There were an overwhelming number of people who felt like I didn’t lose my cool. I was able to push back on some things. He normally will give a guest like Nick Fuentes or Darryl Cooper, or some of the people that have some very strange views, or the Iranian president, or Vladimir Putin, and he’ll give them 65% of the time of his show and he’ll spend 35% asking the questions. With me, it was exactly the opposite. He talked 65% of the time and gave me about 35% of the time to respond to questions. And [he] interrupted me, I think one analyst said, like 500 times.
Did you hear from the White House? Tucker Carlson apparently met with Trump this week.
Nothing negative. I heard positive things, but nothing negative.
There was one exchange that sparked coverage. Carlson asked you if Israel was entitled, according to a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, to claim much of the modern Middle East. And your response was, “It would be fine if they took it all.” When he pressed, you said that Israel didn’t have any intentions to take over all that territory, which includes the land of many other countries. Could you tell us what happened there?
He had pressed and pressed and pressed, and he just wouldn’t let it go. And I finally, it was really tongue-in-cheek, said, “Well, they can just have it all.” And then I immediately, five times, five times said, “Tucker, they’re not trying to take over everything that is listed from the Nile to the Euphrates. They’re just not.” And made that very clear. He took an edited version of that and he left that part out. He ended his clip—that he sent to apparently every Arab nation in the world—and put it out that this was the full exchange. So therefore there was so much consternation about it.
I thought that was a very deceptively edited piece, and dishonest and disingenuous to do it that way. It would be like me saying, “I watched the hockey game between the US and Canada in the Olympics, but I didn’t watch the last 30 seconds.” So the question is, Do I really know how that hockey game went? Well, not if you edited out the last 30 seconds. And I would say that if you edited out the rest of my response, you have no idea what I really said. (Carlson declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)
There are people in the Israeli government who do want to pursue what they call Greater Israel. Would you support those efforts?
Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone—and I’m pretty close to a lot of the people by virtue of my job. I deal with ’em every day. I have honestly never heard a single person say, “Yeah, the land should be the Euphrates to the Nile.” I’ve never heard it, ever.
Another issue you debated was your claim that the IDF “goes to lengths that no other country, including ours, goes to prevent civilian casualties.” And you said that if we take the death toll numbers provided by the Gaza Health Ministry as correct, then the civilian death toll in Gaza is lower than in any urban war in modern history. What are you basing that belief on?