Is a ‘post-Israel’ GOP on the horizon? Breaking down the battle over Israel on the U.S. Right

Last month, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made headlines and generated vociferous backlash after he declared that his organization would not distance itself from the right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson.

Roberts’ statement was a response to right-wing critics who attacked Carlson after he interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

Roberts would later say he “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy,” and insist his video script was written by an aide who went on to resign, but this hasn’t quelled debate about the moment.

A sizable portion of that debate has centered around Israel, as Carlson has repeatedly criticized U.S. support for the country.

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with American Conservative senior editor Andrew Day about the Roberts fallout, how the debate over Israel is playing out on the right, whether neoconservatism has maintained a grip on the Trump administration, and what a “post-Israel” GOP might look like.

I wanted to start with Kevin Roberts’ comments and the reaction. For people who haven’t followed this story closely, can you explain what happened?

To begin the story, we need to go back about a week before Kevin Roberts released his video statement, when Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes on his very popular show.

Nick Fuentes is a young, extreme right-winger and antisemite, I think it’s fair to say, and this was very controversial.

The context for that interview is that, to my understanding, Carlson and Fuentes had been beefing, basically. They had said mean things about one another on their respective shows, and Carlson evidently saw fit to reach out to Fuentes and bring him on.

Many people I know were saying, ‘This was inevitable.’ Fuentes was kind of the elephant in the room. Like it or not, he is extremely popular among young conservatives. I do think that the degree of his popularity among, say, conservative Zoomers on Capitol Hill has been wildly exaggerated, but he’s very popular in the United States and even worldwide. He has a lot of viewers and followers, so Carlson reached a point where he obviously thought he should have him on. 

Carlson was criticized for conducting what many perceived to be a friendly interview, but my read on that was a little different. I thought Carlson was clearly conducting the interview in a kind of fatherly spirit and tone. He was, if you watch it, actually pushing back on Fuentes’ antisemitism, trying to draw a distinction and enforce a distinction between criticizing Israel and blaming Jews or criticizing Jews in general.

Nevertheless, Carlson got a lot of criticism for the fairly warm-seeming interview, in the perception of many people. 

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts released a video statement about a week after that, in which he defended Tucker Carlson and said he wasn’t going to participate in “canceling” Tucker Carlson. He said Carlson was a friend of the Heritage Foundation, and they weren’t going to ditch their friend Tucker Carlson. He also said that he didn’t think Fuentes should be canceled, although he did clarify that he abhorred Fuentes’ antisemitic views. 

I think he was unprepared for the pushback. It was pretty ferocious. A lot of people were upset, not only outside of the Heritage Foundation, but notably inside the Heritage Foundation.

Roberts issued a couple of statements walking back his remarks. They held some sort of meeting at the Heritage Foundation, in which he said that it had been a mistake to issue the video statement.

This hasn’t been enough for people. Someone just resigned from the group over this: Robert P. George. He’s an eminent scholar, and he was on the board at the Heritage Foundation. He’s the latest person to resign. His reasoning was that, even though Roberts has expressed some regret about the statement, he hadn’t recanted on its content to the extent that George thinks necessary. 

So this is an ongoing issue, and it’s really accelerated this civil war on the American right, a civil war that revolves largely around the issue of Israel.

Can you talk a little bit about that battle? How do you perceive the players and where are these lines being drawn within the right?

First, I’d say there’s a generational divide on the right over Israel.

This actually goes back years before October 7th. You could see that Americans, younger Americans, were becoming more skeptical of U.S. support for Israel and more open to considering the perspective of Palestinians. That was very prominent on the left, but it was also developing on the right.

In recent years, polling has shown that support for Israel is even declining among evangelicals, which are historically the religious group that’s most supportive of Israel, besides Jewish Americans.

There was actually a lot of goodwill toward Israel right after October 7th, but the way that Israel responded to it and the terrible images that we’ve seen of the destruction in Gaza and children being killed has really made Americans and Westerners sour on Israel. The polling is very straightforward.

Half of Republicans under 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel. This is very dangerous for the Israel lobby, which is just this kind of loose coalition of organizations and individuals who promote U.S. support for Israel and U.S. foreign policy that favors Israel.

It’s very dangerous for their faction because Israel has already lost the left. During the Obama administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really banked on the Republicans. He put his bet on them, and now he seems to be losing all of the Republicans except for the Boomers.

That’s very dangerous for Israel supporters, and I think it’s brought a new degree of intensity to the conversation around Israel on the Republican side. The Israel Lobby really doesn’t want to lose Republicans. Maybe at some point, Israel will be willing to wean off of American security assistance, but they’re clearly not there yet. They don’t want to go cold turkey.

So that’s the broader context of this civil war on the right.

Even though they’re turning on Israel, American voters don’t really vote on foreign policy. They vote on issues such as economic matters and immigration. So, to some extent, this is a distraction, but it’s not one that we can simply set aside. The logic of the “America First” approach has made this battle inevitable. Young people started asking, Wait, why is there an exception for Israel when it comes to ‘America First”? Why do we give this lavish, unconditional support to Israel, even when it’s often acting against our own interests or disrupting our diplomacy with Iran, for example?

