Tucker Carlson flew to Israel last week, sat down with U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee at Ben Gurion Airport, and then left. He never set foot in the Jewish state beyond the terminal walls. But in the hours following his departure, Carlson released a program packed with some of the most concentrated anti-Israel falsehoods, unsubstantiated accusations, and antisemitic conspiracy theories to air on a major right-wing platform in recent memory — and over a million people watched it on YouTube within hours of its release.
What does it mean when one of the most influential voices on the American right uses a primetime interview platform to claim that Israel is “probably the most violent country on earth,” accuse the Israeli government of personally targeting his family, and peddle a fake, AI-generated image as evidence that Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island — all without providing a shred of proof? It means we are watching something dangerous unfold in real time, and it demands a clear-eyed, fact-based response.
Carlson’s program was a master class in antisemitism and lies dressed up as journalism.
Before Huckabee even appeared on screen, Carlson delivered a solo monologue that set the tone. He claimed the Israeli government had targeted members of his own family — invoking the biblical concept of Amalek to accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of believing in “blood guilt,” meaning collective punishment of an enemy’s family and bloodline.
“There was a threat to my family,” Carlson said. “The Israeli government, and Netanyahu himself, tried to punish two members of my family… because he, as he has said in public many times, believes in blood guilt, Amalek.”
This is false. Netanyahu has never stated that he believes in collective punishment or blood guilt. His reference to Amalek in the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist massacre was a reference to genocidal threats against the Jewish people throughout history — a concept deeply rooted in Jewish biblical memory and entirely understood within its context by anyone with basic knowledge of Jewish tradition. Carlson’s deliberate misreading of that reference to imply a personal threat against his family crosses from commentary into fabrication.
Carlson then turned his solo segment into a broader indictment of Israel, calling it a “police state” and “surveillance state” and claiming that Israel installs spy software on visitors’ phones. “Everybody knows this,” Carlson said. Nobody has substantiated this. Israeli airport security asks visitors standard screening questions — a practice identical to protocols in dozens of countries. Huckabee made this point explicitly: “EVERYONE who comes in/out of Israel has passports checked and routinely asked security questions.”
The Huckabee interview was not Carlson’s first attack on Israel’s record with Christians — it was the latest in a series. On February 4, 2026, just weeks before flying to Ben Gurion Airport, Carlson broadcast an incendiary interview with Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem and a known Hamas apologist, filmed in Jordan — not Israel — and titled the episode “The Shocking Reality of the Treatment of Christians in the Holy Land by US-Funded Israel.” In that episode and again in his Huckabee interview, Carlson accused Israel of blocking Christian Palestinians from accessing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He also claimed — without evidence — that there are more Christians in Qatar than in Israel, a statement that turns the reality of Christian life in the Middle East completely on its head. What Carlson never mentioned is that according to Open Doors, which tracks the 50 countries where Christians face the most extreme persecution, eight of the top 10 countries in 2026 are Muslim-majority nations — none of them Israel. He has nothing to say about the more than 500 churches desecrated, looted, or destroyed in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. He filmed in Jordan, praised Qatar, and attacked the one country in the region where Christians vote, hold citizenship, build churches freely, and walk the streets without fear.
Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association and a former Knesset candidate — an Arab Christian whose family has lived in Israel for generations — was offered no platform by Carlson, despite having extended a personal invitation. Khalloul invited Carlson to a tour of Christian communities and holy sites in Israel, including a meeting with his brother-in-law, the head of the Maronite Church of Israel — and received no response. Carlson instead filmed in Jordan and let a Hamas-sympathizing archbishop speak unchallenged. Khalloul’s verdict was direct: “Tucker Carlson doesn’t want the truth. The truth doesn’t exist in his lexicon.” Khalloul described life for Christians in Israel in terms that demolish Carlson’s narrative: “We build churches freely in Israel. The state allows us freedom of worship, the freedom of movement, the freedom of speech. Our ladies can go out for work and drive their cars, and nobody harasses them, while in Arab countries, everything is the opposite.” As for the crowd limits at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Carlson’s guest cited as evidence of Israeli persecution — those restrictions are standard safety measures implemented after 45 people were killed in a crowd crush at Meron in 2021. Huckabee put Carlson’s entire Christian-persecution narrative in its proper context: “I don’t think that it’s at all accurate to even intimate that tiny, little Israel is pushing the US into something it does not want to do.” The only question is whether Carlson’s audience will hear the correction as loudly as they heard the lie.
