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The night before his assassination, Charlie Kirk and two of his producers were on Zoom getting ready to answer the questions about Israel that kept popping up on his college tour.
Kirk was frustrated that Israel figured in almost half the questions he took on tour, when “he just wanted to talk about America,” said Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, one of two staunch supporters of Israel Kirk had asked to help him prepare.
Indeed, to the increasingly anti-Israel young people he encountered online and on campuses, Kirk was a staunch defender of the Jewish state. He faced years of sometimes overtly antisemitic harassment from Nick Fuentes’ extreme-right supporters.
But to older friends of Israel, Kirk was a potential problem: He was a young man who seemed to be feeling the pull of his generation — which is, across parties, critical of Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Every time he spoke out about something he disagreed with Israel about, he would be attacked by his Jewish donors and the pro-Israel community, and it drove him crazy,” recalled Wolicki, whose Israel365 organization has sought to shape a MAGA-friendly pro-Israel politics. (Kirk, an evangelical Christian, told Megyn Kelly in August that he resented being called an antisemite when “I am learning biblical Hebrew and writing a book on the Shabbat.“)
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Kirk was trying to hold his party together. Now, in the wake of his death, the right is arguing in private and in public — on X, on podcasts, and in anonymous comments — over what Kirk really thought about Israel.
When I spoke and texted this weekend with prominent movement figures close to Kirk, I heard bitterly opposed views. Each side seemed sure the activist largely agreed with them about the war in Gaza.
The most extreme version of this debate over Kirk’s views on Israel emerged with shocking velocity after his death, in the form of groundless claims that he’d been killed by the Israelis. Those baseless allegations went so viral so fast that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on Newsmax responding to them two days after the shooting. (Netanyahu, also without evidence, blamed “radical Islamists” and “ultra-progressives” for the assassination.)
“He was, personally, extraordinarily pro-Israel but was feeling a lot of pressure from the Tucker/Vance very online right,” said one prominent conservative figure who spoke to Kirk regularly — and thought Vice President JD Vance and broadcaster Tucker Carlson were important figures in pulling Kirk toward skepticism of pro-Israel influence on US politics.
“Vance and Tucker are tight, and both were tight with Charlie. Charlie didn’t agree with Tucker on the Israel stuff, but he was a coalition builder and very political. This created a lot of crosswinds,” the figure added.
The American Conservative editor Curt Mills, a critic of Israel, said he saw Kirk’s position on the question as “confused.” At a moment when Gen Z Republicans “hate Israel,” he said, Kirk’s stance made him “the last of the millennials.”
Ben’s view
If different people got different impressions of Kirk’s views on Israel, it was for good reason.
A bereft White House official told me that Kirk functioned as something like a Republican chairman and Rush Limbaugh “rolled into one.” Clips of his speeches and debates are everywhere, but movement-building is a subtler thing, and Kirk’s public statements, friends said, often reflected attempts at intraparty diplomacy.
And one of Kirk’s preoccupations this year, in public and in private, was holding together the Republican Party on the question of Israel. “His No. 1 concern was that this was ripping the MAGA movement apart,” said Wolicki. “He was trying to hold the coalition together in many ways.”
He was, in particular, trying to keep young Republicans inside the tent, two other friends said. He followed that generational path into a flirtation with the theory, for which there is no evidence, that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad; Kirk also invited Carlson and the anti-Israel commentator Dave Smith to his annual conference.
Future historians will puzzle over why the conflict between Israel and Palestine has been the issue, above all others, to split both US political parties in the 2020s. But one thing the feuding MAGA factions agree on is that there isn’t really another prominent figure like Kirk — a big voice who was focused on smoothing over his movement’s fractures, not hashing them out in public for clout.
The only other one, in fact, is Donald Trump, who has proven — in his transactional way — a master of holding together disparate Republican factions. But so far, Trump has firmly chosen Israel’s side in the intraparty dispute. And now it’s not clear who remains to try to smooth over the generational divide, or who would even want to try.
Room for Disagreement
Some on the right don’t think pro-Israel Republicans should be so worried. “Trump stands with Israel because that’s where Republicans are — and the data proves it,” Matthew Continetti recently wrote in The Free Press. “The intra-MAGA debate is less about Israel and the Palestinians than about America’s place in the world — whether our military should continue to backstop international security.”
Notable
- Wolicki offered his reflections on Kirk on his YouTube channel.
- Last month, The American Conservative accused Kirk of subtly “blocking young MAGA conservatives from turning fully against Jerusalem.”