This will be the first of many blog posts here IYH on the Times of Israel website. In order to introduce myself, I will not write about the “two-week ceasefire” with Iran just yet. First thing I wanted to do was establish my baseline as a Jew living in Jerusalem after decades in America. In order to do that I want to repost an article from my substack I wrote about a month ago when Tucker Carlson made a claim about the Jews currently living in Israel which needed to be answered properly. The following is my response, I hope it makes you think and as always would love to hear your thoughts.

When I lived in America, I used to wake up at 3:30am to drive to work which left me little time to watch Tucker Carlson live at 8pm on Fox News. Instead, I would listen to his show in podcast form the next day while working in my office. He was funny, poignant, engaging and willing to call out hypocrisy when he encountered it no matter the party or subject matter. It seemed to me this was his appeal, or as they say today his “superpower”.

I believe it is fair to say, those days are long since gone. I’m not much into name calling because I think it’s the last resort of the weak. But allow me to vent for a moment and call it as I see it. He has since become a stooge. A hack. A shill. And most of all, as much as he feigns surprise at the accusation, an anti-semite.

With that in mind, I turned on his interview with United States Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. I tried to give Carlson the benefit of the doubt hoping to recover the broadcaster who kept me company during those quiet mornings for almost a decade. Sadly, what I found was a childish, combative, shallow, low hanging-fruit Jew hater who was clearly out of his league. He lacked depth, clarity of thought and intellectual honesty. It truly seemed like he believed he was the only beacon of morality left whose job it was to enlighten a world blinded by its most evil enemy. The State of Israel and its inhabitants. The Jews.

Sitting opposite him, Ambassador Huckabee was a picture of maturity and control. He dealt with each interruption, obtuse logic and gaslighting question like the total professional that he is. While I didn’t feel sorry for him, I did feel he had given a chunk of his life, which he can never get back, to a petulant child intent on underscoring his Bona Fides for his Jew-hating fan base.

I do wish I could have been in the Ambassador’s ear to offer him a little help with some of the nonsense he was having to deal with. I would have started with the long-since-debunked “Jews living in Israel now are actually from the Khazars” theory. I want to add that as someone who constantly reminds us of his Christian beliefs and professes to have studied the Bible, Carlson knows scant nothing in it. To answer his question once and for all I would refer Carlson to the very bible he claims to be committed to. “I will lay your cities to waste and make your holy places desolate…And I will bring the land into desolation so it will become desolate of your enemies who live in it. I will scatter you among the nations and I will unsheathe the sword after you. Your land will be desolate, and your cities will be laid waste” Leviticus 26:31-33.

Plenty of Jewish commentators over the past 2,000 years have addressed these verses with brilliant insights but only a few had the advantage of two millennia of history Rabbi Joseph B. Solevietchik had. It is his commentary which answers Carlson’s question in a most deep and powerful way. I am sure all the other anti-zionists and anti-semites will be uncomfortable with his words below since it doesn’t fit their agenda, but unlike them, he had a vast knowledge of history they could only dream of. And it is that history he refers back to in illustrating his point. They will point to false narratives, the Rabbi relies on historical facts. Truth hurts like that sometimes.

“The Land ‎of Israel cannot ‎be built by any other nation or people. Only the Jewish people have it within their ‎power to settle ‎the Land and make its desolation blossom. The Creator’s promise was turned into a ‎wondrous ‎reality in different periods in the annals of the history of the Land of Israel. We cannot ‎forget even ‎for a moment, that the Land of Israel, like a magnet, attracted the nations of the world ‎‎— both ‎Christians and Muslims. The Crusades in the Middle Ages were undertaken with the ‎purpose of ‎conquering the Land of Israel and populating it with Christians. All the toil of the ‎Crusaders was for ‎naught. They did not strike roots in the Land. Even the Muslims who were already in the land, did ‎not succeed in ‎colonizing it properly. It remained a barren desert…Even in modern times, when European nations, in the ‎seventeenth ‎and eighteenth centuries, settled and populated entire continents, the Land of Israel ‎remained ‎desolate and in a more primitive state than its neighboring Arab lands: Egypt, Syria, and ‎the ‎Lebanon. Had the Land been settled by an industrious, successful, and cultured people, had ‎the ‎Land been properly populated and developed, our attachment to it would have been eroded ‎by ‎the course of events, and no Jewish foot would have trod upon it. Strangers would have eaten ‎its ‎bounty and its fruit, and our rights would have become null and void. However, the Land of ‎Israel ‎did not betray the Jewish people. It was loyal to them, awaiting redemption throughout ‎the ‎years.