The most reckless moment came when Carlson confronted Huckabee with the claim that Israeli President Isaac Herzog had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
“The current president of Israel, whom I know you know, apparently was at ‘pedo island.’ That’s what it says,” Carlson said. “Still-living, high-level Israeli officials are directly implicated in Epstein’s life, if not his crimes.”
The source for this claim appears to be a fake, AI-generated image that circulated online following the release of the Epstein files, showing Herzog and Epstein together. The image is fabricated. Herzog’s office issued an unequivocal denial: “There has never been any contact or connection, directly or indirectly, between Isaac Herzog and Jeffrey Epstein. There was never any acquaintance or personal relationship of any kind between them. Any claim suggesting otherwise is false and may constitute libel and defamation.”
Huckabee told Carlson he was unaware of any such connection. Later, after verifying the facts, Huckabee wrote on X: “Tucker may need to talk to his lawyers. Libel and defamation of a good and honorable man is reckless. His allegations against Israeli officials could be the stuff of libel lawsuits.”
Carlson himself subsequently posted a video in the early hours of Sunday morning, backtracking the claim. He stated he had received a letter from Herzog’s office and issued a formal apology, admitting he had acted without concrete information. That correction, however, reached a fraction of the audience that saw the original accusation.
The most ideologically revealing portion of the Carlson program was his extended challenge to the Jewish historical connection to the Land of Israel. Carlson questioned whether modern Jews are the same people as biblical Jews, pressing Huckabee with the suggestion that Ashkenazi Jews descend not from ancient Israel but from the medieval Turkic kingdom of Khazaria — a debunked theory with no serious scientific backing that is often cited by antisemitic conspiracy theorists.
“The current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here,” Carlson said. “Netanyahu, on one side, his family’s from Poland. They’re from Eastern Europe, so how do we know that he has a connection to the people who God promised the land to?”
Huckabee identified this immediately for what it is. In his post-interview statement on X, he wrote: “It’s an idea that gained traction in the 80’s and 90’s with David Duke and other Klansmen and neo-Nazis. This odious conspiracy theory is peddled by the likes of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and by people who love David Duke, as well as Islamist accounts that make up false smears about Israel non-stop and are run out of countries like Pakistan and Turkey.”
Huckabee also pointed out what Carlson repeatedly ignored: Ashkenazi Jews represent only 35–40% of Israel’s Jewish population. The majority of Israeli Jews are Sephardim and Mizrachim — Jews whose families were expelled from or fled Arab and Muslim lands in the 20th century. They never set foot in Europe. Their roots in the Middle East are direct and unbroken.
The science is equally unambiguous. Genetic research has repeatedly confirmed that Jewish populations worldwide share common ancestry traceable to the ancient Near East. The “Khazar theory” is not a question that geneticists take seriously — it is a political weapon, used specifically to strip Jews of their history and delegitimize their connection to the land of their ancestors.
This was not a one-time stumble. Carlson has built a record of platforming antisemitism that is impossible to ignore.
In a 2024 interview with “historian” Daryl Cooper, Nazi motivations were downplayed and Winston Churchill — rather than Adolf Hitler — was depicted as the true villain of World War II. Carlson praised Cooper as the best and most honest popular historian in America. He gave a friendly two-hour platform to avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes. In 2025, he hosted Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, who claimed without challenge that Israel planned to “blow up” the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
In an interview with The American Conservative, Carlson claimed that Israeli “psychological influence” had shaped American perceptions of national security threats, and described pro-Israel supporters as believing they are “specially chosen by God” while viewing others as “sub-human.” He offered no evidence. He also stated that “white people are the main victims of discrimination in the United States — not Jews.” Carlson has been a key promoter of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” theory — the belief that elites are deliberately replacing white Americans with immigrants — which he discussed dozens of times on Fox News.
During the Huckabee interview itself, Carlson accused Israel of controlling U.S. foreign policy — one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in circulation. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has way more influence over American foreign policy than Americans do,” he said. He claimed Americans cannot trust their government to take their side over Israel’s. He alleged that the Iraq War was fought at Israel’s behest. He accused Israel of murdering journalists. None of these claims were accompanied by evidence.
Huckabee gave the only correct response to the Iraq War allegation: “I don’t think that it’s at all accurate to even intimate that tiny, little Israel is pushing the US into something it does not want to do.”
When Carlson tried to claim his program reflected concern for Gaza civilians rather than hostility to Israel, Huckabee’s response was surgical: “You hide that very well.”
