When Tucker Carlson announced he would be interviewing US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, it was clear this would not be a friendly exchange. Carlson, who appears to be funded by Qatar, a state that openly backs Hamas, has positioned himself as one of Israel’s fiercest critics in American media.
What followed was not the exposé Carlson likely imagined.

It was a two-hour display of confident ignorance.

Yet much of the media coverage focused on a single distorted headline: Carlson’s suggestion that biblical scripture implies Israel seeks to “take over the Middle East.”

That became the story.

It was also the least revealing part of the interview.

What went largely unreported was not Huckabee’s answers, but Carlson’s performance: his theological confusion, historical sloppiness, conspiratorial insinuations, and failure to grapple with facts that contradicted his narrative.

A Disaster From Start to Finish

Carlson opened the interview with a monologue that appeared designed to rehabilitate his own credibility.

He repeated claims that he had been “detained” at Ben Gurion Airport when leaving Israel after recording the interview, suggesting it was unsafe for him to travel to Jerusalem. He implied he felt endangered after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly called him a “Nazi.”

That was among the first of his distortions. There is no verified record of Netanyahu making such a statement.

Footage from the airport shows Carlson in the VIP lounge, posing for photos and interacting amicably with staff.

He claimed he was “detained,” that security “took passports,” and his producer was “hauled into a side room.”

Footage from Ben Gurion’s VIP lounge shows Tucker Carlson hugging staff and posing for photos.

This pattern — reframing routine events as persecution –serves a rhetorical purpose. It casts Carlson as a dissident truth-teller under siege. It does not withstand scrutiny.

Huckabee directly confronted Carlson over his earlier interview with Aguilar, a former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid worker who claimed he witnessed Israeli soldiers kill a young boy in Gaza.

As Huckabee pointed out, that account was later proven false when the boy was discovered alive.

Huckabee stated that he personally helped coordinate the child’s evacuation from Gaza, working with four countries to secretly extract the boy and his mother less than a week after the alleged “murder.” The operation had to remain covert, he said, because Hamas would have killed the child to validate Aguilar’s narrative.

And yet Carlson still entertained the claim as plausible, naturally failing to acknowledge his own role in broadcasting this fiction to millions.

For a commentator who brands himself as a skeptic of mainstream media narratives, the absence of self-scrutiny was striking.

Bethlehem and Basic Geography

Carlson cited Bethlehem – the birthplace of Christianity – as evidence that Christians are being driven out of the West Bank by Israel.

Bethlehem has been under Palestinian Authority control since 1995. Israel does not govern it, and there has been no Jewish community there for decades.

If the Christian population has declined, the obvious question is: under whose governance?

Huckabee raised precisely that point.

Carlson did not engage.

1/
The media’s takeaway from Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee?

A distorted headline about Israel “taking over the Middle East.”

That wasn’t the story…

The story was Tucker Carlson self-immolating for over two hours.

Watch the clip.

Then let’s… pic.twitter.com/e5AvpTMGW6

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 21, 2026

Theology as Geopolitical Caricature

Carlson invoked God’s promise to Abraham – “from the river of Egypt (Nile) to the Euphrates” – and suggested that this covenant implies contemporary Israeli expansionism across sovereign Middle Eastern states.

This is a categorical error.

The Abrahamic covenant is a theological concept, not a modern policy platform. No Israeli government has articulated a program to annex the Middle East based on Genesis.

By collapsing ancient scripture into a present-day territorial blueprint, Carlson substituted provocation for analysis.

Huckabee attempted to correct the framing.

Carlson appeared uninterested.

Ancestry as Legitimacy Test

In one of the interview’s most jarring moments, Carlson questioned Netanyahu’s right to live in Israel on the basis of ancestry.

“Netanyahu’s family is from Poland,” Carlson said. “There’s no evidence his ancestors ever lived here. On what basis does he have a right to be here?”

Huckabee responded bluntly: “I’m totally unable to process what you’re saying.”

The exchange spoke for itself.

Framed as a critique of one politician, the logic extended further – implying that Jewish belonging in Israel requires genealogical proof acceptable to Carlson.

It was delivered not tentatively, but with certainty.

And then there was the subject of Qatar.

Carlson appeared surprised when Huckabee noted that Christians in Qatar are overwhelmingly migrant workers confined to a restricted church compound, with no Christian citizens and limited public expression of faith.

