Beinart: What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel
2026/04/29 2 Comments
Good commentary:
…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.
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.
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.
Source: What Tucker Carlson Means When He Talks About Israel
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
Beinart is an interesting character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Beinart#Works_and_views
Wikipedia describes him as a liberal. In terms of the Israeli political spectrum, he would be a member of “the Democrats”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Democrats_(Israel)) The Democrats are polling in the 7-9% range. In other words, Beinart is typical of a reasonably fringe view with respect to Israel.
Taking Beinart’s view seriously, that people on the left are less likely to associate their anti-Zionist views with the religion of the majority of Israel’s residents, I’m not sure this is the “flex” he thinks it is. Anti-Zionists on the right are overt about their anti-semitism, whereas Anti-Zionists on the left are more subtle. Arguable, leftist anti-semites are hiding behind the false distinction between Anti-Zionism and anti-semitism, while redefining Zionism to suit their purposes. Zionism is no more and no less than the desire for national self-determination of the Jewish people on the land of Israel, a position with which more than 90% of Jews agree. I would rather that Anti-Zionists be honest about their motives and their definitions.
agree, greater honesty would be helpful. The latest Amnesty International Canada report is silent on October 7 and the rise in antisemitism in its critique of Isreal.