The American right is mired in a civil war over Israel.
Over the past year, a number of prominent right-wing pundits and activists have broken from President Donald Trump over his support for Israel and condemned Israeli policy in Gaza as mass murder. This dispute is reaching new heights after the anti-Israel sector of the right — led by right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson and including former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing podcaster and conspiracist Candace Owens, former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, and white supremacist livestreamer Nick Fuentes — has accused Trump of betraying his own MAGA movement by, in their view, allowing Israel to drag the U.S. into the disastrous U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. “I hate this war and the direction that the U.S. government is taking,” Carlson said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last weekend, while accusing the administration of failing to “act on behalf of its own citizens.”
Much of the pro-Palestinian left is watching with curiosity and amazement. At the peak of its energy objecting to U.S. backing for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the left-wing pro-Palestinian movement was overwhelmingly opposed by the right and sidelined by the Democratic Party, quashed by university administrators, and silenced by a shameful round of cancel culture within liberal institutions. Now it watches as the right is being riven by its own internal split over support for Israel, with the anti-Israel tendency spearheaded by the most powerful right-wing pundit in America and buoyed by widespread defection from a pro-Israel status quo among Republicans under 50.
Carlson’s intensifying criticism of Israel does not stem from some kind of new, leftist-inspired commitment of his to universal human rights.
The pro-Palestinian left — which includes swathes of the Arab American community, movement advocates, democratic socialists, progressive students, and a segment of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — is in a strange position. Some are pondering whether Carlson and his faction are in fact an unlikely ally to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Online, this discussion often takes the form of debating how to respond to hearing Carlson say humanizing things about Palestinians that can sound quite a lot like a leftist when engaging with the liberal press. Over and over again this discussion centers around whether one must “hand it to Tucker Carlson” or one of his allies, or whether their seeming correctness on one issue deserves “credit” or should become a basis on which they are “liked.”
But these are the wrong questions. They consider the issue through the squishy cultural lens of whether it is appropriate to give applause. Instead, the left should be asking why Carlson et al believe what they do — and then use that understanding to form judgments about political action.
When one does this, it’s clear that the anti-Israel right is not committed in any meaningful sense to Palestinian liberation and is not a friend of the left. That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities for strategic partnership across the aisle at the level of legislation in Washington. But this is a hardly a case of common cause or grounds for a conjoining of movements.
That’s because Carlson’s intensifying criticism of Israel does not stem from some kind of new, leftist-inspired commitment to universal human rights and egalitarianism. Rather it can be traced back to the same right-wing white nationalist worldview that he’s held for years, which constantly deploys antisemitic tropes to insinuate that Jews constitute a threat to ideal Western civilization — and that the fundamental problem with Israel is its Jewishness.
Carlson is a staunch advocate of “great replacement” theory, a concept which holds that shadowy, Jewish financiers are behind porous borders and the replacement of “native” Americans with immigrants. He ascribes to Israel “an Eastern view” which is “totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” He holds the view that Israel has a secret plan to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and trigger a global religious war whose primary victims would be “Christian, Western, white countries.” In October he invited Fuentes — a Holocaust denier who has called Adolf Hitler “really f**king cool” — on to his podcast for a softball interview, during which Fuentes said “organized Jewry” undermined American cohesion. After his podcast appearance, Fuentes said in a video, “We are done with the Jewish oligarchy. We are done with the slavish surrender to Israel.”
In other words, this faction’s hostility to Israel is tied to the idea that Jews — in the U.S. and outside of it — exert an undue and corrupting influence on American life. Carlson will periodically go out of his way to condemn antisemitism and deny he supports it, but it’s not hard to see how it animates his worldview if you examine it closely. It’s also evident when, for example, he discusses Russia and Ukraine. He describes Ukraine’s Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” and says he is “more sympathetic” to warmongering Russian President Vladimir Putin than Zelenskyy.
Carlson’s allies also exhibit an aversion to Israel that seems tied to its identity and uncanny “influence” rather than a principled opposition to its misbehavior. Owens subscribes to a whole host of antisemitic conspiracy theories about Israel. And it be seen in more subtle form in Kent’s resignation letter from the Trump administration, in which he framed Trump as innocent in his decision to launch the Iran war, and argued Israeli leaders “deceive[d]” Trump into joining it. (Inexplicably, Kent also blamed Israelis for the Iraq war, contra the historical record).
