How Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz’s biblical bickering explains the MAGA divide on Israel
Debating Israel and Iran, Carlson and Cruz got hung up on a verse from Genesis. Who read it right?
In the two-hour interview Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz debated U.S. support for Israel, intervention in Iran, and the meaning of the word “Israel” in a Bible verse. Image by screenshot/YouTube
By Louis Keene June 19, 2025
When Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens on his podcast, he provided about as much resistance to their ideas as a youth soccer player does to postgame orange slices. But Sen. Ted Cruz found a much more willing opponent when he joined Carlson this week for an interview about Iran, Israel and the looming prospect of U.S. intervention in their escalating conflict.
Carlson’s head-to-head with Cruz was appointment viewing for Republicans split on whether the U.S. should intervene. But it also produced some viral fodder for the political left, who found in the controversial talk host an unlikely ally as Carlson’s pointed questions put Cruz on the defensive.
In a fiery two-hour interrogation, Carlson — a leader of the MAGA movement’s isolationist faction — challenged Cruz on his support for regime change in Iran and for Israel generally. He asked why AIPAC lobbyists should not have to register as foreign agents, how much the U.S. was spending on Israel and whether it was getting its money’s worth. But the most revealing moment — and maybe the strangest — came when Carlson and Cruz, who are both Christian, debated the meaning of a passage in the Hebrew Bible.
The exchange happened about halfway through the interview — that is, before Carlson stumped the senator on Iranian population figures but after Cruz implied his interviewer’s fixation on Israel was antisemitic — as Cruz, who earlier in the interview had said he hoped to be the Senate’s leading defender of Israel, tried to explain why.
“As a Christian growing up in Sunday school,” Cruz said, “I was taught from the Bible, ‘Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.’ And from my perspective, I’d rather be on the blessing side of things.”
The two then began arguing about the text’s meaning. Was it referring to the state of Israel, Carlson asked? First Cruz replied that it meant the nation of Israel. But after some Carlson pestering, Cruz said yes: God was referring to the political entity of modern Israel.
Jewish people tend to interpret the blessing, which appears more than once in the Bible, the way Carlson said he did: as referring to the Jewish people. After all, the secular nation-state of Israel did not exist until 1948; until David Ben-Gurion named it Israel that May 14, most people assumed the Jewish state would be called Judea.
Whether modern Israel is a project of Jewish nationhood dating back to biblical times or merely the culmination of a late-19th-century political vision is a matter of perspective. Jews are a majority in the modern state of Israel, and it’s not uncommon to see Jewish people post the biblical phrase when ill befalls Israel’s enemies or conversely post Am Yisrael Chai as a statement of support for the people or the place.
But the disagreement between Carlson and Cruz also reflects a fundamental difference between their respective denominations. Evangelicals like Cruz — the archetypical Christian Zionists — tend to see God’s relationship with the Jewish people as an ongoing pact, and the creation of the state of Israel a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Episcopalians like Carlson, on the other hand, typically believe the sacrifice of Jesus broke that pact, and therefore distinguish between the biblical Israel and the modern nation-state. The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops passed a resolution rejecting Christian Zionism last year.
Ironically, the verse Cruz referenced doesn’t mention Israel at all. The direct subject of the blessing is you — literally, “I will bless those who bless you.” When God says these words to Abraham in Genesis, the future patriarch is still living with his parents; when the sorcerer Balaam blesses the Jewish people with similar words in the book of Numbers, they haven’t even crossed into the land God promised them. Which, by the way, isn’t called Israel. It’s Canaan.
