Israel sparks a civil war within the MAGA movement

With its leader, Donald Trump, back in the White House and the Republican Party controlling Congress, this was destined to be the year of MAGA’s expansion. And the assassination of one of its leading figures, Charlie Kirk, marked a turning point: the definitive moment of unity for the heterodox coalition that operates under the umbrella of the slogan Make America Great Again.

And yet, the movement is bidding farewell to 2025 more divided and conflicted than ever, thanks to the Pandora’s box that Kirk’s death opened in September around U.S. support for Israel in its brutal war in Gaza and the limits of free speech when it collides with antisemitism.

The dispute dominated AmericaFest, the major festival of conservative ideas that Kirk used to organize every December in Phoenix, Arizona. Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the youth proselytizing organization he founded, continues without him and managed to bring together some 30,000 people in his memory. But it was not entirely a celebration: on stage, some of the biggest influencers of the U.S. far right became entangled in those quarrels to the point of outright insults.

They were not invited to the conference, but the shadow of two podcasters — the antisemite and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes and the champion of conspiracy theories Candace Owens — hovered over the gathering. Owens has destabilized the old MAGA guard with her falsehoods. And the friendly interview that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson conducted with Fuentes last October revealed the split in the American right’s long-standing consensus that the United States is Israel’s unbreakable ally — one of the few foreign-policy traditions of Washington that Trump has honored in his first 11 months back in power, and one that has defined the Republican Party for decades.

That conversation, and Carlson’s attacks on “Zionist Christians,” sparked the ire of Ben Shapiro, the Orthodox Jewish founder of the MAGA media company The Daily Wire. On the opening day of AmericaFest, Shapiro went after Carlson (whose interview he described as an “act of moral imbecility”), Steve Bannon (whom he called “Jeffrey Epstein’s PR man,” following revelations about the relationship between the two that have emerged from the papers of the convicted pedophile), and another former Fox News employee, Megyn Kelly, for her refusal to criticize Owens and Fuentes.

All of them returned the favors when it was their turn to take the microphone. If a movement is defined almost more by what it attacks than by what it defends, it became clear on that Phoenix stage that its adversaries (the Democrats, the so-called “woke” agenda, globalism) are no longer what they once were.

Shapiro also had words for Owens, who is notorious for using her show — which has 5.7 million subscribers on YouTube — to spread conspiracy theories. She has escalated the misinformation since Kirk’s death; he was her friend and employer at TPUSA (Shapiro also employed her). She claims that Brigitte Macron, the wife of Emmanuel Macron, is a man (a hoax that has earned her a lawsuit from the French president and first lady), and that Kirk — who was shot dead in front of thousands of people attending one of his public debate events at the University of Utah — was killed by a conspiracy hatched by the Israeli, French, and Egyptian intelligence services. She further claims that they, along with Tyler Robinson, the man whom the FBI says single-handedly planned the murder and pulled the trigger, had inside help from TPUSA employees.

According to that theory, the plot was intended to prevent what was about to happen: Kirk’s public expression of a change of heart on Palestine and the potential image crisis for Israel, given the activist’s sway over young conservatives, especially men. If Trump improved his approval ratings among that demographic last year, it was thanks to Kirk’s work both on his podcasts and on the campus tours in which he challenged the progressive ideas of the university students he debated.

To support that theory, Owens published messages from Kirk in a group chat in which he complained about the pressure he was receiving from an influential TPUSA donor for refusing to distance himself from Carlson, who has become one of the fiercest critics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and who had already been accused of antisemitism and of being close to Qatar even before his interview with Fuentes. “I cannot and will be bullied like this,” Kirk wrote a couple of days before he was murdered. “[They are] leaving me no choice but to leave the pro-Israel cause.”

One of the members of that group was Pesach Wolicki, an Israeli rabbi extraordinarily well connected on the U.S. right, who explained in a videoconference conversation with EL PAÍS that Kirk opened the chat “months earlier” and that it included “nine people” to discuss issues related to Israel. Among them was a TPUSA producer who, according to Wolicki, “barely participated” and who was the one who leaked the messages to Owens.

“Charlie firmly believed that all voices should be heard, including those with whom, like Carlson, he disagreed,” explains the rabbi, who hosted the Shabbat dinner at AmericaFest. “What she didn’t mention was what came next: a Zoom call with just three of us the night before the assassination.” Kirk was looking for “arguments to answer the questions about Israel that he would be asked on the tour he was about to begin. It was by far the topic that came up most often in his debates, because anti-Israel sentiment is very strong on American college campuses. I can guarantee that he wasn’t about to change his mind,” says Wolicki.

A devout evangelical Christian, Kirk’s first posthumous book is titled Stop, in the Name of God, and is a defense of the Sabbath as “a radical act of resistance” in a “world of cell phones and constant noise.” His widow, Erika Kirk, met with Owens last week for four and a half hours to ask her to stop spreading the rumor about her husband’s death. She was unsuccessful.

A survey by the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute concluded earlier this month that 17% of the Republican Party falls into what the poll defines as “anti-Jewish Republicans.” “Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated,” the study’s authors explain.

For Wolicki, this is proof that the shift in attitudes toward Israel in the MAGA world has to do with the isolationism promoted by the movement’s main ideological glue, America First. And this is where a figure like Marjorie Taylor Greene comes into play.

From 2021 onward, Greene was one of Trump’s most loyal allies in the House of Representatives, until Trump turned against her over her insistence on the release of the Epstein files, prompting her to give up her seat, which she will no longer hold as of January 5. In July, Greene became the first Republican on Capitol Hill to describe Israel’s actions as “genocide.” She posted on X: “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel [2023, the day Hamas massacred some 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250] was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

In the cover story of the new issue of Harper’s, Andrew Cockburn, the magazine’s Washington editor, also attributes that shift in thinking to new ways information circulates. “Predictably, traditional media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN have offered sanitized reports on the slaughter [in Gaza]. But thanks to social media, it has become impossible to control the flow of information,” he writes. According to an analysis by the Pew Research Center, one-fifth of Americans get their news from TikTok and other social platforms, where, Cockburn adds, “a stream of powerful images from Gaza depicted what was really happening there.” That figure rose to 43% among those under 30.

Several months before his death, Kirk wrote a letter to Netanyahu warning him that he was “losing the information war” with American youth, including conservatives. In the letter, Kirk listed the questions he was constantly asked, including: “Why is America subsidizing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people? ” and “Why does Israel conduct ethnic cleansing?”

This last question was posed in October to Vice President J.D. Vance by an attendee at a TPUSA event. The young man also wanted to know why the United States continues to fund its ally with “several hundred billion dollars.” Vance, aware that he was treading on thin ice, responded with a defense of Trump and a theological tirade about Jews and Christians. He didn’t address the issue of “ethnic cleansing.”

In his speech last Sunday at AmericaFest, Vance reminded the audience that “”President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.” In an interview published that same day, he declared that “antisemitism and all forms of ethnic hatred have no place in the conservative movement,” but on the Phoenix festival stage he made it clear that he had no intention of “canceling” anyone over their ideas. What’s more, he avoided uttering the word everyone had on their minds: Israel.

It is unclear how long Vance will be able to maintain that neutrality. That day, he received public backing from Erika Kirk for his 2028 presidential ambitions. What is clear is that securing a truce in the latest MAGA civil war will fall to him — or to anyone else who hopes to carry on Trump’s mission once his term is over. In the meantime, and as usual, Trump loyalists are reluctant to blame him for anything.

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