By contrast, Israel has approximately 184,000 Christian citizens, hundreds of churches, open Easter processions, and church bells ringing weekly.

Carlson initially leaned on a cursory reading of Wikipedia before conceding he did not know the details.

For someone positioning himself as a defender of Christianity in the Middle East, all while seemingly receiving funding from the Qatari state, the disconnect was difficult to ignore.

Conspiracy, Recycled

Carlson floated additional insinuations and conspiracy, including the absurd claim that the United States went to war in Iraq after September 11 because of Israel.

This trope, that Jewish or Israeli influence dragged America into war, has circulated for decades across ideological extremes.

Reducing complex American strategic decisions, Congressional votes, and post-9/11 security policy to “Israel made us do it” is not serious analysis. Yet here it was, presented as such by a former Fox News host watched by millions.

By the end of nearly three hours, a pattern had emerged.

Carlson repeatedly blurred theology into policy, questioned Jewish historical continuity, recycled war-blame insinuations, dismissed counter-evidence, and spoke authoritatively on subjects he appeared not to have mastered.

And he did so with confidence.

That is what much of the media missed.

The story was not Huckabee’s answer to a distorted Biblical question.

It was watching a prominent commentator unravel under the weight of his own thinly sourced claims.

Criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate. Debate over strategy is healthy.

But when interrogation gives way to insinuation, and skepticism morphs into selective credulity, the result is not fearless journalism.

It is confidence without comprehension.

And it was watched by nearly two million viewers in under 24 hours.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

A recent study of American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel has provoked much confusion in the Jewish establishment: Only 37% of Jews said they identified as Zionists, according to the data, but 88% said that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.”

Which, of course, is the standard definition of Zionism.

What’s going on? Responding to the study, Mimi Kravetz of the Jewish Federations of North America, which commissioned it, noted that large numbers of respondents conflated Zionism with “supporting the policies, decisions, and actions of the Israeli government.” Thus, Kravetz wrote, the 51% of Jews who do not identify as Zionists but support Israel’s right to exist:

are not rejecting Israel’s existence or the idea of a Jewish state. They are reacting to an understanding of Zionism that includes policies, ideologies, and actions that they oppose, and do not want to be associated with.

I agree with Kravetz’s analysis, but propose that we should take it a step further. Because the issue isn’t one survey. Americans, Jewish and otherwise, have been talking past one another about Zionism for years, and the ‘standard definition of Zionism’ hasn’t reflected reality for decades. And maybe those 51% of Jews are right.

Instead of Kravetz’s framing of “correct vs. incorrect understanding of Zionism,” it might be fruitful to see this as the difference between Zionism in principle and Zionism in practice.

Zionism in principle is what Nathan Birnbaum meant when he coined the term in 1890: the movement to establish a Jewish state (details TBD) in the historic land of Israel. That sounds fairly unobjectionable. There are states for French people, Ugandan people, Vietnamese people — so why not a state for Jewish people?

But Zionism in practice has turned out to be something altogether different. For at least 80 years, it has involved the dispossession of another population that calls the territory home, the second-class citizenship held by non-Jews in the Jewish state (which shows up in countless specific legal contexts), and, ultimately, various forms of discrimination, dehumanization and violence. Contrary to the way some on the Left use the word, Zionism is not only these things, but it has, historically, involved all of them.

I was raised to believe that all this was not intrinsic to Zionism, but was the unfortunate result of Arab rejectionism and terrorism, plus a few bad right-wing-nationalist apples in the Israeli population. I was educated in a pre-internet world by Jewish educators who presented a very partial view of Israeli/Palestinian history. I never learned this history from a Palestinian point of view. I never learned about the Nakba. I believed that terrorists hijacked airplanes because they hated Jews.

This understanding was always woefully incomplete and incorrect, but even as a young adult, it still made some sense to me. I was living in Israel when Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn. I saw Rabin himself speak many times. I met with Israeli and Palestinian peace workers who believed, sincerely, that coexistence was finally at hand. Finally, the real Zionist dream would be realized.

Then Rabin was assassinated. And for most of the subsequent 30 years, Israelis elected right-wing and far-right governments. Settlements have swallowed large swaths of the West Bank. And for anyone under 30, this period of Israeli history is all they have ever known.

What is “Zionism” supposed to mean to that person? The dream of Herzl or the reality of Sharon, Netanyahu and Ben Gvir?