It is true that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Trump aggressively to join the war. But the idea that Trump, and his entire inner circle, was duped, or that he could have been strong-armed while presiding over the most powerful country in the world, is nonsense. The U.S. and Iran have been adversaries for decades, and the U.S. launched a war with Israel based on the perception of shared interests in hobbling Iran, as well as providing a close ally with uncontested regional hegemony in a region vital to U.S. energy interests.
And to the extent that Trump was convinced that dominating Iran would be easier than it has been, there are many other factors that explain it, including his own anti-intellectualism, the surprising smoothness of his Venezuela intervention, and his many yes-men advisers. Kent’s cartoonish theory of the cause of the war only makes sense if one subscribes to the harmful worldview of Israelis as all-powerful puppeteers. And the entire anti-Israel right’s fixation on Israel as fueling U.S. imperialism allows it to preserve the myth of America as wholesome when it isn’t “manipulated”or made a “slave” by subversive outsiders.
The real rationales for right-wing anti-Israel positioning have nothing to do with Palestinian dignity or opposing Israeli apartheid and genocide and its brutal style of warfare against neighbors. Rather, to the extent that the right mentions Palestinians at all, it uses them as a prop as part of their agenda to force a U.S. break with Israel based largely on a bigoted suspicion of Jews and isolationist inclinations to withdraw from Middle East interventionism.
So what does it mean from the perspective of left-wing politics? It means the anti-Israeli right is a terrible source of media information and political education, because of its noxious ideologies. It also means it’s a bad idea to invite champions of the anti-Israel right to intellectual and political organizing conferences on the left as featured speakers or as friends of the cause, because it would mean importing and normalizing antisemitism — and virtually every other kind of bigotry that prevails on the American right — into spaces that are meant to uphold anti-bigotry and universal human rights as core principles. The left’s opposition to domination is irreconcilable with the right-wing nationalist ambition to unleash domination within America for “heritage Americans.”
But there are a couple opportunities here for the left. One is that there’s an emerging opening for persuasion and recruitment of people from the right to the left at the grassroots level, by leveraging disenchantment with Trump’s policies on Israel and Iran, and convincing ordinary, disillusioned right-wingers to rethink their worldview. As polarized as the country is, a non-trivial share of the public still floats to different parts of the political spectrum based less on ideology than broad sentiments about status quo policies and institutions. They can be convinced to think differently. Consider, for example, the roughly 12% of Sen. Bernie Sanders presidential primary voters who cast their ballot for Donald Trump in the general election is 2016, likely based on the notion that any vote against the political-economic establishment and forever wars was worth considering.
Pro-Palestinian organizations and the left more broadly have an opportunity to change the minds of people from the right who are sick of war, instinctively repelled by the carnage in Gaza, and feel betrayed by Trump. This would entail making clear and unapologetically antiracist arguments to persuadables that no group of people — Palestinians, Jews, immigrants, Black people, women, trans people or any other marginalized group — is “the problem.” The real problems are the political and economic systems and ideologies that uphold economic exploitation and perpetual warfare while scapegoating out-groups.
A charismatic Democratic presidential candidate who is fiercely opposed to the belligerent logic of imperialism has a lane here. Arguing that putting an end to America meddling in other countries’ business and to backing Israeli carnage in the Middle East could plausibly siphon off soft Trump voters who are sick of the wasteful and gruesome business of empire maintenance.
And if the anti-Israel right eventually evolves into a significant subset of the GOP in Congress, there is an opportunity for Democratic lawmakers looking to cut off aid to Israel to band together with them to bind the president’s hands. (Greene tried to work with a handful of progressive Democrats to oppose funding for Israeli military funding last year.) This kind of cross-ideological strategic partnership is how lawmakers get things done all the time, and a focus on concrete policy positions — no more aid to Israel— wouldn’t require the left to compromise its values. It may be the only way for progressive Democrats to work around pro-Israel holdouts in its own party establishment.
The question of how to work with people across different political camps is never a simple one. But here’s something that is straightforward: You don’t have to “hand it” to Carlson, nor do you have to not hand it to Carlson. You should ignore him and get on with with the real work of liberation and opposing empire.
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