Tucker Carlson’s interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee seemed to get off to a rough start before the commentator had even touched down in Israel, when it became known that Carlson would be conducting the interview from Ben Gurion Airport without plans to leave the complex to engage with the country — about which he spends significant airtime discussing — itself.

The troubles began before the interview aired,with Carlson alleging on social media that the passports belonging to his team members had been taken by Israeli security and that the group had been interrogated at the airport. But Carlson flew into Ben Gurion’s VIP Fattal Terminal, where passports are taken by airport officials to be expedited through a special processing service that avoids the immigration lines at Ben Gurion’s regular terminal. Questioning, as anyone who has flown into or out of Israel knows, is standard procedure and has been for decades.

But it was the release of the interview — nearly three hours long — that caused the most issue for Carlson. The initially released edition of the podcast included comments from Carlson to Huckabee alleging that Israeli President Isaac Herzog had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. “The current president of Israel, whom I know you know, apparently was at ‘Pedo Island,” Carlson claimed. “That’s what it says.”

That was, in fact, *not* what it — it being the Epstein files released earlier this month — said. Carlson appeared to be referencing an email in the trove of documents that referenced “Herzog,” despite no actual linkage between the Israeli president and the disgraced financier.

The outcry, as well as a letter from Herzog’s team and a statement from Huckabee, prompted a swift apology from Carlson, and a rerelease of the interview with that portion of the conversation removed. “They didn’t know each other, they never emailed with each other, never been in the same room. They had no relationship of any kind,” Carlson said. “So I just want to say clearly I’m sorry to imply that I knew something I didn’t know.”

But it was a conversation about the Bible that dominated headlines. The Tucker Carlson Network posted a partial clip on Saturday in which Carlson spoke at length about a passage in Genesis in which God tells Abraham, “to your descendants I will give this land, from the River of Egypt to the great river Euphrates,” then asking Huckabee if he believes that the Jewish people therefore have the right to the land that includes modern-day Jordan and parts of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee said before the video cuts off mid-sentence. The rest of the sentence that was omitted from the clip includes Huckabee saying, “But I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today,” adding “they” — meaning Israel — “don’t want to take it over; they’re not asking to take it over.” 

Huckabee continued: “It was somewhat of a hyperbolic statement if that’s what you feel like we’re talking about, but it isn’t. We’re talking about this land that Israel, the State of Israel, now lives in and wants to have peace in. They’re not trying to take over Jordan … Syria, Iraq or anywhere else, but they do want to protect their people.” 

“Huckabee’s Israel land remarks condemned as ‘dangerous and inflammatory’” read the headline from The Guardian. The Hill’s headline was similar: “Huckabee claims it would be ‘fine’ if Israel took all of Middle East.” NBC News went with “Outcry after Ambassador Mike Huckabee suggests Israel has God-given right to Middle East land,” while Axios headlined its story, “Israel has biblical right to the Middle East, Huckabee tells Carlson.”

The cavalcade of stories framing Huckabee as supporting an imagined Israeli territorial conquest of the Middle East prompted a response from a group of Arab and Muslim states and multinational organizations, led by Saudi Arabia, condemning the comments. Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — all of whom have peace agreements with Israel — signed onto the statement.

The conversation and the resulting diplomatic fallout is not happening in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Washington and Tehran as the U.S. pours military assets into the region in anticipation of a possible strike on Iran. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Arab leaders have made calls to their American counterparts to complain about Huckabee’s comments, “[f]urther complicating any final decision on military strikes.”

It’s far from the first time that inaccurate media reports have impacted diplomatic efforts. In October 2023, a trip to Jordan by then-President Joe Biden, weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks, was called off by King Abdullah II amid the uproar over what mainstream outlets from CNN to the BBC, citing Hamas officials, reported was an Israeli strike on Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital. It was quickly revealed through intercepted calls that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had misfired and hit the hospital complex, though not quickly enough to catch up with the lie that had surged around the world and into the phones and computers of millions of people.

Carlson faced backlash for his handling of the interview from former supporters, including Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), who said he was “appalled” watching the interview, citing a previous interview with far-right conspiracy theorist Nick Fuentes in which Carlson “gave ample platform and time to Nick Fuentes to share his anti-Semitic vitriol, but constantly interrupted, was impatient, disingenuous, argumentative and disrespectful to Huckabee. Ambassador Huckabee was nothing but gracious and kind.”

Carlson, Stutzman said, “is intentionally divisive with an obvious anti-modern Israel agenda when it comes to the Bible, Christianity and the deep roots of America‘s friendship with the Jewish people.”

While Carlson faced backlash from some on the right, he was met with praise by elements of the far left. Mehdi Hassan, who admitted that he is “not a fan of Tucker Carlson,” said that “as an interviewer, Carlson actually, brilliantly, asks follow-up questions, and keeps going, in a way that pretty much no US TV interviewer has done with pro-Israel guests since Oct 7.”