Tucker Carlson has been getting a lot of attention in The New York Times, none of it good (including Michelle Goldberg’s “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology” (April 24). but I’ll leave that for another time). Peter Beinart’s op-ed is based on the idea that Carlson thinks that Israel’s behavior has something to do with its Jewishness. Obviously way out there.
Like other prominent figures on the anti-Israel right, [Carlson] still sees the West as menaced by alien civilizations bent on its destruction. He has just turned his attention to what he sees as the alien civilization that populates the Jewish state. And he’s done so with the same penchant for conspiracy theories that has long marked his public commentary. Now he is using a destructive, ill-defined and unpopular war to give those theories even greater reach. … [Carlson] is at the forefront of a cohort of right-wing commentators who don’t merely condemn Israel’s manifold crimes against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. They also suggest something far more troubling: that Israel’s crimes stem from its Jewishness, which they claim threatens the Christian West. …
Now Americans across the ideological spectrum are growing more critical of Israel. But young conservatives are more likely than their lefty counterparts to link Israel’s transgressions to its religious identity. Last fall, a Yale survey asked Americans ages 18-34 how they felt about claims that American Jews enjoy too much power, are more loyal to Israel than America and should have their businesses boycotted to protest the war in Gaza. Almost two-thirds of respondents ages 18 to 34 who defined themselves as “extremely conservative” agreed with at least one of those statements. Among people in that same age group who defined themselves as “extremely liberal,” less than one-third did.
Candace Owens, one of America’s most popular podcasters, has endorsed Mr. Carlson’s claim that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad is using the Iran war to try to rebuild the Temple. She has also claimed that the Talmud tells Jews “that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them.” In 2024 she accused Israel of giving refuge to pedophiles and linked that behavior to the ritual murder of Christians in Europe during Passover. Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist and misogynist who Mr. Carlson recently hosted for a friendly interview, has insisted that “If you read anything about the Israeli government, anything even about Talmudic Judaism, what they say is, we don’t love our enemies. They say that the non-Jews, we don’t even consider them human.”
What’s going on here is that Beinart assumes he is safe in saying these things because, by not allowing his readers to evaluate the evidence, they likely seem so outrageous and over the top tp NYTimes readers that they will automatically reject them without being able to actually look at the evidence. For example, there can be little doubt that a great many Israelis, especially religious fanatics, believe that ultimately their victory will be crowned with destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the reinstitution of the Jewish temple, complete with animal sacrifices. Haaretzfrom 2024:
It arrived last week, right on schedule – a yearly flier advertising “a live rehearsal of the Passover sacrifice.” One might assume that the men featured on the brochure dressed in what appears to be ancient religious garments are the AI-generated result of someone’s search for “modern-day high priests,” but they’re completely real.
Hailing from the most extreme factions of the Temple Movement, the umbrella term for the various groups that share the goal of reclaiming Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the men in the photo have spent years studying the biblical instructions for preparing the special Passover offering at the Holy Temple – which last existed in the year 70.
They’re sticklers down to the length of the knife cuts and the procedure for the blood that will be collected after the baby lamb has been ritually slaughtered. Their rehearsal is intended as a dry run, should their dream of rebuilding the Temple ever come to fruition.
The event advertised in the flier promised to take place outside of Jerusalem, in Mitzpeh Yericho, an ultra-religious settlement in the West Bank, and not on Temple Mount. But another group of Temple activists stuck to a more ambitious plan, and were arrested on Monday for trying to sacrifice a goat on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. When they were released shortly after the arrest, they gloated about Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir intervening on their behalf.
In other words, these “extremists” are well connected to the current government, especially National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Itamar Ben-Gvir heading for the Temple Mount in 2022.
Temple Movement activists in the government
For almost its entire existence, Temple Movement activists have viewed the Israeli government as an obstacle on their path toward Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount.
But that changed in 2022 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed the most far-right government in Israel’s history, including several ministers who were, at the very least, Temple Movement-adjacent if not full members. No one fits this description more than National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose wife Ayala is an active member of the Temple Movement.