The interview also produced a significant controversy of its own making. Carlson pressed Huckabee on the biblical promise of the Land, citing Genesis 15:18, in which God promises Abram’s descendants territory from the Nile to the Euphrates. Carlson asked whether this meant Israel had a right to encompass all of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
Huckabee, after some back-and-forth, said: “It would be fine if they took it all.” He quickly added that Israel was not seeking territorial expansion and that the comment was, in his words, “somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”
The foreign ministers of 14 Arab and Muslim governments did not receive it as hyperbole. Saudi Arabia called the comment “extremist rhetoric” and demanded a State Department clarification. Egypt called it a “blatant violation” of international law. The Arab League stated the comments were designed to “inflame sentiments and stir religious and national emotions.” Neither Israel nor the United States issued an immediate official response.
Carlson, throughout this program, invoked the Bible — selectively, clumsily, and without understanding. He quoted God’s promise to Abraham as though it were a problem to be debunked rather than a covenant to be understood. The Sages teach that the covenant recorded in Bereishit (Genesis) was not a land grant contingent on ethnicity but a divine bond with a people and their descendants through history. “To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). The Jewish people’s connection to this land does not rest on genetics alone — it rests on an unbroken historical presence, a living tradition, and a covenant that predates every modern nation-state by thousands of years.
Carlson wanted to interrogate whether Netanyahu’s Polish-born grandfather qualifies him as a descendant of Abraham. The Sages would have found this question as absurd as it sounds. The Jewish people are defined not by DNA tests run by 21st-century algorithms but by mesorah — tradition, covenant, and collective identity passed down through every generation of exile and return.
Tucker Carlson does not merely disagree with Christian Zionists — he despises them. In his October 2025 interview with avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, Carlson declared, “I despise Christian Zionists more than anyone else on earth. If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith means you have to support whatever the Israeli government does, that’s not Christianity — that’s something else.” That interview drew more than 10 million views in its first 24 hours. In the same period, Carlson let Fuentes rant about “Zionist media control” without challenge, even calling him “enormously talented.”
This is the ideological company Carlson keeps — and the audience he is playing to — when he targets the millions of evangelical Christians who support Israel out of genuine biblical conviction. His portrait of Christian Zionists as credulous dupes being manipulated by sinister Jewish interests is not commentary. It is a classic antisemitic trope dressed in the language of American nationalism. Carlson depicts American Christian Zionists as “informal employees” of Israel in the United States, and has suggested that supporters of Jews and Israel have a “brain virus.” His deeper frustration, as one analysis noted, is that American Christians, many of them evangelicals, continue to support Israel financially and politically — and Carlson frames this support as evidence that they have abandoned their suffering brethren in Nazareth and Bethlehem in favor of a “Zionist agenda.”Agency
Huckabee did not absorb Carlson’s attacks on Christian Zionists quietly. When Carlson released his February 4 episode claiming Huckabee had “failed Jerusalem’s Christians,” the ambassador responded on X with a direct challenge: “Instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me? You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?” That challenge produced the airport interview. But when Carlson continued pressing the Christian persecution narrative in the interview itself, Huckabee pushed back on the data behind it. Figures released by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics ahead of Christmas 2025 show an increase in the Christian population in Israel— the opposite of what Carlson has repeatedly claimed. Joel Rosenberg, a Jewish believer in Jesus who has lived in Israel since 2014, put it plainly: “The Christian citizens in Israel have full and equal rights like every Jew, like every Muslim, like everyone else.”
Calev Myers, an Israeli civil rights attorney and chairman of the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress, went further, calling Carlson’s February 4 Jordan-border report “a master class in gaslighting,” saying Carlson took half-truths and blew them out of proportion while ignoring critical facts. Carlson was offered the chance to hear directly from real Christian leaders in Israel. Shadi Khalloul, founder of the Israeli Christian Aramaic Association, personally invited Carlson to his home in the Galilee to meet with the head of the Maronite Church of Israel. Carlson did not respond. He went to Jordan instead, let a Hamas-sympathizing archbishop speak unchallenged, and called it journalism.
Tucker Carlson flew into Ben Gurion Airport, sat in the VIP terminal, spread demonstrable falsehoods to more than a million viewers, and flew home. He did not tour the country, visit its cities, speak with its people, or engage with its history in any serious way. He came to perform — and the performance was a showcase of some of the most dangerous conspiracy theories circulating in the American right today.
Huckabee extended an invitation. Carlson rejected it. A man genuinely interested in the truth would have walked out of that terminal and seen for himself. Instead, he left, and the antisemitic tropes he amplified will circulate long after this news cycle moves on.
Israel is not going anywhere. And neither is the truth.
