The most revealing part of the nearly three-hour verbal sparring match between Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee last week came about 30 minutes from the end, when Carlson distilled the feelings of a meaningful swath of US Republicans.

“I’ve never met an American that thinks — other than, like, the people who have ideological reasons to pretend they think it — that the imminent threat to America is anything having to do with Iran,” Carlson said. “The imminent threats to America include, like, bankruptcy from too much debt, your son OD-ing on fentanyl, your neighborhood completely changing” due to immigration.

He went on, “Can you feel the resentment? Because it’s real… I’m mad at my lawmakers for not protecting my country with the care they’ve protected Israel.”

Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, shot back. “They are the tip of the spear,” he said of Israel. “Every enemy they have is our enemy. Things that are targeted toward us often go through them.”

In the days since Carlson, the far-right US pundit, posted his interview with Huckabee, almost all of the attention it’s gotten has focused on two things: Huckabee saying he’d be “fine” with Israel conquering much of the Middle East, and Carlson’s cascade of falsehoods, embellishments, elisions, misdirections and conspiracy theories, many of them antisemitic.

But those controversies point to something larger: Carlson and Huckabee represent two opposing poles of Republican thought on Israel that have become increasingly irreconcilable.

On one side is Huckabee, a dyed-in-the-wool Evangelical Christian Zionist whose maximalist support for Israel, rooted in the Bible, includes backing West Bank settlements. Huckabee’s vision dovetails with a broader Republican posture that sees the Jewish state as the front line of a larger civilizational conflict and an indispensable American ally.

On the other side is Carlson, an avatar of the Republican Party’s isolationist wing, whose pining for a Christian America of an earlier era is often laced with antisemitic ideas. This camp sees US support for Israel as a dangerous siphon, sucking away American resources that should be devoted to fixing problems at home.

Those two approaches do not represent all Republicans — many don’t connect with either or are somewhere in the middle. But they are now battling for the heart of the party and the US president, with major implications for the Jewish state.

Carlson’s staccato drumbeat of antisemitic claims was exhausting, and watching Huckabee try to parry them was like witnessing a game of Whac-A-Mole on speed

Carlson’s staccato drumbeat of antisemitic claims was exhausting, and watching Huckabee try to parry them was like witnessing a game of Whac-A-Mole on speed

Carlson’s staccato drumbeat of antisemitic claims was exhausting, and watching Huckabee try to parry them was like witnessing a game of Whac-A-Mole on speed. Carlson pivoted from theories about Epstein to calling for all Israeli Jews to get DNA tests to blaming Israel for the Iraq War.

One lie Carlson told was so egregious — falsely claiming President Isaac Herzog visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island — that he had to post an apology for it, then cut that segment from the published interview.

This is nothing new for Carlson, who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on his former Fox News show. Lately, he’s made a point of platforming Holocaust deniers for his huge audience and interviewing seemingly anyone who will criticize Israel, from far-right influencer Nick Fuentes to Ben Cohen, the progressive activist of Ben & Jerry’s fame.

(Carlson, for what it’s worth, claimed in the Huckabee interview to “hate antisemitism.” He also said “I wish Israel no harm” — after deriding it as a “police state,” “the most violent country in the world,” and the country that spies on its citizens more than any other.)

The antisemitic invective was all meant to undergird his central argument: That Americans don’t want to go to war with Iran, and that any US attack on the Islamic Republic would be one more example of the US acting on behalf of Israel instead of its own national interest.

Among the staunchest critics of Israel — even those on the opposite end of the political spectrum — Carlson’s performance has received fulsome praise. Attempts to debunk his antisemitic rhetoric have come mostly from Jewish and pro-Israel activists.

Huckabee has drawn more prominent criticism for entertaining the idea that Israel could conquer the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, which today includes the territories of several sovereign countries. Those hypothetical borders come from a verse in Genesis 15, cited by Carlson, in which God promises the land to the biblical Abram.

“It would be fine if they took it all, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today,” Huckabee said. “They don’t want to take it over, they’re not asking to take it over.”

That quote spurred a condemnation from virtually every country in the Middle East. But it isn’t the only time in the interview that Huckabee outpaced Israel’s current right-wing government.

Near the end of the conversation, he said, “Area C is Israel,” referring to the parts of the West Bank under full Israeli control. While many members of the coalition would like to make Area C formally part of Israel, it is not currently so.

What tied together Huckabee’s pronouncements was the traditional Evangelical Christian Zionist argument: that a combination of scripture, international law and geopolitical realities give Israel the right to its territory, and give Americans a duty to support it.

Versions of that idea once held sway across large parts of the American right. Now the question is which vision — Carlson’s or Huckabee’s — will be more compelling for the Republican Party and, crucially, for its singular influential member: Donald Trump.

The US president has long had a symbiotic relationship with the Evangelical community, but it’s clear he’s no Christian Zionist.

Trump’s view of the world is based in transactions rather than scripture and prophecy

Trump’s view of the world is based in transactions rather than scripture and prophecy

Trump’s view of the world is based in transactions rather than scripture and prophecy. And the rhetoric that set him apart early in his current term — disentangling from foreign conflicts and cracking down on undocumented immigrants and drugs at home — accords with the Carlson wing of the party. Carlson has been a welcome guest at the White House, even as he has embraced antisemitic voices and ideas.

US Vice President JD Vance is more firmly in the isolationist camp, and Carlson’s son Buckley works for him. In his speech at the recent inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace meant to oversee postwar Gaza — one of Trump’s foreign policy successes — Vance framed the achievement partly in domestic terms.

“This creates incredible prosperity for the American people,” he said. “The countries represented here represent trillions of dollars of investment in the United States of America… The economies here represent millions of American jobs.”

But Trump has also been no isolationist.

He has attacked Venezuela, Iran and Nigeria in the first year of his presidency, and brokered an end to fighting in Gaza and elsewhere. He has remained close to Netanyahu, meeting with him frequently since returning to the presidency, pushing unabashedly for the premier to be pardoned, and gratifying him with the June 2025 strikes on Iran.

And even as he has ruled out Israel annexing the West Bank, both of his ambassadors to Israel have been vocal boosters of the settlements: Huckabee and David Friedman before him. When a member of his Religious Liberty Commission rejected Zionism and defended far-right voices, including Carlson’s, during a recent hearing, she was removed.

Now, he has amassed the most American firepower in a generation in the Middle East, threatening yet another regime-change war, even as polls show that most Americans, and even many Republicans, don’t want conflict with Iran.

A decision on that strike, and how extensive it will be, will determine the future of the US role in the Middle East. But more broadly, it’s likely that the three remaining years of Trump’s presidency will at times gratify and frustrate both the Carlson and Huckabee visions of America’s relationship to the region.

At some point, a Republican reckoning may come, in which one side — disengaging from Israel, or embracing it — prevails. That will have a deep impact not only on Israel but also on American Jews.

Until then, there’s Trump, who has made clear that the party’s philosophy is whatever he says it is.

“MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do,” he said following the US capture of Venezuela’s president, using an acronym for his followers. “MAGA is me.”

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