Since coming to power, Ben-Gvir has relentlessly pursued a pro-Jewish agenda regarding the Mount, visiting the site several times and calling for sweeping changes to the status quo, with only Netanyahu standing in his way.
On the one hand, as Hasson has reported, Netanyahu has, perhaps surprisingly, done a fairly good job of keeping Ben-Gvir and other Temple fundamentalists in check. “He actually has a long history of keeping things calm,” Hasson says. “And this year, all eyes were on Netanyahu on Ramadan.”
Ben-Gvir wanted to impose limits on which Muslims would be allowed to pray at Al-Aqsa during the Muslim holy month, which security officials warned would lead to disaster. “Ultimately, Netanyahu didn’t give in to Ben-Gvir’s demands and we had one of the quietest Ramadans in years,” Hasson says.
But these small gains have been swallowed up by the security minister’s larger mission. Ben-Gvir is “an agent of chaos,” as Tzidkiyahu puts it. “He thrives on creating as much drama as possible.”
Ben-Gvir doesn’t just go quietly up to the Temple Mount, a point raised by all three experts interviewed for this article. “He loudly announces it with the most racist, incendiary statements possible,” Tzidkiyahu says. “And with the control he has over the police, he’s directly responsible for the leniency that Jews who try to pray on the Temple Mount are afforded.”
And so, emboldened by broad support among not necessarily religious Israelis, the increasing number of Jews visiting the Mount – 30,000 last year alone – political endorsements and security officials allowing brazen violations of the rules, the gap between the murky status quo and actual events on the Mount is widening. And Temple Movement extremists don’t seem to be letting up.
“My real fear is something we’ve seen before,” Persico says. “I worry that if a new peace process makes headway, either with Palestinians becoming citizens of Israel or a two-state solution, extremists in the Temple Movement will do what they have always done any time there is a step toward peace: attempt to derail it by any means necessary.”
Getting back to the Beinart op-ed:
Last fall, a Yale survey asked Americans ages 18-34 how they felt about claims that American Jews enjoy too much power, are more loyal to Israel than America and should have their businesses boycotted to protest the war in Gaza. Almost two-thirds of respondents ages 18 to 34 who defined themselves as “extremely conservative” agreed with at least one of those statements. Among people in that same age group who defined themselves as “extremely liberal,” less than one-third did.
It’s certainly encouraging that a significant subset of young conservatives agreed with a least one of those statements, along with a substantial number of liberals. I should think that it’s obvious that American Jews enjoy too much power, given that we are at war with Iran because of the power of the Israel Lobby even though polls indicate that the war is not popular. And it’s obvious that at least some Jews are more loyal to Israel than America—Mark Levin being a case in point (see below), not to mention the entire Jewish activist community (ADL, AIPAC, JINSA, etc.) centered around supporting Israel no matter what, including the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid and ethnic cleansing that have been going on in the West Bank for decades.
Beinart continues:
That’s not surprising given the rhetoric of some of America’s most influential far-right commentators. Candace Owens, one of America’s most popular podcasters, has endorsed Mr. Carlson’s claim that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad is using the Iran war to try to rebuild the Temple. She has also claimed that the Talmud tells Jews “that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them.” In 2024 she accused Israel of giving refuge to pedophiles and linked that behavior to the ritual murder of Christians in Europe during Passover. Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist and misogynist who Mr. Carlson recently hosted for a friendly interview, has insisted that “If you read anything about the Israeli government, anything even about Talmudic Judaism, what they say is, we don’t love our enemies. They say that the non-Jews, we don’t even consider them human.”
