Victor Davis Hanson responds to Tucker Carlson’s claims that Israel offers little strategic value to the United States, laying out Israel’s cultural importance, democratic legitimacy, military cooperation, and technological innovation—and why America benefits directly on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Victor, I’m looking at an X post today and it’s posted by someone, Open Source Intel. There‘s a link in here to a video of Tucker Carlson giving an interview, which I watched. It’s a few minutes long, but here’s the synopsis of it.
He’s in Qatar. I’m going to call it “Gutter.”
He questions why the United States prioritizes Israel over Gulf States such as Qatar, arguing that the strategic value is one-sided. He, Tucker, said Israel is, quote, “a completely insignificant country,” end quote, with no resources, 9 million people. Adding that, quote, “The only reason it has any significance is because we provide a security guarantee.”
Carlson added, “Do we have to defend Israel?” and claimed there is, quote, “no strategic interests in Israel for the United States,” saying, “What are we getting out of this? Nothing. It’s only costs.”
By contrast, he argued the Gulf States matter far more, saying, quote, “The six GCC nations, there are very obvious benefits to the United States,” and he described those ties as, quote, “much more important than the relationship with Israel.” Infinitely more important, he concluded that Qatar’s relationship with the U.S. is so much more important than with Israel.
Man, oh, man, Victor, your thoughts.
Victor Davis Hanson: I would like to say it pains me to say this, but the Tucker that is talking is not the one that I had a seven-to-eight-year relationship every Monday after the monologue. But to be frank, everything he just said is demonstrably untrue.
It’s not an insignificant country. Let me not just say platitudes but let me be precise and offer examples and data.
First of all, Israel is the home of half of the Judeo-Christian, and you can argue the whole home of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s the protector of Jerusalem. Does Tucker really believe that Jerusalem in the hands of the Jordanians was better than under the Israelis? Does he really believe that prior to the existence of Israel, the Middle East was a better place? So, it’s got historical and cultural value.
No. 2, when he says it doesn’t have resources: It’s completely self-sufficient in fossil fuels. It is a net exporter of natural gas. It will be working with the Cypriots and the Greeks to tap offshore Mediterranean natural gas, which will be sent to Europe if Turkey doesn’t interfere.
He’s talking about Qatar, which is an autocracy. And I have always said that there was no strategic point in demonizing Saudi Arabia in the way that Joe Biden did. Said it was a rogue nation, then he turned around and begged it to pump oil.
Tucker, there’s not one constitutional government there. When you say they have three million people in Qatar, there’s only about 20 % are citizens. The rest are helots. That is, they are laborers with no civil rights.
They don’t have the civil rights that Arabs do inside Israel, which are full citizens. They don’t vote on any legislation in Qatar. Nobody votes on it. But in Israel, Arabs vote on their own government. And they have Arab representatives throughout the Israeli bureaucracy and throughout the Knesset.
That was wrong.
When he said it’s insignificant, we don’t get anything out of it: It has 12 Nobel Prize winners. And if you look at 11 million people, it’s pretty much the highest per capita Nobel Prize winners.
And they have given us everything from flash drives to drip irrigation.
I’ll give you an example, Tucker. I came home in 1980 from graduate school, and we had 20 acres of sandy vineyard that was uphill almost. You could not irrigate it, furrow. My grandfather almost had a heart attack.
And then I came home, and one day my brother was there, my twin brother, and he had this curious little black tubing. And he was with an Israeli Dutch engineer who was unraveling it. And I said, “What in the world is that?” And he said, “It’s called drip irrigation.” I said, “What?”
And he said, “Yeah, we’re going to have high-pressure blades on the pump, we’ll change them, and we’ll put some filters on it, and we’re going to send all this water uphill under enormous 60 pounds of pressure, and we’re going to have one gallon per hour emitters at every vine.”
I said, “You don’t have to do furrows, you don’t have to cut?” No. I said, ”Who thought this up?” He said the Israelis did, and then the engineer explained it to me, who was an Israeli. It was called Netafim. It had just been invented.
And that story could be replicated all through American life.
When we send over F-35s, it’s the only country in the world that makes adaptations to it to improve its efficacy. And it usually shares those completely with us.
When he said, “What do we get out of it?” Just forget Israel for a minute and ask yourself, “What was the position of the United States government toward a nuclear Iran?
I can tell you what it was. George Bush had an initiative—that Barack Obama canceled—to build a missile defense system on the request of Europe in the Czech Republic and perhaps in Poland to protect the European continent from a missile, which they now have, to reach Europe and they probably would have had a nuclear weapon with and probably within a year a miniaturized one that would fit on an intercontinental ballistic missile.
And Europe would be at the mercy of the Iranian theocracy because you know what they would do. Every five minutes they would say the, “We want the 72 virgins, you love life, we love death. You’re a one bomb continent, we can live with half our population,” that whole stuff that they do with Israel.
And so, when we decided, we, we, the United States decided to take that out, who did we ask permission to get into Iranian airspace, the Israelis.
There were no air defenses. We flew all the way from the United States. We were there for 28 minutes. We took them out, and we returned in complete safety. That would have been impossible without the Israelis.
And does Tucker really believe that Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis are not enemies of the United States? We don’t have any soldiers fighting Hezbollah. They blew up our Marines. They blew up our embassy. The Houthis attacked our ships. Hamas people have committed terrorist acts.
Who has deterred them? The Israelis have.
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