I’m not saying that this is a full depiction of recent history. It wasn’t only Bibi expanding settlements; it was Hamas blowing up buses and Yasser Arafat letting peace slip through his fingers at Camp David. I’m only saying that the “Zionism” that a Gen Z or young Millennial American has known for their entire life is totally different from the Zionism that I learned about in Jewish day school or saw in my own younger years.

So who is right about what Zionism really means? Those of us who cling to the classical definition in spite of its remoteness from reality, or those who define Zionism as it has actually been put into practice in the decades of Netanyahu’s rule?

Personally, I still cling to that dream, even if it is a delusion. And obviously, I am not alone. Organizations like J Street, the New Israel Fund, Truah, and many others still believe that Zionism can mean, or should mean, a Jewish and actually-democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. What’s left of the Israeli Left does too. Even Bono managed to issue a nuanced statement on Israel/Palestine accompanying U2’s surprise new release, which includes both a Yehuda Amichai poem and a song dedicated to peace activist Awdah Hathaleen.

But many of my close friends do not. And many intellectuals including Avraham Burg, Peter Beinart, and Shaul Magid have demonstrated that the dream was never reality; that it could not ever have been reality; that Zionism was ethno-nationalism from the beginning and thus inevitably leads to a politics of domination. In this view, the war crimes in Gaza aren’t an aberration from Zionism, but its inevitable expression.

I admit, I find it increasingly hard to disagree with this dim view of Jewish nationalism, especially as Israeli Jews keep voting for the Right.

Of course, I understand that many are not selecting an ideology so much as trying to keep their families safe from unrelenting violence. One can hardly blame a population for voting for security rather than peace when they are subjected to constant rocket fire from Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. Nor do I embrace the hyperbolic exaggerations of some on the hard left, which often slide into antisemitism.

But sometimes I wonder if I’m just clinging to a nostalgic, diaspora-tinted image of what a Jewish state could be. Where I could go to the symphony at the Jerusalem Theater and eat gourmet kosher food in the German Colony. Where I could sit in my favorite field and imagine ancient pasts. Where the patterns of my religious and cultural life were embedded in the society itself.

Maybe, like the nationalists further to my right, I am so besotted by these emotions that I am unable to see the reality of what Zionism really entails, particularly for those on the wrong end of its hierarchies. I would submit that many of us who maintain the classical definition of Zionism in principle, rather than adopt the historical one of Zionism in practice, may be similarly swayed by emotion.

At the end of the day, I despise right-wing ethno-nationalism (in the United States as well as in Israel) and its consequences, most recently the ethnic cleansing proposed for Gaza and the state-sanctioned pogroms underway in the West Bank. I feel ambivalent when I hear the Hatikva. But ultimately, there are 7.5 million Jewish people living between the river and the sea, and the large majority of them will not surrender their sovereignty. Neither will the 9.5 million Palestinians living in the same territory. Ultimately, there will still, one day, have to be some division of the land — if not this decade, then in the next one.

If this is Zionism, it is a Pragmatic Zionism, born of exhaustion. I have no utopian visions to offer, no dreams. What I yearn for is what Yehuda Amichai describes in Wildpeace, the poem that U2 just set to music:

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.

 

The post We are talking past one another on Zionism appeared first on The Forward.

This is a revised version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.

Di Tsukunft (The Future)
A book of short stories in Yiddish
by Shiri Shapira
Leyvik House, 2025

You may not have heard about Shiri Shapira yet but you may do so soon. She’s one of the few young Israeli writers who are choosing to write in Yiddish, the language of her East European ancestors. A collection of her short stories was recently published by the Tel Aviv publishing house, Leyvik House, with the support of Israel’s National Authority for Yiddish Culture.

Like the author herself, the protagonists in her new collection of short stories and autobiographical pieces, Di Tsukunft (The Future), are average Israeli men and women with everyday worries about their livelihood, families and health problems. But beneath their daily routine lies a latent personal experience that waits for a critical moment to be revealed. When that moment arrives, the characters often enter a new phase of life.

For the 13-year-old heroine of the opening story, also titled “The Future,”  this happens in 2001. The terror attacks of 9/11 in New York City coincide with the onslaught of terror in her own town:

“The changes to daily life were immense. A seemingly endless series of discussion circles was held in memory of a victim from our school that I hadn’t known. Every morning I’d have to look at his smiling, pimpled face staring out from the enlarged photo that had been hung by the school gate.”