The good thing about being a supporter of Israel in The New York Times is that you don’t have to actually support what you write. Carlson in fact supported his claim by noting that IDF soldiers have been seen wearing patches depicting the Third Temple, and he quotes a soldier saying “But what are we really fighting for? We’re fighting for the right of the Jewish people to exist. Be Jewish, practice the religion, and be free. And one day, our true leader will come and will be united as a whole Jewish nation so we can rebuild the Beit HaMikdash [the Third Temple].” And he discusses the Hasidic group Chabad, noting “Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the third temple. And it seems like from the reading we did recently, that those patches actually came from Chabad. In any case, Chabad is pushing for the building of the Third Temple.” Chabad is quite connected to American elites. President Reagan was close to Chabad leader Menachem Schneerson, and really the only time Trump can be seen expressing religious piety (he released a famously profane statement on Iran on Eastern morning) is in Jewish contexts, as when he visited Schneerson’s grave in 2024:
Standing alongside the grave next to Chabad representatives, Trump engaged in a series of traditional Jewish mourning practices. He donned a kippah, read a chapter of Psalms that is quoted in the daily Jewish penitential prayer, placed a note on the grave and then laid a small stone on the headstone. He also lit a yahrzeit memorial candle, something President Joe Biden also did in commemoration of Oct. 7.
Trump, along with Ben Shapiro, honoring Rebbe Schneerson
I can see why Beinart would not provide any information on why the statements by Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are wrong. Too much evidence to support them. Par for the course. Beinart joins the tradition of fact-free defences of traditional Jewish attitudes and religious writing.
Beinart continues:
Mr. Carlson is more subtle. But he, too, often attributes Israel’s behavior to what he sees as its anti-Western religion. Last October, he claimed that “the Israeli position is ‘everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children.’ That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s a non-Christian — that’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” Earlier this year Mr. Carlson said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had tried to punish members of Mr. Carlson’s family because Mr. Netanyahu “believes in blood guilt, Amalek. You know, when someone commits a crime against you, you punish not just him but his family, his bloodline. There’s no idea that’s less Western than that, more anti-Christian than that. Christians reject that.”
Mr. Carlson is implying that Israel’s punishment of the Palestinian people stems from something particularly Jewish — or “non-Christian” — about its misdeeds. Such civilizational generalizations are false; many Christian and Western leaders practice collective punishment. The United States was founded on the same kind of land theft that Israel is committing against Palestinians.
Carlson is pointing to the well-founded reality that the West is individualist—and uniquely so, whereas Jewish culture is profoundly collectivist to the core. Thus Israel believes in collective punishment, as Carlson has noted. This can be seen in the pattern where Israelis demolish the houses of Palestinians they regard as terrorists—a trivial example compared to the complete disregard for Palestinian life in the Gaza genocide (the life of all Palestinians—men, women, and children, no matter what their behavior or beliefs). In November 2023 Ben-Gvir declared that “when they say that Hamas needs to be eliminated, it also means those who sing, those who support and those who distribute candy, all of these are terrorists.”[97][98] In Western legal systems, individuals would be prosecuted for suspected crimes, but whatever they had done would not make their family members prosecutable, much less the entire population of men, women, and children.
Mark Levin, who is often critiqued by Carlson, epitomizes this mindset:
Unsurprisingly, Ben Gvir has also made statements implying the collective guilt of all Palestinians. From his Duma arson attack in which vigilante settlers firebombed the home of a family in a Palestinian village, resulting in the deaths of a 18 month baby and its parents,[68] it was controversial that Ben-Gvir, along with Bentzi Gopstein, were seen attending the wedding of a couple related to the perpetrators, which became known as the wedding of hate, in which the weddinggoers could be seen waving rifles, guns and firebombs and even stabbing a photograph of the Palestinian toddler who was killed.[69][70]
On 25 February 2019, Ben-Gvir said that Arab citizens of Israel who were not loyal to Israel “must be expelled”.[71]
Prior to entering office Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American mass murdererBaruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre;[72][73] he removed the portrait in preparation for the 2020 Israeli legislative election in hope of being allowed to run on the unified right list headed by Naftali Bennett.[74]
Combating the anti-Israel right’s conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well.
