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Author and Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart returns to "Know Your Enemy" to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics, their connection to his broader nationalist project, and how the left should think about right-wing anti-zionism.
Sources:
Peter Beinart, "What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel," New York Times, April 28, 2026
— "Progressives Must Not Give Tucker Carlson a Pass," The Beinart Notebook, May 11, 2026
— Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, (2025)
Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (2023)
"Tyler Oliveira: Exposing Somali Welfare Abuse, Republican Hypocrisy & the Group You Can’t Criticize," The Tucker Carlson Show, May 8, 2026
Will Alden, "The Many Equivocations of Curt Mills," Jewish Currents, April 16, 2026.
I do think it's worth giving listeners more of a sense of what is the aspect of Tucker's criticism of Israel that shades into or is informed by or ultimately goes back to his core principle, which is some kind of white civilizational struggle. Yeah, where you see it show up is when he contrasts kind of the civilization that Israel has created to the civilization of the West, right? So most progressives, I think when they look at Israel, they say, what we are seeing in Israel is a form of settler colonialism, of militarism, of ethno-nationalism, and we can see parallels, you know, to those across the world and particularly in white Western Christian countries that are themselves settler colonies. The call is coming from inside the house. Right, and also because Zionism came to fruition in large part because of the support of the British Empire and from Christian Zionists and then from the United States. That's not really the way that Carlson talks about it, because I think Carlson is trying to preserve a kind of an American innocence or a Western white Christian innocence. And so he says things like, what Israel's doing in Gaza where they're targeting civilians represents an Eastern mentality. This is a phrase he sometimes used, as opposed to the Western mentality that cherishes human rights. Peter, I'll just read from your New York Times piece, which I think summarizes what you were just describing so well. You said, when progressives seek explanations for Israel's misdeeds, as you noted, right, they often talk about systems, settler colonialism, imperialism, ethno-nationalism. But here's the key part. By contrast, conservative critics like Mr. Carlson tend to shun such explanations because they threaten American and Christian moral superiority. Instead, they frequently root the problem in Israel's Jewishness. The other thing that comes through in his discourse, which is very different than I think what progressives would talk about is he doesn't describe Israel as a kind of an ally of the white Christian West so much as an enemy of the white Christian West. So he certainly doesn't deny that Israel is doing terrible things to Palestinians, but he often will kind of turn to this idea that Israel's real enemy is the white Christian West. That's what Israel is actually really trying to subvert. And I think that's where you get into this idea that there's something civilizationally different about Israel as a Jewish state that leads it to have a different set of values from the white Christian West and actually to represent a threat to the white Christian West. I mean, there is one sort of like, this is just occurring to me now, but there's like one simple reason you could give for why he has to make the argument in this way, which is that like Israeli nationalism is not a problem because of the nationalism, or Tucker, it's a problem because of the Jewish character of it. And it has to be that way because he doesn't want to imply that nationalism is a problem in and of itself, or even the preservation of a national character over and against democratic demands because that's exactly what the Trump project is. So it has to be about the Jewishness of Israel, not the nationalist character of Israel. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Peter Beinart joins to discuss Tucker Carlson's newfound anti-Israel politics.