The most prominent person in this faction is probably Tucker Carlson, as you say, but there’s also Steve Bannon, and there’s The American Conservative. On the pro-Israel side, you have voices like Mark Levin of Fox News, Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. And Christian Zionism is very much a part of this; it’s not just Jewish Americans who support Israel like some people think. It’s people like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who seems to be preparing his run for president in 2028 on the basis of him being something different than Tucker Carlson. He’s positioning himself as a throwback Republican who is still supportive of Israel.

Obviously, our ambassador to Israel is Mike Huckabee. He was formerly an evangelical preacher. He’s definitely part of the Israel lobby. It’s been said that he often acts more like Israel’s ambassador to the West and to America than like America’s ambassador to Israel, and I think that’s accurate.

During the Iraq War, there was a lot of talk about the GOP being taken over by the neoconservatives, which were seen by some as something of a shift from previous GOP administrations.

In 2016, Trump won, in part, because he criticized the Bushes and endless wars. We can debate whether he has actually followed through with that rhetoric, but it definitely continues to resonate with a sector of his base.

Does neoconservative thought still dominate the party or do you think it’s going in a different direction?

Neoconservatism, as a phenomenon, kind of gravitated to the Republican Party from the left. Originally, it was a lot of ex-Trotskyites who had become fed up with the Democratic Party and didn’t think that it was bold enough in its opposition to the Soviet Union. They also had become suspicious of what they perceived to be sort of liberals’ sympathies for the Soviet Union’s economic model, so they gravitated to the Republican Party.

At the time, basically everyone was a hawk, but the Republican Party was more hawkish than the Democratic Party, so it attracted this group that eventually became known as the Neoconservatives. After the Cold War ended, people like Pat Buchanan, co-founder of The American Conservative, no longer perceived any existential threat emanating from Eastern Europe, so they changed the way that they talk about foreign policy. 

They began to think more in terms of the need for retrenchment from Europe. They began to oppose giving security guarantees to many countries. They wanted our allies to do more for themselves, to look out for their own security, for the benefit of both us and our allies. The neoconservatives obviously saw things very differently.

The height of neoconservative power was obviously during the George W. Bush administration. After 9-11, they were able to pursue their plans in the Middle East. Those wars, interestingly, were not blamed on Israel at the time. A lot of people on the left and right who were critical of the wars, especially on the left, I think, they thought about them more in terms of: these were wars for oil and natural resources. And conservative critics thought these were liberal crusades to spread democracy. But the role of Israel didn’t come up much.

As you mentioned, Trump really distinguished himself by opposing neoconservatism, at least rhetorically, and opposing George W. Bush and the associated neocons. Again, Americans don’t typically vote based on foreign policy, but I think 2016 was somewhat of an exception, because Donald Trump used foreign policy as an opportunity to distinguish himself from the rest of the Republican crowd, to generate all these headlines, and to create these scenarios on the debate stage where he seemed to be the most unique figure and the only one really taking on the Republican establishment.

That really endeared him to a lot of conservative voters. On these issues, I think his first term was a mixed bag. But he often brags that he didn’t start any new wars and there’s some truth to that. He was certainly better than George W. Bush. I would say in his second term, that he’s still better than George W. Bush. I don’t think it’s correct to just say that Trump is a neoconservative or something.

At the same time, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor is one of the most hawkish figures on the American political scene. He’s kind of changed his tune and evolved over the course of his political career, but I think you can basically just see him as a neoconservative. I think some of the people that I mentioned earlier, like Mark Levin, often seem to have Trump’s ear more than Israel critics.

I think it’s an open question what happens next. I don’t think it’s predetermined. In political science terms, it’s a high agency moment rather than a structurally determined one. I think it could go either way. I think these competing instincts exist within Trump as a person. I think he’s very averse to military engagement that risks the lives of American soldiers. At the same time, he likes to demonstrate his strength. And he definitely has pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, who have influenced his approach to the Middle East over the years.

In recent days, the Epstein Files and Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein have dominated the headlines. Many of the conservative podcasters who criticize U.S. support for Israel are also quite concerned about this issue. 

Over the past week, we have also seen Trump attack fellow Republicans like Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Green, two lawmakers who have been outspoken on Epstein and Israel.

Do you see a connection between these two issues? Are people on the right seeing them as connected in some capacity?

Those two things are definitely linked in the discourse because a lot of people on the right, and on the left, think that Epstein was some sort of intelligence agent or asset for Israel, for Mossad.

Whether that’s borne out in reality isn’t clear, although Epstein did clearly have a lot of connections to Israeli government officials. He had connections to heads of state and powerful political people all over the world, but his connection to people like [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak seemed to be stronger and more significant and more salient than even his other political connections.

So a lot of people think he was some sort of Mossad agent, and that he was compromising American political figures on behalf of Israel. I’m agnostic on that. I don’t really think we have quite enough evidence to make that claim quite that directly and forthrightly. It’s possible that he was somehow connected to various intelligence agencies around the world. It might be that his connections to intelligence agencies around the world have been overstated, in part because he was a master manipulator who constantly exaggerated the degree of his own connectedness and influence when talking to people in emails, for example, like the ones that were recently released by the House Democrats and then the House Republicans.