No kidding! It’s good to see Beinart mentioning this rather glaring fact although it is indeed a one-line mention rather than a real examination of its importance. There was a time when Jewish activists made fine distinctions between criticizing Israel and criticizing Jews, but those days are long gone. Now anyone who criticizes Israel can expect to be considered an “anti-Semite”—a reality that is quite obvious in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. A rather glaring example is provided by Caitlin Johnstone:
Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal has published a handbook which unequivocally clarifies that her office exists not to protect Australian Jews from discrimination, but to stomp out criticism of the state of Israel.
However bad you’re imagining it is, it’s worse. The handbook, set to be formally launched later this week under the title “Understanding Antisemitism in Australia,” explicitly conflates antisemitism and antizionism with statements like “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” and asserting that it is antisemitic to accuse Israel of “apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”
It is therefore unambiguously the official position of the Australian government’s appointed authority on antisemitism that it is hateful and abusive toward Jews and their religion to oppose the racist political ideology underpinning the modern state of Israel.
So when Australians hear Jillian Segal and government officials talking about how there’s been an increase in “antisemitism” in our country and saying extreme measures must be taken to stop it, it’s important to be clear that this is the “antisemitism” they are talking about. They are talking about criticism of Israel.
Beinart again:
But progressives must not blur the distinction between viewing Israel as a state, which practices forms of oppression and aggression that can occur in states of every ethnic and religious type, and viewing Israel as the product of a peculiarly Jewish pathology. It is understandable that some progressives, who are rightly eager to end America’s support for Israel’s human rights abuses, might be tempted to see figures like Mr. Carlson as allies. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom should not indulge bigotry of any kind. That includes the bigotry of figures like Tucker Carlson, who blame Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness so they can pretend that America and Christianity are morally pure.
So in Beinart’s view Israel’s crimes have nothing to do with its being a Jewish state. All states may do it. But the reality is when Jews have gotten power over non-Jews, the results have been catastrophic for the latter. Exhibit A is the intensive Jewish involvement in mass murder of Russians and Ukrainians in the early decades of the USSR at a time when they had become an elite group. Since Christians are a small minority in Israel, it is not surprising that they have come under attack. The Jewish hatred of Christianity is “an ancient Jewish custom,” as Ben-Givr noted in October 2023, following the arrest of five Haredi Jews for spitting at Christians outside churches. There are many examples, many quite recent (the following is a machine translation of a French article).
Walking alone on a nearly empty street, the nun, a researcher at the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF), was attacked from behind. The assailant left and then returned to kick her repeatedly in front of the few passersby who appeared. Some were indifferent. He is 36 years old. It is known that this type of attack is usually perpetrated by minors who can evade justice. (See video here).
A European diplomatic source asserts that the attack “is part of a context of anti-Christian acts that have become commonplace, with insults and spitting by extremists targeting religious figures in their robes on a daily basis.”
The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem also confirmed that this is not “an isolated incident [but] is part of a worrying trend of increasing hostility against the Christian community and its symbols.”
The same brutal violence was evident on April 20th in the attack on the head of the Christ statue in the southern Lebanese Maronite village of Debel. An Israeli soldier vandalized the statue while his comrade photographed it for media attention. They were sentenced to one month in prison and barred from participating in combat. Lebanese media reported that it was the Italian contingent of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) that donated the new statue, not the occupying army, which had claimed to have replaced the damaged one.
In July 2025, the Christian town of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank was subjected to constant harassment by Israeli settlers, who engaged in incursions, land destruction, intimidation tactics, and the burning of places of worship, such as the Byzantine Church of St. George. The Patriarchs and heads of the churches in Jerusalem warned against “the current climate of impunity.”
The situation of Christians in occupied Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, is marked by a worrying increase in acts of violence, harassment and vandalism, mainly perpetrated by Israeli extremist elements.
More than 111 anti-Christian acts were recorded in Jerusalem in 2024, or about one every 3.3 days, according to local churches.
The incidents include spitting at priests and pilgrims, hate graffiti, desecration of cemeteries and churches, as well as physical attacks.
