Tucker Carlson's Antizionism

How a Forgotten Alliance between American missionaries and Arab nationalists is re-emerging on the Right

Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Mike Huckabee has sparked much conversation about Carlson’s specific and emerging anti-Jewish worldview. But what we are watching is not a simple revival of classical right-wing antisemitism. It is something more historically and structurally interesting.

Carlson’s emerging form of antizionism reflects the reappearance of an alliance that long existed at the margins of American political life, but whose influence was submerged for decades by the dominance of the evangelical bloc and Christian Zionism: the relationship between American Protestant missionaries and Arab nationalists.

For a long time, Christian Arab nationalists such as Fayez Sayegh, Constantine Zureiq, and Edward Said maintained connections with American universities and Protestant intellectual networks, finding their way into elite American institutions such as Georgetown University or Princeton University.

The American University of Beirut—founded in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College—was itself a missionary institution that played a major role in the intellectual consolidation of modern Arab nationalism.

Figures like Said and Sayegh repeatedly argued that the “Palestinian point of view” was submerged in American public discourse—eclipsed, in their telling, by the political and theological alignment between Christian Zionism and Israel.

Carlson maintains an intense interest in Palestinian Christians, and he works to construct them as the “true inhabitants” of the “Holy Land.” That move is typically antizionist. The civilizational erasure of Jews in the Land of Israel—the displacement of Jewish indigeneity by supersessional Christian or Islamic claims—is a central feature of antizionist discourse.

In effect, Carlson is fusing American Christian nationalism with antizionist Arab nationalism in its Christian roots and resonances.

In 2024, he interviewed Munther Isaac, the Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem who wrote Christ in the Rubble: The Genocide in Gaza—a work advancing the genocide libel, fused with deicide themes and “Jesus as Palestinian” discourse. That is contemporary left-wing and Christian Arab antizionist material, not traditional right-wing antisemitism.

The Khazar theory—the claim that Ashkenazi Jews descend not from the ancient Israelites but from a medieval Turkic people who converted to Judaism—did not originate as a right-wing trope. It circulated in Arab nationalist and antizionist contexts as a way of denying Jewish indigeneity and severing Jews from the land of Israel. Variants appear in the work of Constantine Zureiq, the Christian Arab nationalist who coined the term Nakba.

The broader construct that Jews are “White Europeans” is a staple of antizionism. It's antizionist white-coding. When Carlson refers to Netanyahu as “Polish,” he is drawing on a framing far more typical of antizionist discourse than of classical right-wing antisemitism.

What looks like a new right-wing rebellion is, in reality, the migration of an evolving antizionist cosmology—from the seminar room and the missionary network into prime-time American media.