Tucker Carlson’s interview with Avraham Burg tells you something important about the kind of case Carlson now likes to make about Israel. He starts with a conclusion, then finds an Israeli voice that gives it local legitimacy.
Carlson, the American far-right commentator and former Fox News host, recently sat down with Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and once a senior figure in Israel’s old Labor establishment. On paper, Burg looks like an insider. That is precisely what made him useful.
Presenting Burg as a stand-in for Israel is like presenting Cornel West, with a dash of Jill Stein, as a stand-in for America: articulate, familiar, and nowhere near the national mainstream.
Carlson told viewers that Israelis support the war because they “don’t really know the details of what is happening or why,” that Israel is “a particularly censored place,” and that its citizens live in “an information vacuum.” Then he explained why Burg deserved attention.
He wanted someone who was “not just wackos with weird opinions, but thoughtful people who have a dissenting view.” Burg, Carlson said, may represent “the minority of Israeli opinion,” but he “was at the very center of Israeli politics.”
That's a neat way to smuggle in a distortion. Yes, Burg once stood near the center of Israeli public life. He served as speaker of the Knesset, briefly as acting president (for about two weeks), and came from one of Zionism’s most storied families.
That history is real. It is also old. Over the years, Burg moved far from the Zionist center into something much more estranged. Hebrew media marked that shift years ago. In a 2007 Haaretz interview, he warned that defining Israel as a Jewish state was “the key to its end” and attacked the Law of Return as part of the problem.
In 2015, Ynet reported that he openly supported Hadash, the Jewish-Arab far-left party. The Jerusalem Post later described his ideological turn as a move from Jewish Agency chairman to “a crusader against a Jewish state.”
Burg attacks Israel policies yet appears centrist to US audience
Burg is not just a left-wing critic of government policy. He has spent years attacking core ideas at the heart of Jewish statehood. He has every right to do that. Carlson also has every right to interview him. But American viewers saw an Israeli centrist without doubt.
They were shown a former insider whose politics left the Israeli mainstream a long time ago. To outsiders, he can still sound like Israel’s conscience. Inside Israel, he has long sounded like a man who left the argument for a different country.
To exemplify how detached Burg is, just take a look at Israeli polling: On Iran, Jewish Israeli support for Operation Roaring Lion has been overwhelming. Recent polling found support above 90%, including a vast majority of support among Jewish Israelis on the Left.
Burg is free to oppose that. Israel is full of dissent, and much of it is fierce. Still, presenting him as the voice of buried Israeli sanity against a crazed public is false. He is far from being a hidden majority. He is an outlier with a microphone.
The same goes for the Palestinian question. After October 7, Israeli faith in the old peace-process vocabulary collapsed. The numbers show that clearly. Burg moved in the opposite direction. He has spoken in post-national terms about the land between the river and the sea as “one space,” and in the Carlson interview, he said Israeli politics lacks “any reconciliatory politics.” That is a legitimate position. It is also far from Israel's national center today.
This is where Carlson’s method comes into focus. He was not looking for a mainstream Israeli critic, and there are many. He was looking for an Israeli who could certify his indictment.
Burg obliged. He said Israel has “no strategy,” only tactics. He described many Israelis as wanting simply to “get over with the Iranians.” He called Israeli political culture a “zero-sum game,” then pushed it further: “I want to win alone. I want you to be dead. I want to humiliate you; I want to cancel you.” He said Israel has no real peace vocabulary and that “we never grew up” into the era of the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat or the Oslo Accords.
These are wide-ranging judgments about Israeli society, Israeli political culture, and the moral instincts of the Israeli mainstream. Carlson wanted precisely that kind of witness.
He needed an Israeli who could tell his American audience that its ugliest assumptions were correct, that Israelis are manipulated, fearful, morally disfigured, and driven by a nationalism they barely understand themselves. Burg was useful because he is Israeli, because he carries establishment credentials, and because his distance from the national mood can be sold as wisdom.
There is also a broader pattern here: The far right and far left increasingly meet on Israel. They arrive there from different places and in different languages. The far left sees Israel as a colonial crime. The populist far right sees it as a symbol of elite deceit, endless war, censorship, and moral blackmail. The rhetoric changes. The instinct is often similar. Both sides are drawn to Israelis who can be used as native witnesses against the country’s legitimacy or basic grip on reality.
That is why Carlson did not choose a mainstream Israeli critic, though there are plenty. He did not choose a hostage-family voice, a former general arguing for a different endgame, a center-left Zionist, or a liberal who still takes Israeli fears seriously after October 7.
He chose someone more useful to his project: a man with a famous name, anti-establishment conclusions, and a worldview far enough from the Israeli center to flatter Carlson’s audience.
When Americans are shown Israeli outliers as if they are the country’s hidden center, they do not learn more about Israel. They learn less.
A serious interviewer would have asked why so many Israelis who loathe their government still support military action against Iran. He would have asked what October 7 did to Israeli assumptions about deterrence, vulnerability, and coexistence. He would have asked why Israeli society became more hawkish and more distrustful at the same time. Those questions start in reality.
Carlson chose a simpler route. He found an Israeli who would tell his audience exactly what it wanted to hear.
That is why the interview concluded the way it did. The case came first. The Israeli witness came second.