DNA, Sovereignty, and the Obsession With Jewish Legitimacy

In his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Tucker Carlson did not rant. He did something more subtle. He asked questions.

They sounded simple. Almost disarmingly childlike. Who really has the right to Israel? What gives Netanyahu’s family a connection to the land? What about DNA? Why is the United States so deeply invested in supporting this country?

But these were not neutral questions. They were structured questions — questions that quietly presuppose something: that Israel’s legitimacy is uniquely suspect, uniquely fragile, uniquely in need of moral justification. The tone was calm; the premise was accusatory.

I found myself laughing out loud because the questions and the narratives were instantly recognizable — as if copied from a Ziophobic playbook. I’ve answered and debunked these exact claims, along with countless variations of them, repeatedly over the past several years on social media, beneath my posts, and in the comment sections of my articles. They were, quite literally, carbon copies.

It was also evident that Mike Huckabee was, at moments, caught slightly off guard — not because the questions were brilliant, but because they were carefully framed and delivered as spontaneous innocence. There is a difference between preparing a line of prosecutorial questioning and responding to it in real time. Carlson had the luxury of performance; Huckabee was expected to deliver fully formed legal, historical, and philosophical rebuttals on demand. That asymmetry is part of the performance.

No one conducts interviews this way about Canada. Or Mexico. Or Turkey. No one asks whether the American president’s family has uninterrupted pre-Columbian ancestry. No one interrogates French sovereignty on the basis of Frankish bloodlines.

Yet when it comes to Israel, suddenly the standard changes. Suddenly sovereignty is insufficient. Suddenly genetics enters the courtroom.

So let’s apply this standard honestly.

What gives Tucker Carlson the right to live in the United States? Does he possess Native American DNA? Can he trace his lineage to tribes that inhabited the continent before European settlement? If not, should his citizenship be reconsidered? Should millions of Americans be told their presence is morally provisional?

Of course not. The very suggestion sounds absurd — because modern states do not derive legitimacy from DNA testing. The United States derives its authority from sovereignty: a constitutional order, defined borders, laws governing citizenship and naturalization — and, above all, the ability to defend itself. That is how political reality works in the modern world.

Now apply the same principle to Israel.

Israel is a sovereign state. It has defined institutions, a functioning legal system, recognized borders, a military, and a citizenry. It determines who becomes a citizen under its own laws — just as the United States does. If Israel grants citizenship to Jews under its Law of Return, that is not mystical theology. It is not racial engineering. It is a sovereign decision made by a sovereign state.

There is no structural difference.

The genealogical interrogation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s family — were they “really” from there? — collapses under the same scrutiny. Modern states are not ancestry clubs. Italy does not require citizens to prove descent from Roman senators. Greece does not DNA-test citizens against classical Athenians. The United States does not demand proof of lineage to Plymouth Rock. Political legitimacy does not flow through uninterrupted bloodlines; it flows through law and sovereignty.

The fact that Israel alone is subjected to genetic cross-examination is not an accident. It reveals the asymmetry at the heart of the argument.

And then there is the invocation of “international law,” spoken of as though it were a functioning global constitution. This, too, is theater. International law is not domestic law. There is no global legislature, no global police force, no enforcement authority above sovereign states. There are treaties, norms, power arrangements, and alliances — followed when convenient, ignored when necessary, reinterpreted when politically expedient.

The United States does this. China does this. France does this. Every state does this.

To present Israel as uniquely illegitimate under a supposedly binding global code misunderstands — or deliberately misrepresents — how international politics actually works. Sovereign states operate in a system of power, not in a classroom model of universal compliance.

But beneath the legalistic language lies something deeper. For centuries, supersessionist doctrines claimed that the Jewish covenant was replaced — inherited by others, fulfilled elsewhere, spiritually expired. The Jewish people were supposed to dissolve into history, to become a theological preface rather than an ongoing subject.

When that worldview secularizes, it takes a political form. It asks: aren’t you finished? Didn’t history move on? Didn’t someone else inherit this?

The continued existence of a sovereign Jewish state is an affront to replacement narratives. It declares continuity. It asserts that Jewish identity was not canceled, not transferred, not dissolved. That continuity disrupts stories that require Jewish disappearance to remain coherent.

Whether Tucker Carlson consciously operates from that metaphysical root is secondary. The structure of his questioning mirrors it. Israel must justify its survival. Jewish presence must be proven. Sovereignty must be earned retroactively.

Meanwhile, no one demands that standard elsewhere.

In an era when media figures routinely platform representatives of regimes openly hostile to America and Israel, such framing deserves careful scrutiny.

As for the claim that America’s relationship with Israel is “toxic,” Americans are perfectly capable of debating foreign policy. The alliance between the United States and Israel is not mystical dependency; it is strategic alignment — intelligence cooperation, military collaboration, technological exchange, and shared democratic infrastructure in a volatile region.

To suggest that American support exists only because Americans are manipulated implies something far more insulting to the American electorate than to Israel. It suggests that Americans cannot choose alliances rationally — that they are coerced, deceived, or controlled whenever Jewish interests are involved.

That insinuation has a history. It is not an honorable one.

The simple truth is this: the right of Israelis to live in Israel comes from Israeli sovereignty. The right of Americans to live in America comes from American sovereignty. Citizenship is a legal status, not a genetic measurement.

If the standard is universal, Israel stands on the same ground as every other modern state.

If the standard is applied only to Jews, it is prejudice disguised as inquiry.

Tucker Carlson is free to ask his loaded questions.

Israel is free to exist without answering them.

And that — whether critics approve or not — is what sovereignty means.

The Most Misunderstood Law in the World

The Most Misunderstood Law in the World

/*! This file is auto-generated */!function(d,l){"use strict";l.querySelector&&d.addEventListener&&"undefined"!=typeof URL&&(d.wp=d.wp||{},d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage||(d.wp.receiveEmbedMessage=function(e){var t=e.data;if((t||t.secret||t.message||t.value)&&!/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/.test(t.secret)){for(var s,r,n,a=l.querySelectorAll('iframe[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),o=l.querySelectorAll('blockquote[data-secret="'+t.secret+'"]'),c=new RegExp("^https?:$","i"),i=0;i

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)