Tucker Carlson has figured out who the real extremists are in the Middle East. They’re the IDF soldiers wearing patches on their uniforms — patches depicting the Third Temple, the future temple that Jews have prayed toward and mourned across two thousand years of exile. Tucker spotted these patches, connected them to the broader war in Gaza, and concluded that Israeli soldiers are secretly fighting a religious war to bulldoze Islamic holy sites. The American taxpayer, he noted gravely, is footing the bill.

He’s right that this is a religious war over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. He’s just got the sides confused.

The taxpayer line is worth clearing away first. American military aid to Israel amounts to approximately ten percent of Israel’s defense budget — and that was before October 7th, after which Israel dramatically escalated its own military spending without a corresponding increase in American assistance. As a percentage of Israel’s GDP, aid to Israel clocks in at well under one percent. Tucker repeats the “we’re paying for all of this” line with such regularity that it’s worth pointing out: it’s simply not accurate.

But the Temple — that’s where Tucker’s commentary gets interesting, and where the real argument begins.

For Jews, the Temple Mount is not a symbol or a political talking point. For Jews, it is the holiest place in the world, where Solomon built the First Temple nearly three thousand years ago, where the Second Temple stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE, where the Holy of Holies once housed the Ark of the Covenant and the presence of God. 

When the Romans burned the Temple and drove the Jews into exile, something happened that has no parallel in the history of nations or religions: the Jewish people spent the next two millennia mourning the loss, rebuilding their entire liturgical life around that mourning, and refusing to forget. Every synagogue in the world faces Jerusalem. Jews pray three times a day for the restoration of the Temple. At every Jewish wedding, a glass is broken as a reminder of its destruction. Every Passover, we say next year in Jerusalem — and we mean the Temple. This was not some medieval religious affectation. It was, and remains, the living expression of a continuous, unbroken chain of Jewish memory and longing stretching from antiquity to the present day.

So when Tucker Carlson spots IDF soldiers wearing a Temple patch and acts as though he’s caught them in some extremist confession, what he’s really revealing is that he knows nothing about the Jewish people. The Temple isn’t a fringe idea among Jews. It is woven into the fabric of Jewish identity so completely that it would be strange if soldiers fighting to defend the Jewish people weren’t thinking about it.

Now here’s what Tucker missed entirely, and what changes the entire picture.

Hamas named the October 7th massacre “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” Not “Operation Palestinian Liberation.” Not “Operation Two-State Solution.” They named the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — an attack that took place near Gaza, a full two hours’ drive from Jerusalem — after the mosque built on the Temple Mount. The connection to Jerusalem wasn’t incidental. Hamas itself declared, in its own words, that the attack was intended to rally the Muslim world around the claim that Jews were threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The organization that massacred, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians on that October morning framed the entire war as a battle over the Temple Mount.

And if there is any doubt about the theological underpinnings of that framing, one only needs to open the Hamas charter. Among its founding documents is a quotation from the hadith — Islamic religious texts recording the words and deeds of Muhammad — in which the Prophet describes Judgment Day as the moment when Muslims will hunt down and kill every Jew, even those hiding behind rocks and trees. The Hadih describes the rocks and trees themselves calling out to identify the hiding Jews. This is not some marginal commentary. This call to genocide is enshrined in the founding document of an organization that Tucker has referred to as a political movement.

In other words: Hamas made this war about the Temple Mount. Israeli soldiers responded by putting the Temple on their uniforms. These are the soldiers Tucker decided to mock.

There is a broader historical pattern worth understanding here, one that explains how the Temple Mount became “an Islamic holy site” in the first place. When Islamic armies conquered Jerusalem in the seventh century, they built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the precise location of the destroyed Jewish Temple — because the Temple had stood there. This was deliberate. Islamic conquerors throughout history converted churches into mosques, built shrines over the sacred sites of other faiths, and then declared those sites Islamic. The same thing happened in Hebron, where the Cave of Machpelah — the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah — was transformed into a mosque, and for centuries of Islamic rule, Jews were prohibited from entering. The Temple Mount’s significance to Islam derives entirely from its prior significance to Judaism. A thousand years before Islam existed, that mountain was the center of Jewish worship.

Tucker called himself a Christian while making these arguments. It is worth pointing out to him that the people whose cause he was advancing — the people who named their massacre after the mosque they built over the ruins of the Jewish Temple — also spent centuries fighting to wrest Jerusalem away from Christians. The same revisionist logic that erases Jewish claims to the Temple Mount erases the entire Jewish history on which Christianity itself is built. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have openly denied that a Jewish temple ever stood on the Temple Mount — a claim that presents a theological problem not only for Jews, but for anyone who believes in Christianity as well.

Which brings us to what Tucker and Hamas actually have in common. In a separate interview with Mike Huckabee, Tucker questioned whether the Jews living in Israel today are even the genuine descendants of the ancient Israelites — a line of argument that has been standard fare in Palestinian propaganda for decades. The goal of that argument is transparent: if today’s Jews have no authentic connection to ancient Israel, then there was no real temple, and therefore the mosque has simply been there a long time, and Jewish claims to the land dissolve. Tucker may not have thought through the implications, but the implications are what they are. A narrative designed to sever Jews from their own history serves the same purpose whether it comes from a media personality or from a genocidal terror organization’s founding charter. Tucker and Hamas are playing the same game.

Israeli soldiers wearing a Temple patch are not secretly planning to demolish mosques. They are fighting an enemy that started a war explicitly in the name of the Temple Mount and that has called for the extermination of the Jewish people as a religious obligation. They are also the latest link in an unbroken chain of Jews who have never stopped dreaming of return, never stopped mourning, never stopped saying — across every century of exile — that the Temple will be rebuilt.

We have nothing to apologize for.

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki is the Executive Director of Israel365 Action.