Tucker Carlson’s Interview in Israel: How To Get the Woke-Right Right

Jerusalem, We Have a Problem…

Tonight, during prime time in Israel, Channel 13 will air an interview with American host Tucker Carlson, whom many accuse of being the standard-bearer of the assault on U.S.-Israel relations from the right, and who has made scandalous statements bordering on antisemitism. For many Israelis, this will be their first exposure to the depth of the challenge Israel is experiencing in its relations with the Republican Party as well.

For years, Israel assumed it faced a severe problem regarding the erosion of bipartisan support in the U.S., primarily due to the decline in backing among Democratic Party voters. Most efforts by Jewish and pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. were aimed at addressing this challenge. 

Indeed, on the Democratic side, what was once contested is increasingly treated as a settled fact: Israel is being thrown under the bus even by figures who were long considered relatively pro-Israel. At the heart of the controversy is primarily American military aid to Israel.

However, over the past year, it has become clear that the bond between Israel and the U.S. is also being challenged from the right.

The Republican Identity Crisis

The war with Iran exposed the depth of the fractures within the Republican Party over support for Israel, over American involvement in international conflicts, and over the meaning of President Trump’s campaign slogan “America First.” Recent polling and analysis suggest that younger Republicans are less committed to the old pro-Israel consensus than previous generations. Israel is no longer merely an ally in Republican politics; it is becoming the ultimate litmus test through which the American right is struggling over identity, authority, religion, and national purpose.

Today, three major Republican streams can be identified:

1. Liberal Republicans — a pragmatic camp strongly associated with the party’s former establishment. It is broadly pro-Israel and believes the United States should maintain an active global presence while focusing American resources primarily on containing China.

2. The mainstream wing led by President Trump and the core of the MAGA movement — this camp also remains broadly supportive of Israel, though it believes in greater restraint regarding the deployment and use of American military power overseas. The war with Iran has left many within this camp uneasy and conflicted.

3. The Alt-right — a political movement associated with the far right and white nationalism. The movement embraces white supremacist ideas, and antisemitism and xenophobia are prevalent within parts of it. This camp advocates an extreme isolationist foreign policy, and many within it increasingly see Israel as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

   
   

Israel as Litmus Test

This is why Israel has become such a charged issue:The debate is not really about what Israel is doing, at least not in the narrow policy sense. Israel has become the ultimate litmus test of the Republican Party itself. Among voices critical of Israel, including Tucker Carlson, support for Israel is increasingly framed as submission to neoconservatives, donors, globalists, the liberal empire, or even distorted theology; whereas opposition to Israel is presented as evidence of independence, authenticity, anti-elitism, and moral and civilizational clarity. What appears to be a foreign-policy debate is, in practice, an internal struggle over who controls the American right.

The Iran war accelerated this dynamic. The populist right, like significant parts of the American left, has adopted the narrative that Israel dragged the United States into war. It is not for us in Astarta-Israel to determine whether the decision to go to war served American interests. However, in the prevailing discourse on both the American left and right, the United States is increasingly portrayed as having lost the legitimacy to even debate what it should do in response to a state that openly calls for “death to America,” is developing nuclear weapons, and is advancing delivery systems capable of reaching the United States. Within this framing, it is taken as self-evident that Israel manipulated America, that the war served external interests, and that the longstanding alliance is a trap. Once this narrative takes hold, Israel is no longer seen as an ally confronting shared threats, but as a symbol of elite manipulation, foreign influence, endless wars, and even theological corruption.

Challenging the Evangelical Support

One of the central pillars of American support for Israel is evangelical Christianity. Yet even in this case, the generational trend does not bode well for Israel. A Brookings  report found that support for Israel among young evangelicals declined sharply between 2018 and 2021, and warned that there is a real question mark surrounding the future of evangelical support for Israel. The Brookings study also showed that the core of Republican support for Israel is rooted in evangelicals, and that without evangelicals, Republican attitudes toward Israel do not differ substantially from those of the broader American public — which, as noted, is increasingly distancing itself from Israel. In other words, the weakening of the evangelical foundation is not a side issue; it is fundamental.

The relative decline in support among young evangelicals is not merely an organic outcome of natural social processes; it is also the result of deliberate anti-Israel activism. Israel has become a point of contention within the MAGA movement as well, with Tucker Carlson serving as one of the leading drivers of this trend. Carlson frequently attacks the State of Israel and Zionism, including through explicitly theological arguments.

