CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

All Aboard the Secular Zion Train

Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – CC BY 4.0

On February 21, 2026, Tucker Carlson flew to Israel to interview Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel, ordained Baptist minister, and former Governor of Arkansas. The interview, posted to Carlson’s YouTube channel, ran nearly three hours. Most of it was unremarkable—the kind of friendly ideological sparring that constitutes content in the post-cable media universe. But then Carlson, an unlikely thorn in the side of the pro-Israel establishment, pinned his guest down. He opened the Book of Genesis. He read aloud. He asked a question that nobody in official Washington ever quite gets around to asking.

“So, God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn’t,” Carlson said. “You’re saying he did. What does that mean? Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you’re appealing to Genesis. You’re saying that’s the original deed?”

Huckabee paused. Then: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

The territory in question, per Genesis 15:18 — land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates—encompasses what Carlson rightly described as “basically the entire Middle East”: large portions of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. Huckabee later walked it back as “somewhat hyperbolic,” insisting Israel has no current intention of territorial conquest. But the clip was already flying around the world. Arab governments from Cairo to Amman to Riyadh responded with fury. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime proponent of Greater Israel, appeared to welcome the remarks.

The confrontation did not end there. Later in the same interview, Carlson pushed further. How do we even know, he asked, that the ancestors of Benjamin Netanyahu—whose family came from Eastern Europe—ever lived in the land whose divine inheritance they now claim? “How do we know that Bibi, specifically Bibi’s ancestors, ever lived here?” Huckabee shot back, “Maybe I could ask you, how do we know they didn’t?” Carlson dropped the smile. “It’s on the basis of the claim that they did that all kinds of things happen. People are displaced. There’s a money flow. I mean, it’s a big question. A lot hangs on this.”

Indeed it does. And it is the question this essay means to examine—not merely Huckabee’s particular brand of theological maximalism, but the entire contested terrain of Zionism as concept, metaphor, and political inheritance. I want to ride the Zion Train from its deepest roots to its most dangerous contemporary expression. But I want to be clear about which train I’m boarding: not the one driven by a biblical deed, but the secular-progressive Choo Choo—the one that takes its cue from liberation rather than scripture.

I am an atheist. I find myself, on this particular question, in the unlikely company of Tucker Carlson—not ideologically, let me be absolutely clear, but epistemologically. The idea that a 3,000-year-old text constitutes a legally and morally binding deed to twenty-first-century territory is hermeneutical madness with a body count. When a sitting United States Ambassador says it would be “fine” if Israel absorbed the entire Middle East because Genesis says so, we have left the realm of policy and entered the realm of apocalyptic real estate speculation. And we have done so at precisely the moment when American military assets are massing in the region and the United States and Israel have commenced a war against Iran.

But Huckabee’s Zionism is only one station on the line. To understand what’s at stake, we need to go back to the beginning—or at least to several different beginnings.

Three Stations on the Zion Line

The word “Zion” is ancient Hebrew, a name for Jerusalem and the hill on which the Temple stood. But like most words that survive long enough, it has accumulated meanings far beyond its etymology. By the time it reached the twentieth century, it had split into at least three distinct and politically irreconcilable concepts—three trains running on very different tracks, all claiming the same departure platform.

The first train is Bob Marley’s. In Rastafarian theology, Zion is not a place on a map—it is a condition of liberation. It is the spiritual destination of a people cast into Babylon, the Rastafarian name for the entire apparatus of colonial oppression: the slaveholder, the plantation system, the Western metropole, and the mental prison of internalized subjugation. Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement gave this theology its political skeleton, and Marley’s music gave it its nervous system. When Marley sang “Zion Train,” he was not issuing a land claim or invoking a divine deed. He was singing about the collective spiritual journey of the African diaspora toward wholeness, dignity, and return—to a self and agency (in the parlance of our times). There is no state apparatus in Marley’s Zion. No tanks. And no ambassador. Just the train and the invitation to board it.

The second train belongs to Louis Brandeis. Before........

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