President Trump obviously has found this whole Epstein files thing to be a thorn in his side. He ran against corruption. He ran as someone who would take on the establishment and drain the swamp, and the whole Epstein scandal and his prior friendship with Epstein really complicates things for him and his MAGA movement and threatens to undermine his legitimacy among MAGA voters.

On Truth Social, he released a post saying that he would he encouraged House Republicans to go ahead and vote to release the Epstein files. It’s a somewhat unusual statement because the Trump administration could release them itself if it wanted. It doesn’t need to be forced by Congress to do so, as I understand, but nevertheless this was a signal that he’s not going to be attacking every House Republican who comes out in favor of releasing the Epstein files.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence when he goes after Massie and he goes after Marjorie Taylor Greene, two Republican representatives who are popular among MAGA types, who have been calling for the release of the Epstein files. It’s not a coincidence that they have also drawn the antipathy of the Israel lobby.

Massie is going to have a really difficult re-election campaign in Kentucky because these pro-Israel donors, including Paul Singer and Miriam Adelson, are funding the opposition against him in Kentucky. He’s got quite a battle on his hands.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has now been called out by Trump. There’s always the threat that he’ll reduce the popularity of Republicans by doing this, which is why Trump wields his power so effectively and why Republicans are so nervous about getting on his bad side.

So far the evidence suggests that Trump was aware of Epstein’s crimes, but maybe not fully. So far, it’s unclear if he’s involved based on the emails we’ve seen. Epstein says things like, “Well, of course Trump knew about the girls. He told Ghislaine Maxwell to stop.” If Trump had been participating in these crimes in the way that some people imagine, I don’t think Epstein would quite put it that way.

So, we don’t fully know the extent of Epstein’s crimes or of Trump’s connection, but the cover-up from the Trump administration is clearly more politically dangerous than just releasing the files would be. If all the files  were released, I think people might see that the wildest, most salacious version of the conspiracy doesn’t actually probably exist and doesn’t directly implicate Trump.

You wrote a recent piece about Vice President J.D. Vance, titled “J.D. Vance Can Lead a Post-Israel America.”

You talk about Vance potentially becoming President in the piece and him navigating a “post-Israel” GOP. 

What do you mean by “post-Israel” GOP.? What would that version of the Republican party look like?

The day before I wrote that thing, I had been leafing through the pages of my copy of Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American World, and I think that formulation just kind of insinuated itself into my brain.

I got a lot of pushback and attacks from pro-Israel commentators on X about that headline. Obviously, I’m not imagining that Israel is going to be wiped off the face of the earth or something. Rather I was envisioning a GOP that wasn’t necessarily anti-Israel or pro-Israel, but was a party that is no longer fixated on the Israel relationship, and that can move past the civil war over this issue and focus on other issues.

I suspect Joe Biden will be seen as the last pro-Israel Democratic president and I think there’s a pretty good chance that Trump will be seen as the last pro-Israel Republican president. The public opinion polls indicate that the American people are no longer willing to support this special relationship. It no longer possesses the kind of cultural cachet it once had. This natural affinity has decreased a lot throughout the war in Gaza.

What kind of transition can happen here? I have an old-fashioned conservative disposition where I’m just generally, as a principle, wary of massive political changes.

A lot can happen in the next two years and I can’t predict with any certainty that Vance is going to be the Republican nominee, but it’s a pretty good bet he will be. He’s the clear favorite among right-wingers who favor foreign policy realism and restraint. That’s a faction that tends to be critical of Israel because it thinks we get sucked into wars in the Middle East over Israel.

At the same time, Vance isn’t known for being an anti-Israel guy. In the past, he’s gone to places like the Quincy Institute, which favors realism and restraint, and defended America’s relationship with Israel and carved out, in my assessment, an exception in his pro-restraint views for Israel.

Now we can see some of his rhetoric is changing. At a recent Turning Point event, the organization that was headed by Charlie Kirk until his assassination, Vance was filling in for him and he was facing questions from students who are critical of Israel. 

He basically took the position that we need to start treating Israel as just a normal foreign country. Sometimes our interests with Israel align, and in that case, we can work with Israel. Sometimes our interests don’t align with Israel, and in that case, we can’t really cooperate with or support them. I think that’s basically the line we have to take, that Republicans need to take and stick to credibly going forward. Because, as the Turning Point events clearly demonstrate, young Americans are just fed up with this, and they’re very interested in the subject, and they’re not going to turn away from it.

My piece got a lot of pushback from pro-Israel types and made me realize that they really dislike Vance and don’t want him to be the next Republican presidential nominee. They’re probably going to be all in on Ted Cruz, which is why he’s positioning himself the way that he is right now.

My own sense is that if the Republicans run Ted Cruz for president they’re going to get absolutely stomped by the Democrats, whereas JD Vance, because of his credibility on the right, his appeal to young people, and his political and rhetorical dexterity, I think he can position himself in the way needed to unite the GOP and appeal to moderates and centrists, although that may be a challenge because of his association with the Trump administration.