But Rabbi Soloveitchik continues laying the groundwork and begins to slam the door on the intellectually dishonest as only he could.

“Those who exile the Jewish people and replace them as its residents will reside in a desolate land. They will starve because the land will not give itself to them. Our enemies drove our ancestors out of Jerusalem. They set fire to it and destroyed the holy Temple but never colonized or populated it. Mount Zion was desolate for a very long time, and despite many attempts, not a single nation, not one other people, ever succeeded in establishing a state in the Land of Israel. Many people were eager and ready to colonize it. It is a land considered holy by Christians and Muslims. It was occupied by many powers-by Rome, later the Byzantium, by the Muslims, by the Crusaders and the Muslims again. It changed hands so many times, but no one developed the land of Israel agriculturally, industrially, or scientifically. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, entire continents and huge stretches of land like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were colonized and settled by the British. They took desert country, jungle and converted it into blossoming gardens. They brought civilization to pagans. Yet the British could not colonize the Land of Israel. It is a special land, a pleasant land. With the exception of a small colony here and there, no one was able to colonize it on a grand scale. The land of Israel remained a desolate land.”

And here Rabbi Soloveitchik emphatically answers Carlson’s question with a definitive blow: “Contrast this to the flourishing of the settling of land of Israel. It is very young, only in existence since the turn of the twentieth century. And yet see what its members have accomplished! Apparently there is sense of loyalty on the part of the land that she will never betray her people, she will not give herself up to strangers or to conquerers. She will save herself only for the people to whom the land of Israel belongs.”

The Rabbi wrote the above some 50 years ago. Tucker, you dishonest coward, how do I know the descendants of the biblical Jews are the same people who live here today? The land itself is letting you know loud and clear and indeed the entire world is the beneficiary. Her children have returned home and the land has responded accordingly. As the prophet Amos (9:14) wrote some 2700 years ago “I will restore My people Israel. They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them; They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine; They shall till gardens and eat their fruits.”

The Jews living in Israel today are drinking from their vineyards, rebuilding ruined cities and inhabiting them. The state of Israel has become an economic power on the world stage as well as a military one. According to the Economist, Israel was the third best performing economy in 2025. Keep in mind more than half the year was spent in wartime. The number of world wide life-changing inventions created in Israel boggles the mind. Here is just a small list to send to Tucker when you have some time. Usb Flash Drive, Waze, Mobileye, ICQ-which was the first instant messaging service-wait, in lieu of his Fox News days maybe you might want to keep this one from him, Firewall, Pillcam, Epilady, Drip Irrigation, and cherry tomatoes. There are many more impacting the world which emanate from the Jews who are living in Israel today.

Ezekiel foretold of the Jewish people’s destiny thousands of years ago and assured us it was indeed the land that would respond to the peoples return to their home. “But you, O mountains of Israel, shall yield your produce and bear your fruit for My people Israel, for their return is near (Ezekiel 36:8)”

I do not believe there are verses in the Torah which testify to its veracity more than these three from Leviticus. As a matter of fact, I will grant the non-believer every argument they make against Torah being Divine and instead having been written by man, though they have never been able to pinpoint by whom exactly. That is for another day. My only question is one they continually fail to answer. With 3500 years of historical evidence behind us which has gone from biblical narrative to historical certainty, who wrote these words in Leviticus if not for a Being Who knew what was to come? The answer is the same for them as it is for Tucker. The Jewish people have returned and just like it was the land which had remained desolate while her people were chased away, it is the very same land that has responded to their return. As Ezekiel promised, it is the land that will yield its produce and bear fruit for her people. The Miracle of the state of Israel is surely frustrating to the likes of Carlson and others in the intellectually dishonest crowd, but for those willing to open their eyes and see, the prophets Ezekiel and Amos among others told the world this was going to happen when Abraham’s descendants finally returned home. Forget DNA and anything else, the actual witness to the lineage of the Jews inhabiting the land of Israel today, is the land itself. Just as it laid barren for centuries while her people were dispersed, so too it has blossomed and responded to the true indigenous inhabitants of the land assured to the bible believing world by the Creator of all things.

There is much more to dissect of this interview and I will do so over the coming days. I wanted to thank Ambassador Huckabee for doing the right thing and not giving in to the nonsense. Those of us living in this Holy Land appreciate you and your efforts on our behalf. Next time though, give me a call. I’ll be glad to help you vanquish the useful idiots who attempt, every single day, to negate our very existence.

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