Everyone is talking about Tucker Carlson. I get it.
He’s a genius of the attention economy, a man who turned provocation into a career and the airport lounge into a geopolitical stage. Candace Owens runs the same playbook. They’re performers. And they’re increasingly beside the point.
US Ambassador Mike Huckabee sat across from Carlson at Ben-Gurion Airport and did something nobody seems to want to talk about. He made an argument. A real one. Patient, specific, grounded, the kind you can actually follow from beginning to end.
But first, I have a confession to make: “Christian Zionism” entered my working vocabulary embarrassingly late.
For years, the phrase lived somewhere in the back of my mind as a sociological curiosity, somewhere between a footnote and a conference panel I’d skip. Then October 7 happened, and the footnotes started mattering.
American Christians care about Jewish survival
While Jewish intellectuals were busy being nuanced, millions of American Christians were busy actually caring about Jewish survival. Not abstractly. Practically. Showing up.
Huckabee is one of them. He’s also, it turns out, quite good at explaining why.
He defined Zionism simply: Jews have a right to a homeland where they can live with security and safety. He defined a Christian Zionist as someone who believes Israel has a right to exist. You might find that modest. I find it clarifying.
When the baseline has drifted so far that stating Israel’s right to exist reads as a controversial position, saying it plainly and without embarrassment is its own kind of act.
When Carlson tried to steer the conversation toward his usual grievance tour, Huckabee said early on that he wanted them to “talk to each other and not about each other.”
That’s such a small sentence, and it did so much work. He’d decided before the cameras rolled that he was there to persuade, and he spent the whole interview doing exactly that.
When Carlson insinuated that supporting Israel creates some kind of conflict of interest for an American diplomat, Huckabee looked down at his lapel. “What flag am I wearing here? It’s my flag. It’s who I serve.”
The argument that pro-Israel Americans are somehow disloyal to their own country is one of the uglier ideas making the rounds right now, on the MAGA Right and the campus Left simultaneously, which tells you something, and Huckabee cut through it without raising his voice.
On the money, he was equally clear. American military assistance to Israel cycles back through American defense procurement. It buys an ally in one of the world’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Israel is, he said, “the tip of the spear.”
Argue with the metaphor if you want. The underlying point holds: this alliance has a strategic logic that would cost far more to replace than it costs to maintain. He wasn’t asking anyone for charity. He was describing how deterrence works.
On Iran, he said what the situation actually requires saying: that a regime that has spent decades chanting “Death to America” should probably be taken at its word.
Here’s what got me interested in this conversation: When Carlson raised the harassment of Christians in Israel, and it does happen, it’s a real problem, responsible people acknowledge it, Huckabee didn’t change the subject.
He called it what it is. Spitting on Christians comes from “an evil heart,” he said, and “they should go to jail here.” That’s how a real friend talks. Holding an ally to its own values because you believe it can actually meet them.
He also mentioned, almost as an aside, that he’d made over a hundred trips to Israel across several decades. That he goes to church every Sunday. That he plays bass guitar in his church band. That he’s never been bothered for being a Christian there. Carlson flew in, stayed in the terminal, flew out, and made content. Huckabee has spent 30 years building familiarity with a place.
At the end, he invited Carlson back. Come see more. Come to church with me. See that Christians are pretty free here. It was the tone of someone with nothing to hide, a host, not a supplicant.
I know the temptation among Jews and Israelis right now is toward a certain wariness about Christian support. After watching institutions they trusted dissolve over the past two years, suspicion feels like the grown-up position. I understand it.
But Huckabee sat in that airport and made the full case, strategically, morally, personally, when making it cost something. He didn’t flinch, didn’t deflect, didn’t reach for the easy answer.
Carlson will keep generating headlines. He always does. But Huckabee made the argument, and arguments have a longer half-life than clips.
The least we can do is pay attention and thank Huckabee for speaking the truth of sane Judeo-Christian values.