Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host turned independent podcaster, accused Israel of running an “apartheid situation” and announced plans to help launch a third political party in the United States, in an interview published Wednesday by the Columbia Journalism Review. The remarks mark the most explicit break yet between Carlson and both the Republican establishment and the Trump administration he once championed.
Carlson told CJR he had avoided criticizing Israel for most of his career because the subject felt “too personal,” adding that he had long operated under what he called an “unwritten rule” that criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews generally. He claimed his private views have not changed in twenty years. “I’ve been to Israel a lot, so I’m fully aware of the apartheid situation in Israel,” Carlson said. “I’ve been offended by it going back twenty years.”
Carlson said the immediate trigger for going public was the 2025 war with Iran, which he described as “the first salvo in a regime-change effort led by Israel.” He said he warned Trump directly, during three White House visits in the month before the war began, that toppling the regime in Tehran would not produce “a democratic, pro-Western government.” According to Carlson, Trump’s response was simply, “I know.”
Carlson’s break with facts
Carlson framed his falling-out with Trump in the language of betrayal, telling CJR he feels sorry for a president he now regards as unable to control his own administration’s direction. “He’s not a man in charge of his own life at this point,” Carlson said. That claim collapses under its own weight: Trump remains the sitting president of the United States, commanding the executive branch, the military, and a Republican Congress. Carlson’s sympathy is a rhetorical device, not an argument.
The “apartheid” charge is worse than a rhetorical device. It is a factual claim, and it is false. Carlson offered no legal definition, no comparative case, and no evidence beyond two decades of personal offense. He built an entire political turn on a word he never bothered to define.
Carlson also cast American and Israeli policy as a single conspiracy of “war, money” and casualties, insisting that Republicans and Democrats stand in “lockstep solidarity” on Israel and that this uniformity is itself proof of corruption. That argument treats bipartisan agreement as evidence of wrongdoing rather than as evidence that American interests and Israeli security happen to align. Carlson wants a third party built on the premise that support for Israel is illegitimate by definition.
What apartheid actually means
Apartheid was a legal system in twentieth-century South Africa built on racial classification written directly into law. Under the Population Registration Act of 1950 and the laws that followed, South Africans were assigned to racial categories at birth, and those categories determined where they could live, whom they could marry, what jobs they could hold, and whether they could vote. It was a system of statutory racial hierarchy.
Israel has no such law. Arab citizens of Israel vote, run for the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and serve as government ministers. Israel’s Declaration of Independence guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Arab citizens make up roughly a fifth of Israel’s population and are represented across medicine, law, academia, and the judiciary. None of that is compatible with apartheid, as the term was ever defined.
Where the honest reckoning has to begin
A reader who only wants confirmation should stop here. But an honest accounting requires facing an uncomfortable truth: Israel enforces restrictions on Jews that have no equivalent for any other group in the country.
The Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, is administered under an arrangement that bars Jewish prayer, largely at the discretion of the Jordanian Waqf and enforced by Israeli police. A Jew who is caught moving his lips in what a police officer decides looks like prayer can be removed from the site his ancestors built. Jewish access to other biblical sites, including sections of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, is similarly restricted or divided by schedule.
Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem stands as one of the starkest violations of Israel’s own diplomatic commitments. The Oslo II Accords, signed in 1995, explicitly designated the tomb as an Israeli-controlled enclave and guaranteed Jewish access to the site of the biblical Joseph’s burial (Genesis 50:25). That guarantee lasted five years. In October 2000, at the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a Palestinian mob overran the compound and desecrated it while Israeli forces withdrew under fire, and an Israeli border policeman, Madhat Yusuf, bled to death after Israeli authorities delayed sending a rescue force. Since then, Jewish visits happen almost exclusively under cover of night, coordinated in advance with the Palestinian Authority and escorted by IDF convoys, typically limited to once a month for a matter of minutes. The tomb has been torched and vandalized repeatedly since, including a 2015 arson attack that gutted the site. A biblical site guaranteed by signed agreement now requires a military convoy and a curfew for Jews to set foot on it.
Jews are also barred by Israeli law and government policy from living in Gaza since the 2005 disengagement, and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria face restrictions on building and expansion that Arab towns in the same territory do not face to the same degree. These are real, documented policies, and they apply to Jews because they are Jews.
Many other sites, such as Rachel’s Tomb, the tomb of the prophet Samuel, and Shiloh, are restricted or limited to Jews due to security concerns.
The law was never meant to bend based on identity. Israel’s founding documents echo that standard. Israel’s actual practice on the Temple Mount does not. The Sages taught that the Temple stood as “a house of prayer for all peoples,” language drawn directly from Isaiah, and a nation that calls itself the guardian of that promise while barring its own citizens from praying there has not kept faith with its own text. That contradiction deserves to be named without flinching, and naming it is not the same as accepting Carlson’s slander. A government falling short of the biblical standard for its own people is not apartheid. It is a failure of nerve that Israel’s own leaders have the responsibility and the obligation to correct.
The apartheid state Carlson will not name
Carlson never mentions the Palestinian Authority, and that omission tells its own story. The PA governs under the Basic Law that designates Islam as the official religion and Islamic sharia as a principal source of legislation. Article 1 of the PA’s Basic Law bars the sale of land to Jews, a prohibition carrying the death penalty under laws inherited from Jordan and still enforced by the PA’s own courts. No Jew can legally live under Palestinian Authority rule.
The PA’s record on Christians is no better. The Christian population of Bethlehem, a majority-Christian city under British Mandate rule, has collapsed under PA governance amid land seizures, intimidation, and economic pressure, while the Christian population inside Israel has grown. Homosexuality remains a criminal offense in PA-administered areas under laws never repealed. Women in Palestinian society face so-called honor killings that PA courts routinely punish with minimal sentences. And the PA’s treatment of its own African and Black African migrant and refugee population has drawn documented reports of abuse, detention, and deportation, a form of racial discrimination that gets no attention from Carlson or the outlets amplifying his claims.
An organization that criminalizes land sales to Jews, enforces Islamic law as state law, persecutes gay people, tolerates the killing of women for perceived dishonor, and abuses black Africans within its own territory is the actual apartheid state in this story. Carlson built a political movement on accusing the wrong side.
A conclusion Carlson cannot reach
Carlson wants Americans to believe that walking away from Israel is a return to principle. It is the opposite. The nation he is condemning is the one whose founding law promises equality to every citizen and whose failures, real as they are on the Temple Mount, are failures against its own scripture, not failures of a racial caste system. The territory he refuses to discuss, ruled by the Palestinian Authority, enforces exactly the kind of legal discrimination he claims to oppose, against Jews, against Christians, against gay people, against women, and against black Africans. Tucker Carlson did not discover an apartheid state. He built a third party on top of one and pointed his finger at its victim instead.