Thus 2001 ushered in the “terror attacks of the future […] up to the very skies, shining, silvery.” They became an indispensable part of the ‘new normal’ — for Shapira, the State of Israel and the entire world.

The word “future” is both the title of the book, and the name of the first and last stories in the collection. The term is key to Shapira’s work: for the author and her characters alike, the future is dangerous and uncertain.

Notably, “The Future” is also the name of one of the most important Yiddish literary periodicals, Di Tsukunft, published in New York from 1892-2010. In one of the more autobiographical pieces in the collection, also titled “Future”, Shapira writes about cataloging articles of Di Tsukunft for the Index to Yiddish Periodicals at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The concluding story “Future” highlights Shapira’s turning to Yiddish, which comes to loom so large in her life.

Shapira shares how she’d initially hoped to read the issues of Di Tsukunft and “learn everything about Jewish history.” Instead, she found herself reading the Israeli press, with its news of terror attacks in Israel, day after day, during the 2015-2016 wave of violence known as the “Intifada of the Individuals.” Israeli reality cancelled out the beautiful, visionary future of those long-ago Yiddish socialists: “What’s there to say about the future? The future’s a thing of the past.”

Shapira recalls: “As a child, I had the impression that I’d come too late for the past, and that someone whose past was shut off to them was of little use for the future.” Shapira references here a national oblivion around the “past”: Israeli society’s longtime neglect of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture.

This neglect, however, served only to awaken her own interest in Yiddish. Historical inquiries and philosophical questions such as this one are woven skillfully into the narrative fabric of her stories.

Shapira’s characters live in Israel and speak Hebrew. Most of them don’t know Yiddish. Shapira herself is a Hebrew writer who has translated a significant number of works from German into Hebrew.

Sometimes Shapira’s tone is bitterly ironic, especially on the subject of the writer’s bleak lot in today’s society. The protagonist of “Self-Portrait as a Hebrew Writer” fantasizes about her ideal reader:

“He comes to an event celebrating my first book, my debut. […] He sits there, looking ridiculously handsome, listening to me babble about the difficult, wrenching labor of writing this text. When the musicians finish their part, he applauds energetically.”

The man reads her book twice and, as she comments ironically, “sees deep into her soul.” Their encounter takes them to the bedroom: “As he climaxes, he lets out a sweet sigh, a melody of contentment — like an enthused, eloquent review.”

So what role does Yiddish play here? Her stories suggest an answer.

In “Earthquake,” an elderly couple, Benny and Dalia, survive an earthquake in Jerusalem. Their modern apartment is unharmed, but many buildings in Shuafat, a Palestinian refugee camp in East Jerusalem, are destroyed, and around 700 people are killed. The couple’s Arab cleaning lady goes missing, and no one knows what happened to her.

For the couple, life goes on as usual. They quickly forget the cleaning lady, especially because they never even knew how to pronounce her name. Jews and Arabs make their home in the same town, but they live in completely different worlds.

Every night, Benny and Dalia eat dinner and nap a bit while watching a TV show. Something new does enter their routine; they sign up for a Yiddish class. Though they barely remember any of the Yiddish their parents once spoke, they hope they’ll “at least learn something before the next earthquake comes.”

The earthquake acts as a metaphor for the dramatic and tragic events that take place in Israel. These misfortunes cut through the monotony of the everyday, but soon enough life goes on as before. In such moments, Yiddish makes its appearance as a sort of phantom of Jewish history from which one might “at least learn something” before the next crisis hits.

Shapira remembers a feeling that used to disturb her as a child: “I was really young, and I thought that everyone besides me knew what to do in every situation, that they were grounded in their lives, while I was the only one floating in the air, not knowing where to land safely.” Yiddish, on the other hand, creates a kind of spiritual shelter, a ‘refuge’ where historical roots can be found.

Shiri Shapira has a keen sense of time in general and of the present moment in particular. In her stories, time flows naturally for months on end, then suddenly brings on changes in the lives of individuals and of society at large. Every day has the potential for danger. Written in Yiddish, Shapira’s stories build imaginary bridges between the troubling present and the past that has nearly disappeared from Israeli memory.

To buy the book, click here.

 

The post Millennial anxieties are the ‘new normal’ in these Yiddish stories appeared first on The Forward.