. I did not complain to Charlie about @TuckerCarlson’s criticism of me at TPUSA. I did ask him why he thought Tucker attacked me and he told me that he did not know why.”

In his July speech, Carlson said that Ackman, a hedge fund manager, accumulated wealth at a level far greater than his “useless” talents merited, and said he was in the “constellation” of the late Jeffrey Epstein. 

The next day, Ackman posted a lengthy response calling Carlson’s speech a “defamatory… rant.” He explained the sources of his wealth: he got a “huge head start” from his father being in real estate, and he’s made a career of “compounding, that is, investing over the long term and building a successful investment business” (whatever that means!). He said that he had never met Epstein, though he said his wife once received a $125,000 grant at MIT from the late financier.

“I never met Jeffrey Epstein, flew on his planes, went to any of his parties and/or properties, or interacted with him ever. When my wife was a professor at MIT, she received a $125,000 grant from Epstein (prior to my knowing of her existence). She met Epstein once for 45 minutes,” Ackman wrote. 

Ackman’s long post surely only stirred the controversy over Israel’s role in our politics. 

Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, grew up in Israel and served as an officer in the Israeli air force. She moved to the U.S. in her late 20s and became a grad student-later-professor of media arts at MIT between 2005 and 2020. 

And Ackman openly uses his wealth to persuade people to support Israel. He used donation-blackmail in his successful effort to force out Claudine Gay as Harvard president and Elizabeth Magill as Penn president in 2023 when he felt they were insufficiently critical of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.

“President Gay’s failures have led to billions of dollars of cancelled, paused, and withdrawn donations to the university,” Ackman wrote on X/twitter (where he now has 1.8 million followers). “I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni.”

And despite Ackman’s recent claim that he agreed with Charlie Kirk that the antisemitism charge is wielded too readily by Israel advocates, he blamed Claudine Gay for a “metastasis of antisemitism to other universities and institutions around the world.”

It is hardly surprising that young conservatives are questioning the U.S. support for war crimes. Israel is conducting what countless human rights authorities, lately a  U.N. commission calls a “genocide.”

Kirk had an important role to play here. Kirk was a mix of GOP party chairman and Rush Limbaugh, seeking to unify different factions of the party, Ben Smith writes at Semafor. “And one of Kirk’s preoccupations this year, in public and in private, was holding together the Republican Party on the question of Israel. ‘His No. 1 concern was that this was ripping the MAGA movement apart,’ said Wolicki. ‘He was trying to hold the coalition together in many ways.’”

One barometer of how the issue has been playing out within the MAGA movement is the right-wing Georgia Congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene, who labeled Israel’s actions a genocide in July and said she didn’t want Americans to pay for it. “I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with. And I will not be silent about it,” she said. She was moved by the destruction of “masses of innocent people and children.”

Greene was way ahead of Democrats Bernie Sanders and Becca Balint on the genocide judgment. The two left-leaning Vermont politicians finally joined the chorus last week. They are reportedly the first Jews in Congress to use the label—yet another tragic sign of the moral failure of the Jewish establishment, and of the Democratic establishment. 

The polling is only too clear. More than 3/4ths of Democrats see Israel as committing genocide. And 20 percent of Republicans do. Surely most of those Republicans are young. 

These numbers are causing huge instability inside American politics because party leaders are so pro-Israel. 

Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York in some part because he refused to back down on calling Israel an apartheid state committing genocide even as Andrew Cuomo sought to drown him in ads publicizing those views. Many young voters rewarded him for that position. And when New York Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani last week, her statement said nothing about their differences on Israel (just “antisemitism”). 

She knows that the Israel issue is explosive, and being pro-Israel may only hurt a candidate. 

The Democratic branch of the lobby is panicking. J Street laments that Israel is “becoming a pariah state.” Michael Koplow at the Israel lobby group Israel Policy Forum writes, “We need to wake up to how Israel is viewed. … …. I can sadly but confidently state from my own conversations and observations that regional actors view Israel as the Middle East’s reigning source of instability, on par with and even surpassing Iran.”

And the Republican branch of the Israel lobby is panicked as well. 

Bill Ackman was one of Trump’s leading donors. A longtime Democratic Party donor, he now appears to have replaced Sheldon Adelson as the leading financial influencer on the right. He surely played a role in Trump’s recent scheming on behalf of Cuomo in the NY mayor’s face.

Of course, our mainstream media is reflecting very little of this news. Pro-Israel donors are central to our political processes, but their influence remains a verboten subject in the media. 

So the discussion goes on elsewhere. No wonder Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson get millions of views.