Donald Trump does not take orders from anyone. Not from his own cabinet, not from his closest advisors, not from the Republican Party that spent years trying to stop him. The man who defied every political institution in America, rewrote the rules of modern politics, and bent Washington to his will is not, by any reasonable assessment, someone who takes instructions from a foreign government.
Yet Tucker Carlson insists otherwise. Trump, Tucker says, is a “hostage” under Netanyahu’s “total control,” the relationship between America and Israel nothing less than “slavery.” Candace Owens agrees: America is “an occupied nation.” So does CAIR, the jihadist front group whose leaders describe Congress and the White House as “Israeli-occupied territories.” Across social media the memes pile up: “United States of Israel,” “MIGA, Make Israel Great Again,” Netanyahu photoshopped behind the Oval Office desk.
On at least one thing, the woke right and Islamist left agree: Israel pulls the strings in America.
The idea that tiny Israel, a country of ten million people with a GDP smaller than the state of Texas, is secretly pulling the strings of the most powerful nation in human history is not serious geopolitics and doesn’t require a serious response.
That said, the accusation is not just false. It is precisely, almost perfectly, backwards. To see why, we need to go to the last place Tucker and Candace would ever think to look: a twelfth-century Jewish legal code.
The Bible is explicit: an object used for idol worship is forbidden:
Maimonides, in his great legal work known as Mishneh Torah, asks a follow-up question: can such an object ever become permitted?
His answer is fascinating. Even a broken or discarded piece of an idol “is forbidden to benefit from… the prohibition against benefiting from it remains until one knows that the gentiles who worshipped it, nullified it.” And then the ruling: “It is permitted to benefit from a false deity belonging to a gentile whose deification was nullified by gentiles… If their deification was nullified, they are permitted.”
In other words, an idol owned by a gentile becomes permitted only when the gentile himself renounces its status as a deity. A Jew cannot perform that nullification. Even if a Jew smashes the idol to pieces, it remains forbidden under Jewish law. The inner act of renunciation must come from the one who worshipped it. Only when the worshipper himself recognizes his mistake and rejects his belief in the idol does it become permissible for use.
This is not a technicality buried in an obscure legal code. Maimonides’ ruling contains a critical theological point. Transformation cannot be imposed from the outside. It cannot be forced, legislated, or controlled. The spiritual awakening of the nations must come from within the nations themselves. God designed it that way deliberately. He could compel the nations to abandon their idols in an instant, yet He does not, because coerced transformation is not transformation at all. And if God Himself will not force it, Israel certainly cannot. A Jew smashing the idol changes nothing essential. The gentile renouncing it changes everything.
Light illuminates; it does not coerce. You cannot force someone to see by shining a light in their eyes. You place the light, you build the fire, and those with eyes to see will come of their own volition. God charged Israel at Sinai to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”
Not a conquering empire. A model society, one whose justice, wisdom, and closeness to God would draw the nations toward the light on their own terms, in their own time, by their own choice.
And when they come, they come on their own. Nobody forced the Queen of Sheba to travel to Jerusalem. She heard about Solomon’s wisdom, his justice, his kingdom, and she made the journey herself. She saw the order of his court, the justice of his laws, the glory of his Temple, and she declared:
That is Israel’s model: not occupation, but admiration; not control, but inspiration. As I argue in Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption, Israel’s mission is to build a holy society in the land God promised, and let the example speak for itself.
Look at the Christian Zionist movement. Tens of millions of Americans who love Israel, pray for Israel, and support Israel, not because AIPAC gave them marching orders, not because Netanyahu picked up the phone, but because they read the Bible, watched Israel survive against impossible odds, and something moved inside them. They came to Israel the way the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon. No one told them to come. No one controlled them. They came because the light was real.
This is what Tucker and Candace cannot process. They look at tens of millions of Americans standing voluntarily and enthusiastically with the Jewish state, and their only explanation is control, manipulation, puppet masters pulling strings. It never occurs to them that people might simply choose to stand with Israel. That is or la’goyim, a “light unto the nations,” working exactly as God intended.
Maimonides ruled that smashing an idol changes nothing. The idol is only truly destroyed when the person who worshipped it renounces it from within. That is not a technicality. That single ruling contains the entire biblical vision for how we will bring the nations to God. Tucker and Candace think Israel pulls the strings, but Maimonides knew the truth: Israel cannot choose for the nations. It can only light the way.
