This article focuses on the false claims made in that exchange about Israel as a state, about Jewishness as an identity, and about the conspiratorial framework constructed around both. The Tucker Carlson–Nick Fuentes conversation contains a tension between a legitimate argument about US policy towards Israel and a slide into assigning political motive and collective guilt to a religious minority. The interview moves between those modes so that they sound like the same argument. They are not.

The central claim is stated most confidently. Carlson says: “Israel has always funded extremism throughout the Middle East, including Hamas … That’s a fact.” This is not established in the conversation, and the wording matters. “Funded” is a specific allegation. “Always” and “throughout the Middle East” are sweeping. “Including Hamas” implies a direct, sustained financial relationship of the kind a state might have with a proxy. None of that is demonstrated in the interview.

What can be said without stretching? Israeli governments have at times made tactical decisions that are said to have strengthened Hamas. One discussed example is the decision to allow certain external funds to enter Gaza under Hamas rule, framed as a way to maintain calm or avoid humanitarian collapse. That is not the same as “Israel funded Hamas” in the ordinary sense of a state financing an allied armed group. Allowing money to move, under monitoring and calculation, is an indirect choice. The word “funded” collapses the difference between toleration, miscalculation, indirect enabling, and intentional sponsorship, and it erases other sources of Hamas capability, such as internal taxation, external patrons, and smuggling........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)