Israel, as noted, is merely a symptom of broader processes unfolding within the Republican Party. Indeed, a growing current on the American right seeks to undermine the Protestant-theological foundations of support for Israel. This current challenges the conclusions drawn from literal readings of the Bible that helped cement the alliance between evangelicals and Israel, while simultaneously promoting theological doctrines such as supersessionism — the claim that the Church inherited the role of the Jewish people as God’s chosen nation, and that the biblical promises given to Israel were transferred to the Church (and therefore that there is no obligation to support Israel). Studies show that evangelical support for Israel is closely tied to beliefs regarding prophecy, biblical authority, and the enduring significance of the State of Israel. As younger evangelicals increasingly drift away from these commitments, and as influential voices on the right increasingly mock Christian Zionism or portray it as a pathology, the struggle over Israel becomes, in part, a struggle over who has the authority to define orthodox Christian political theology on the American right.

Safe Spaces, Schools, and Communal Life

What is sometimes called the “Woke Right” is, in practice, the adoption by the far right of the discursive framework of the radical progressive left: purity politics, binary divisions between those who are with us or against us, attacks on the establishment, victimhood narratives, and an obsessive search for hidden systems of oppression that generate conspiracy theories. The target is different, but the style is similar. Within this framework, Israel almost inevitably becomes the ultimate victim of populist discourse on both the left and the right, situated at the intersection of war, religion, media, nationalism, and Jewish identity in America.

The two forms of “wokeness” complement one another in ways that are deeply destructive to Jewish life in America and to the relationship between Israel and the United States. The wokeness of the left undermines Jewish life in America by recasting mainstream Jewish identity and institutions as a form of suspect and oppressive power. The wokeness of the right undermines the U.S.-Israel relationship by framing support for Israel as a betrayal of nation, faith, and sovereignty. They speak in different vocabularies, but they are advancing the same troubling reality: Israel as stigma, Jews as symbol, and the delegitimization of Jewish communal life in America.

As a result, “safe spaces”, above all universities, K-12 schools, and labor unions, are becoming the primary arenas in which Israel is transformed from a foreign-policy issue into a mechanism of moral sorting. The politicization of these safe spaces is now filtering down into earlier stages of civic and social formation, shaping the way children first learn to think about Jews, Israel, and the legitimacy of Jewish communal life.

So What Should Be Done?

First, the response must begin with a clear-eyed realism. Support for Israel among Republicans remains very high, and while the influence of Tucker Carlson and his allies is troubling, it still represents a relatively marginal phenomenon. There are, however, specific communities that should become the focus of pro-Israel activism: evangelicals, whose support for Israel is rooted in theology; and patriotic Republicans — both from the liberal wing and from the mainstream nationalist camp — whose support for Israel stems from a perception of shared interests (“the realists”). At times these groups overlap, but not always. The Jewish establishment struggles to operate effectively within these circles, feeling far more comfortable with liberal institutions, universalist values, legacy media, and bipartisan frameworks than with the religious, populist, and digital ecosystems in which the new right increasingly operates. The Jewish community certainly holds no special advantage in an internal Christian theological struggle.

Moreover, many of Israel’s evangelical allies are not even attempting to confront the influence of figures like Carlson, simply because they do not recognize the connection between isolationism, theological realignment, anti-elite nationalism, and  anti-Israel narratives. Many still perceive these developments as separate phenomena rather than as interconnected expressions of the broader trend described in this article. Exposing that connection — between the growing anti-Israel currents inside the Republican Party and these deeper ideological shifts — should become a central mission for advocacy and influence organizations.

Furthermore, the operating doctrine of Jewish advocacy and community-relations organizations was built over decades around a fusion between the liberal values of the American Jewish community and the need to defend Israel against boycott and delegitimization campaigns from the left. That doctrine is largely irrelevant when confronting forces on the American right. This is an entirely new challenge. What may prove effective instead is a response grounded in theological infrastructure. In contrast, when engaging realist supporters of Israel, the arguments must be translated into the language of national interest, Israel as a reliable and valuable ally, anti-jihadist realism, minority self-defense, and resistance both to genuine elite manipulation and to conspiracy theories of the kind promoted by Carlson and his circle.

What is now required is the construction of a genuine operational infrastructure: credible messengers, relevant language, patient coalition-building, and a willingness to engage the nationalist right on its own terrain. The response to prominent anti-Israel influencers such as Carlson must rest on demonstrating that their framework is strategically shallow, theologically corrosive, and politically destructive. It also requires understanding that the struggle is not only about Israel; it is about who will define the moral center of America.

The trends in U.S.-Israel relations are not encouraging, but the relationship is not necessarily doomed. What is clear, however, is that the old logic underpinning the relationship is no longer sufficient. Israel must once again prove itself as a strategic asset that advances American interests regardless of which administration is in power in Washington. This also requires rethinking Israel’s place in the region. Deeper integration into the emerging regional order and stronger partnerships with pragmatic regional actors would strengthen Israel’s standing in Washington as well. Israel already appears to be thinking in these terms — including through the voluntary relinquishment of direct American aid while expanding broader security and defense cooperation. Israel and Jewish community organizations do not need to move to the right; they need to get this right.