According to the Holy Land website, more than Christians themselves, it is the visible signs of Christianity that are targeted: crosses, statues, monasteries, religious clothing…
“As a minority, they are the first to suffer the consequences of geopolitical contractions,” analyzes Father David Neuhaus, a Jesuit with extensive knowledge of interreligious dynamics in the Holy Land.
But the Vatican City’s L’Osservatore Romano website accuses Christians of a constant threat from extremist elements, particularly ultra-Orthodox Judaism. This illustrates a doctrinal ideological perspective.
“The Land of Jesus, in particular, where our faith was born, has an additional reason to fear this phenomenon and to try to stop it. The absence of a Christian presence would risk reducing the places of preaching and passion of Our Lord to mere archaeological or tourist sites,” the site warned.
Neither the intervention of the Israeli police nor the statements of some rabbis who denounced acts “contrary to the Jewish religion” have contributed to eradicating this phenomenon.
According to the website of the Belgian-Palestinian association, other rabbis encourage these acts.
Rabbi Benzion Gopstein, a member of Ben-Gvir’s party, a Kahanist from the extremist settlement of Kiryat Arba, calls Christians “blood-sucking vampires”, declares that Christmas has no place in the Holy Land, advocates the expulsion of Christians from Israel and the burning of churches.
In their book, The Torah of Kings, Rabbis Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira of the settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus, state, among other things, that “wherever the influence of goyim (non-Jews) constitutes a threat to the life of Israel, it is permitted to kill them, even if they are Righteous Among the Nations.” This includes both Christians and Muslims.
Since 2005, the website notes, Christian celebrations during Holy Week have been met with military roadblocks and violence perpetrated jointly by police and settlers. The number of worshippers allowed to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been drastically reduced, from 11,000 historically during the Holy Fire ceremony to 1,800 since 2016, with authorities citing “security reasons.” This year, in addition to this restriction and police violence against worshippers and even priests (evident videos of this are circulating online), dozens of Jewish extremists attacked foreign believers, shouting, “Jerusalem is ours. Get out of here!” The mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King, has openly stated that he has recruited dozens of Jews to fight against Christian missionaries.
These attacks have been exacerbated by the religious far-right component of the government in place since 2022.
Now I suppose one can say that religious Jews who attack Christians are “extremists” and don’t represent Judaism as a religion. But these “extremists” are well represented in the government and there is a trend at least since Begin was Prime Minister for succeeding governments to be more on the right and more supportive of settlers. And of course having anti-Christian sentiments is not restricted to religious Jews. Besides the Jews carrying out massacres in the Soviet Union, Max West reminds us that the same phenomenon could happen in the U.S.:
It is important to remember the extent to which the Jewish-dominated Weather Underground leadership sanctioned genocidal levels of violence, when the time came. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Weather Underground, reported how the group’s leadership estimated that, once the Revolution had succeeded in the United States, they would need to kill 25 million people. Grathwohl writes: “I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. … And they were dead serious” (Kengor, 2013).
They were indeed dead serious and one can only be horrified that 50 years later they are closer than ever to the violent destruction of White America. These attitudes were also apparent in my experience with Jewish radicals at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, as recounted Ch. 3 of The Culture of Critique:
There was also a great deal of hostility to Western cultural institutions as politically and sexually oppressive combined with an ever-present sense of danger and imminent destruction by the forces of repression—an ingroup bunker mentality discussed in A People That Shall Dwell Alone Chapter 7 that I now believe is a fundamental characteristic of Jewish social forms. There was an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority and even contempt toward traditional American culture, particularly rural America and most particularly the South—attitudes that are hallmarks of several of the intellectual movements reviewed here (e.g., the attitudes of Polish-Jewish communists toward traditional Polish culture; see also Chs. 6 and 7 on Jewish attitudes toward populism). There was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure viewed as having victimized not only Jews but non-elite gentiles as well—reflecting the revenge theme of many commenters on Jewish motivation.
It’s that “bloody, apocalyptic revenge” that we have to prevent at all costs.
