Tucker Carlson went looking for an Israeli to hold up as proof of the country's cruelty. He found Moshe Feiglin, and Feiglin has now answered him.
It started when Carlson played his audience a clip from an interview with Feiglin, the chairman of the Zehut party. In it, Feiglin argued that Israel should have answered the October 7 massacre the way the United States answered Japan in 1945, and that the world would have stood with Israel if it had.
The interviewer asked about Gaza's children and babies. Feiglin said that morally, that was still what should have been done. He added that as a Jew with a soft heart, he would have opened the borders and let everyone leave, as long as no one stayed.
Carlson told his viewers that Feiglin was a politician running for office and part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. He then boiled the remarks down to a single charge: that Feiglin thinks killing babies is moral.
One of those claims is plainly wrong. Feiglin has not sat in the Knesset since 2015, and Zehut has never won a seat. He speaks for himself, not for the government.
Feiglin replied in a video addressed to Carlson by name, and he went straight for the history. He asked what standing an American has to preach, when his country burned most of Japan's cities and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He raised Britain's bombing of German cities too.
He then drew the distinction he sees. No German soldier crossed the English Channel to murder babies and rape their mothers, he said, and no Japanese soldier did that in an American city. Israel, on October 7, faced exactly that.
The Jewish people, Feiglin said, gave the world morality with the Ten Commandments, and do not need lessons in it from Carlson.
He did not back down from the original remark. Destroying Gaza after October 7 would have been the moral response, he said. But he was clear that he is not calling for that now. Today, he said, Israel should do what the American president himself first proposed: let Gaza's residents leave.
What comes after, in his view, is Jewish resettlement. Feiglin called Gaza part of the Land of Israel, given to the Jewish people by God, and said that rebuilding Jewish communities there is the only real answer to October 7 and the only path to victory and peace.
He ended by turning Carlson's accusation around. He is the one speaking in the name of morality, Feiglin said, and Carlson is in no position to judge anyone. "You know nothing about morality."
