Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview Wednesday that American conservatives who criticize his government are not “MAGA.”
This would be news to some of the most prominent voices within that movement.
Netanyahu told the conservative-populist news outlet Breitbart: “And let me say one more thing — you talked about the ‘woke right’? Some of these people call themselves MAGA [Make America Great Again].”
“They’re not MAGA,” he insisted.
“Israel is the best ally of the United States. Israel is fighting Iran, and you can’t be MAGA if you’re pro-Iran, you can’t be MAGA if you’re anti-Israel. President Trump understands this, and he stands very strongly with us,” Netanyahu added.
What qualifies as “pro-Iran” or “anti-Israel” is not really thoroughly explained or explored, other than the insinuation that American conservatives should agree with Israel’s government at all times. It also makes sense that the head of Israel’s government would want to rhetorically align with the Republican president of the United States and his core base, many of whom, particularly among Christian evangelicals, have historically been staunch supporters of Israel if not self-proclaimed Zionists.
Still, many of Trump’s most high profile supporters unequivocally help define MAGA while also harshly criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza.
We should start with the undeniable MAGA queen, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Greene has been a devout Trump loyalist for most of her political career, with an X bio that reads “Congresswoman for GA-14, Christian, Mom, Small Business Owner, Proud American, 100% Pro-Life, Pro-Gun, Pro-Trump,” coupled with a photo of herself standing with President Trump and conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.
Whatever your opinion of Greene, her rightwing bonafides are unchallenged.
Greene is also the first Republican member of Congress to call Israel’s war on Gaza a "genocide,” posting on X in late July, “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
That was no one-off for Greene, who regularly deplores the mass slaughter of Palestinians on X in lengthy posts from a Christian and “America First” perspective. “Yesterday I spoke to a Christian pastor from Gaza. There are children starving,” Green wrote on July 31. “And Christians have been killed and injured, as well as many innocent people.”
“If you are an American Christian, this should be absolutely unacceptable to you,” she wrote in a long post that had 3.7 million views as of this writing. Needless to say, Greene, or ‘MTG,’ is now a frequent target of AIPAC.
Like Greene, independent pundit Tucker Carlson has also been a major MAGA player and a critic of Israel’s government. Carlson and many of his guests have condemned Israel’s continued bombardment of Palestine, including author John Mearsheimer explaining in detail why he believes what is happening in Gaza is definitionally a genocide.
The pro-war contingent went mad when Carlson interviewed or “platformed” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in early July, despite media figures talking to America’s enemies being a long journalistic tradition here in the U.S.
Carlson also drew a line in mid-August between “America First” supporters of his MAGA camp and bomb-bomb Iran Republicans who prioritize Israel during an interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Texas). Cruz insisted that the Bible commanded him to side with Israel’s government at all costs. Carlson asked where the Bible said that. Cruz didn’t know and ended up looking foolish.
The two have been at war ever since.
Which brings us to what one means by “MAGA.” If Greene, Carlson, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have been major figures within the movement for years, and yet are now disqualified from it according to Netanyahu, maybe we should instead be asking if defending Israel unequivocally is ‘MAGA’.
That is news to Bannon, who was quite clear what he thought about Netanyahu's interventions in a social media post on Thursday:
Trump has been all over the place on this front, but he clearly ran (in all three presidential campaigns) on an “America First” platform and also decried the “endless wars” that the U.S. has been involved in over the last 20 years. In 2016 and 2024, millions of Americans seemingly took that to heart, among other things, and elected him president.
In his foreign policy, Cruz still represents the brand of the last pre-Trump GOP administration for which writing a blank check to Israel is a given and an unquestioning enthusiasm for foreign intervention is what it means to be a Republican. This is why Cruz, Senator Lindsey Graham (S.C.), talk host Mark Levin, and others are still deeply invested in neoconservatism, and now try to insist that Trump’s MAGA is no different than the brand of foreign policy pushed by Republicans in the Bush-Cheney era.
It’s a cute trick, but history shows differently. While many can make valid claims to MAGA, the foreign policy promise — if not always the actions — of the movement was to break with Republicans of old and to put the United States before the interests of other nations, whether they be Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israel. Marjorie Taylor Greene even now substitutes “America First’ with “America Only,” and often.
Benjamin Netanyahu claims that true MAGA must put his nation and government first. He’s wrong.
