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

 

Analysis

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

J Oliver Conroy

Parts of Maga view Israel with suspicion, but US ambassador continues to believe in its divine right to much of the Middle East

 

Sat 21 Feb 2026 16.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/tucker-carlson-mike-huckabee-israel

 

Parts of the Maga right may be souring on Israel – but a hardline form of Christian Zionism seems 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 vividly illustrated a gaping divide between two factions of the Republican party. On one side is a Christian nationalist stream of the Maga movement, which views the United States’s close relationship with Israel with increasing suspicion. On the other is an older Christian conservative establishment that views that alliance as a totem of US foreign policy – and in some cases believes that Israeli Jews possess a divine right to a large swathe of the Middle East, US public opinion be damned.

 

Call it the Brawl at Ben Gurion. During their more than two-hour dialogue, Carlson, the rightwing commentator, repeatedly insinuated that Huckabee was more invested in defending the interests of Israel than those of the country he represents as a US official. For his part, Huckabee – a prominent Christian Zionist who believes that Israel has a biblical right to the territory that its 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 testy interview highlights just how unresponsive the Trump administration is to rising American discontent with Israel, as measured by polling of Americans across a variety of demographics – including a modest drop in pro-Israel sentiment among Republicans.

 

In one extraordinary moment during the interview, Carlson asked Huckabee if Israel was entitled, according to a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, to claim much of the modern Middle East. Huckabee responded: “It would be fine 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 occurs against the backdrop of the Israel-Gaza war, which continues to claim Palestinian lives despite a fragile truce, and as Israel has recently moved to tighten control over Palestinian areas of the West Bank, in what an Israeli minister has described as a measure to “kill the idea of a Palestinian state”.

 

The interview also comes as Trump threatens US strikes on Iran – a prospect that Carlson ardently opposes, but which Huckabee has hinted he believes may be necessary.

 

Carlson noted that only around 20% of Americans, according to polling, 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 whose magnitude the American people might not understand. (He did not articulate any direct threat Iran poses to the US.)

 

Carlson also hammered Huckabee about his decision to meet, late last year, with Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted of spying on the US for Israel; about why an Israeli official was able to return to Israel after police arrested him in Nevada last August for allegedly soliciting a minor for sex; about why the US might 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 pleaded not guilty. Barak has not been implicated in wrongdoing, and has said he regrets ever knowing Epstein.)

 

Israel “looks a lot 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 argued fiercely – often interrupting each other to question the premises of each other’s assertions. In fact, controversy and mutual antagonism dogged the interview since before it even aired: earlier this week, Carlson alleged that shortly after he interviewed Huckabee he and his staff were subjected to a “bizarre” temporary detainment at Ben Gurion airport by security agents. In response, Huckabee on social media ridiculed Carlson’s characterization, describing his treatment as a normal security process at the famously strict border. Carlson never left the vicinity of the airport.

 

A one-time supporter of the Iraq war, Carlson has over time come 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 a particular vehemence. Some critics have accused him of mainstreaming conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes.

 

Although Republican voters as a whole remain pro-Israel, younger conservatives are increasingly skeptical of the US’s support for the country and sympathetic to Carlson’s point of view.

 

“I think that we are reaching the end of a period, [which] reached its peak under George W Bush, when it could be taken for granted that national spokesmen for 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 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 that American Christians support the Jewish state. In contrast, Carlson, 56, has tracked with the rise of a stream of the Maga movement that is isolationist and Christian nationalist.

 

 

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

 

In recent decades, the Israeli right cultivated close ties with the Republican party and conservative Christian groups in the US. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu believed that Christian Zionists would prove a more useful longterm ally to Israel than liberal-leaning Jewish Americans, and that allying with the right was worth the risk of alienating other segments of American support.

 

But “I don’t think that a lot of Jewish groups, especially Jewish allies of the right, have understood that Protestant Christianity is … highly fluid,” said Eliyahu Stern, a professor of religious studies at Yale and the author of a forthcoming book entitled Nowhere Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right 1977-10/7. Protestantism is a protean movement, he said, that is constantly changing with larger political and social forces.

 

As long as Trump is in power, however, Maga critics of Israel will probably remain on the margins of deciding actual US policy in Israel and the Middle East. Yet once Trump leaves office, the right’s internal divide about Israel might pose serious problems to the coherence of the conservative movement.

 

What happens then is anyone’s guess. “We’re at the beginning of something, not at the end,” Stern said. “We do not know where, at this point, this goes.”