Tucker Carlson flew to Israel last week on a private jet he said he chartered because he is “cheap,” sat down with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee inside Ben-Gurion Airport’s diplomatic terminal, and never left the building. He didn’t need to. The war he came to wage was not with Hamas or Hezbollah. It was with the American officials, Jewish thinkers, and conservative allies who have spent months pushing back against what Israeli-American political theorist Yoram Hazony has called a “circus of anti-Jewish messaging” on Carlson’s podcast.

The two-and-a-half-hour episode, released Friday, featured a combative 25-minute monologue before Carlson even sat across from Huckabee. In it, Carlson called Israel “probably the most violent country in the world” and that most people have held a gun or killed people – a claim resting on the conflation of mandatory military service with criminal violence.

The vast majority of IDF soldiers have not, contrary to the implication of Carlson, fired their weapons at people. Carlson is also a vocal supporter of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, further showcasing his double-standard for Israel.

Israel’s homicide rate is a fraction of Honduras, Venezuela, or South Africa. The 2025 Global Peace Index ranks Israel above Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria.

When the interview began, Carlson opened with a discussion on Jonathan Pollard, the former US Navy analyst convicted of spying for Israel in the 1980s. He called Pollard “the greatest traitor in modern American history” and cited an unproven report of Israel passing the information to the Soviet Union. The declassified CIA Damage Assessment found that Israel’s requests to Pollard focused on Arab states and Soviet weapons systems, not US war plans against Moscow. Former CIA Director James Woolsey noted that Pollard “did not get anybody killed and was not spying for an enemy.”

Carlson ignored a long list of genuine traitors who have caused severe damage to the United States, including Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who gave top-secret information to Russian intelligence for over 20 years, Julius Rosenberg, who gave US Atomic bomb secrets the the Russians and Aldrich Ames, who also gave secret information that led to the deaths of at least 10 U.S. foreign agents. Carlson also glossed over the most infamous traitor in US history; Benedict Arnold, who defected to the British during the American Revolution.

Huckabee acknowledged meeting Pollard at the embassy, saying the visit came after he sent condolences following Pollard’s wife’s death. He was unapologetic. “Tucker, if you’ve ever been to the US embassy, you would know there’s no such thing as a secret meeting at the US embassy. There are cameras everywhere.” He added, “I did. And frankly, I don’t regret it.”

Huckabee incorrectly stated that Pollard was “sentenced to 30 years.” He was sentenced to life in prison and served approximately 30 years before being paroled in November 2015.

The interview’s most charged exchange came over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s invocation of Amalek on October 28, 2023, the eve of the Gaza ground offensive. “That is calling for genocide,” Carlson said. “And you know that.”

Huckabee rejected the accusation. “Because if Israel wanted to commit genocide, they could have done it in two-and-a-half hours.” Israel possesses overwhelming military superiority in the region, and has not deployed it to its maximum capacity. The Prime Minister’s Office has long stressed that the verse Netanyahu quoted from Devarim, a commandment to remember, is not the passage commanding destruction that Carlson cited. The phrase appears on Holocaust memorials and at Yad Vashem.

The confrontation over civilian casualties produced what may be remembered as the defining moment of the interview. After Huckabee defended the IDF’s warning system  text messages, leaflets, roof-knocking, evacuation maps and said Israel’s procedures exceed those of the United States military, Carlson pounced. “Your dig at the United States is very revealing,” he said. “Because your priorities are very clear.”

Huckabee gestured to his American flag pin. “What flag am I wearing here?”

“Well, that’s, of course, my flag as well,” Carlson replied. He did not let up.

On child casualties, Huckabee said some of those killed had been recruited by Hamas, “kids as young as 14.” Carlson’s retort “Do you think a 14-year-old child has agency?”  was pointed. Hamas has operated military training camps for children, and the UN has documented the use of minors in armed roles. Recruiting children under 15 into armed groups constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute.

On Christian rights in Israel, Carlson was on weaker ground than he appeared. His claim that Christians are “far fewer in absolute numbers” than in 1948 contradicts data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, which shows the Christian population has grown from approximately 34,000 in 1949 to around 185,000 today. He also raised incidents of Jews spitting on Christian clergy in Jerusalem’s Old City. Huckabee did not hedge. “It shouldn’t happen. It’s horrible.” He added, having made over 100 trips to Israel over 53 years, that he had never personally experienced such treatment. Shadi Khalloul, a prominent Israeli Arab Christian advocate, told the Jerusalem Post separately that the incidents do not represent the Christian experience in Israel, are perpetrated by a “fanatic, tiny minority” and are “punished when reported.”

After Tucker Carlson made his case against Israel on camera as part of his interview with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, one of the most influential voices in the conservative intellectual world provided a behind the scenes look into Carlson’s diatribes.

Hazony, a shomer Shabbos, Jerusalem-based Israeli-American political theorist who founded the Edmund Burke Foundation and organized the National Conservatism conference movement, disclosed Motzoei Shabbos that he had spoken with Carlson at length in early February at the Trump administration’s urging. The account is striking for what it reveals not about Carlson’s ideology, but about his judgment.

On January 11, President Trump, asked whether he condemns antisemitism on the right, said “certainly” and added: “I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them.” Trump then met with Carlson at the White House on January 16. It was pressure  discreet but unmistakable from an administration that relies on both Jewish and Christian Zionist support.

Carlson, according to Hazony, wanted to know what “practical steps” he could take. Hazony’s response was direct. He told Carlson that nearly every Jewish person he knew believed Carlson had been waging “a savage campaign against Jews, Judaism, and Israel” for the past 18 months, with the apparent aim of driving Jews and Zionist Christians out of the Trump coalition and out of the Republican Party.

When Carlson asked why anyone would consider him an antisemite, Hazony spent more than an hour walking him through specific examples from his program; guests who had claimed Jews control the American government, that Jews shot John F. Kennedy, that Jews financially sustained Winston Churchill to provoke a war with Hitler, that the Hebrew Bible teaches only revenge and genocide.

Carlson kept expressing amazement. Hazony kept producing examples.
“I didn’t feel he was open to dialing down the hostility,” Hazony wrote. He kept the door open anyway, in case the administration’s pressure eventually produced movement.

It did not. The weeks since January 11 have brought no discernible change in the content or direction of Carlson’s program.

Then came a sequence that reads as alternately audacious and farcical. On February 3, two days after a conversation in which Hazony had described in precise terms why Carlson was considered a leading antisemite of his generation, Carlson wrote to ask if he could speak at the first NatCon conference in Jerusalem, scheduled for June. Hazony declined, explaining in writing that much of the speaker lineup “will revolt if you join the program and that story will blow back on you in addition to blowing up the conference.”

On February 9, Carlson asked Hazony to arrange a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Hazony’s reply was frank: “I don’t see how that could happen. It doesn’t serve any interest I’m aware of. It could only damage him.”

In the same video released Friday that included his interview with Huckabee, Carlson characterized Hazony’s refusal as evidence that Israel was suppressing access. He also suggested, in what Hazony described as a “peevish summary,” that Israel might be trying to kill him and his family.

“The private person turns out to be exactly who we’ve been seeing in public,” Hazony concluded. “As of now, I’m not seeing any sign that he is willing to play ball with the mainstream nationalist camp in the Republican party, much less that he has any regrets about who and what he has become since leaving Fox News in 2023.”