For years, a debate over Israel has been raging behind the scenes of Republican politics.
Then, last week, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts thrust that battle into the open.
“Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Roberts said in a widely circulated defense of Tucker Carlson following the podcaster’s friendly interview with avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which focused on American support for Israel. While the right should support Israel in areas of mutual interest, Roberts continued, “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”
The short video set off a civil war on the right. Many pro-Israel conservatives, from think tankers like Michael Doran to politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), have framed the debate as a question of fighting antisemitism. Fuentes is, after all, an unabashed antisemite. He has openly expressed doubt that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and he has called for “a total Aryan victory.” To drive the point home, Fuentes followed up the Carlson interview with a video slamming “Jewish oligarchy” and complaining about the “Holocaust religion.”
Roberts attempted to walk a tightrope by denouncing many of Fuentes’ views in a lengthy statement on X and making the case that the best way to confront these opinions was to debate them. He later explained that he made the video after facing “a lot of pressure” to “cancel Tucker,” and many MAGA leaders have indeed flocked to Roberts’ and Carlson’s defense. But these efforts have only heightened the split, in which most prominent Republicans are now being asked to pick a side.
Ten months into President Donald Trump’s second term, the long-simmering GOP debate over Israel has reached its boiling point. On one side, pro-Israel conservatives are leaning into their opportunity to discipline Heritage and sideline Carlson, who has become Israel’s most prominent critic on the right. And on the other side, restraint-oriented Republicans are throwing their support behind Carlson and his view that America First foreign policy should treat Israel like any other state.
Hovering above it all is Trump, whose ambiguous positions on Israel have left significant room for interpretation. On the campaign trail, he hinted that his backing for Israel was less than iron-clad. When a crowd called then-President Joe Biden “genocide Joe” because of his support for Israel, Trump demurred, saying “they’re not wrong.” He’s also lamented the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and seemingly blamed Israel for preventing aid from entering the region. At the same time, Trump has maintained a clear pro-Israel stance in office, working closely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and even joining Israeli strikes on Iran back in June.
Given this ambiguity, Republicans have had to fight among themselves over what, exactly, it means to be “America First” in the Middle East. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said recently that supporting Israel is “innately tied to America's fundamental interests.” But many on the right, including podcast host Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), view this as a betrayal of the America First ethos, in which foreign commitments of all sorts should be viewed with skepticism.
In many ways, this represents a microcosm of Republican debates over foreign policy that have been raging for decades. The GOP had been broadly supportive of Israel for much of the 20th century, but that support was supercharged in the 1980s and 1990s as the neoconservative movement became increasingly influential on the right, according to David Klion, a columnist at the Nation and the author of a forthcoming book on the history of neoconservatism.
Even then, the conversation was often as much about antisemitism as it was about Israel. Following a series of debates between paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, right-wing stalwart William F. Buckley stepped in and accused the paleocons, who were more skeptical of unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government, of simply being antisemitic. “The neocons won the coalitional fight, at least for a while,” Klion told RS.
Such was the state of the debate leading up to 9/11, after which America launched a series of wars in the Middle East with bipartisan backing. The neoconservatives, who didn’t hesitate to use military force in service of purportedly idealistic goals, had won, and the paleocons were left toiling at the margins.
But, as the post-9/11 wars became increasingly controversial, the debate over foreign entanglements returned with a vengeance. Trump railed against “reckless foreign interventions” during the 2016 campaign and insisted that he would have voted against the Iraq War if he had been in office at the time. While Trump’s record on foreign policy has been decidedly more hawkish than these comments imply, he has maintained a habit of denouncing wars, suggesting that he sees the position as a political winner.
Meanwhile, a growing set of institutions sought to reorient American foreign policy away from war, led by groups like Defense Priorities, the Center for Renewing America, and the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. Prominent paleocon Pat Buchanan also helped found the American Conservative magazine in 2002, which has since served as an anti-interventionist ballast on the right.
Throughout this period, restraint-oriented ideas have struggled to break into the elite level of Republican politics. But they’ve been extremely popular among the base. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Republicans want the U.S. to “pay less attention to problems overseas,” and another survey found that fully 50% of Republicans under 50-years-old have an unfavorable view of Israel — a 15 point jump since 2022.
Under Roberts, the Heritage Foundation has made a concerted effort to normalize these beliefs among conservative elites, many of whom had long embraced the neoconservative orthodoxy of the George W. Bush years. Roberts, who describes himself as a “recovering neo-con,” drew sharp criticism from traditional hawks for using his perch at one of America’s most powerful conservative institutions to question military spending and oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Like most Republican elites, Roberts had largely avoided taking on the issue of Israel. But the debate continued just underneath the surface. Two years of brutal war in Gaza had led a growing contingent on the right to turn against Israel, with many arguing that it was not in American interests to continue supporting a government as it committed crimes against humanity. Others on the right have made the case that U.S. support for Israel is contributing to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. And, as Trump has slashed USAID and other foreign assistance programs, many fiscal conservatives have grown more frustrated with the billions of dollars that the U.S. sends Israel each year.
Carlson has placed himself at the center of this fight, holding positive interviews with critics of Israel while grilling Sen. Cruz over his support for bombing Iran. As Klion explained, pro-Israel voices on the right have tried to use this as a chance “to excise [Carlson] from what’s now considered respectable conservatism.” But that attention has seemingly only led him to double down, as evidenced by his decision to carry out a friendly interview with an outright white nationalist. (Klion added that he felt “a certain amount of schadenfreude” watching the incident play out following years of left-wing warnings about rising antisemitism on the right, adding that the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has hurt the fight against real antisemitism.)
Given Carlson’s prominence and persistence, it was only a matter of time before the debate broke open. “I suspect Tucker Carlson is acting as a vehicle for some segment of the American political establishment that is unhappy with the present terms of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” argued Murtaza Hussain of Drop Site News, adding that, given the sensitivity of the issue, Carlson must have felt confident that he “had something backing him up.”
Curt Mills, the executive director of the American Conservative, lauded Roberts for his “unbelievably courageous and accurate” comments about the need to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. In Mills’ view, opponents of Roberts and Carlson simply want to “cancel” conservatives who are “anti-Zionist” or “skeptics of Israel.”
“We’re not having a debate about white nationalism,” Mills said. “We’re having a debate about conservative think tanks and what should or should not be allowed to be said about U.S. foreign policy in the mainstream of center-right politics.”
It remains unclear to what extent this elite debate could lead to changes in U.S. policy. Some skeptics of American support for Israel have found their way into the administration, and Vice President J.D. Vance has come to lead the growing push on the right to reduce U.S. military adventurism.
Yet much of Trump’s policy apparatus is still dominated by pro-Israel hawks. Trump himself has continued to listen to prominent pro-Israel advisers and donors, like Miriam Adelson, who still has the president’s ear on Middle East policy. And even as the Heritage Foundation has opened the door to criticizing Israel, it has also supported policies that crack down on anti-Israel speech.
Still, Mills sees significant reason for optimism, at least in the long term. While the old guard of the Republican Party remains relatively hawkish and pro-Israel, many younger Trump administration staffers are more skeptical of foreign entanglements. “I sense a natural sympathy for our perspective throughout the administration,” Mills said.
