All Aboard the Secular Zion Train

On February 21, 2026, Tucker Carlson flew to Israel to interview Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel, ordained Baptist minister, and former Governor of Arkansas. The interview, posted to Carlson’s YouTube channel, ran nearly three hours. Most of it was unremarkable—the kind of friendly ideological sparring that constitutes content in the post-cable media universe. But then Carlson, an unlikely thorn in the side of the pro-Israel establishment, pinned his guest down. He opened the Book of Genesis. He read aloud. He asked a question that nobody in official Washington ever quite gets around to asking.

“So, God gave that land to his people, the Jews, or he didn’t,” Carlson said. “You’re saying he did. What does that mean? Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you’re appealing to Genesis. You’re saying that’s the original deed?”

Huckabee paused. Then: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

The territory in question, per Genesis 15:18 — land stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates—encompasses what Carlson rightly described as “basically the entire Middle East”: large portions of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait. Huckabee later walked it back as “somewhat hyperbolic,” insisting Israel has no current intention of territorial conquest. But the clip was already flying around the world. Arab governments from Cairo to Amman to Riyadh responded with fury. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a longtime proponent of Greater Israel, appeared to welcome the remarks.

The confrontation did not end there. Later in the same interview, Carlson pushed further. How do we even know, he asked, that the ancestors of Benjamin Netanyahu—whose family came from Eastern Europe—ever lived in the land whose divine inheritance they now claim? “How do we know that Bibi, specifically Bibi’s ancestors, ever lived here?” Huckabee shot back, “Maybe I could ask you, how do we know they didn’t?” Carlson dropped the smile. “It’s on the basis of the claim that they did that all kinds of things happen. People are displaced. There’s a money flow. I mean, it’s a big question. A lot hangs on this.”

Indeed it does. And it is the question this essay means to examine—not merely Huckabee’s particular brand of theological maximalism, but the entire contested terrain of Zionism as concept, metaphor, and political inheritance. I want to ride the Zion Train from its deepest roots to its most dangerous contemporary expression. But I want to be clear about which train I’m boarding: not the one driven by a biblical deed, but the secular-progressive Choo Choo—the one that takes its cue from liberation rather than scripture.

I am an atheist. I find myself, on this particular question, in the unlikely company of Tucker Carlson—not ideologically, let me be absolutely clear, but epistemologically. The idea that a 3,000-year-old text constitutes a legally and morally binding deed to twenty-first-century territory is hermeneutical madness with a body count. When a sitting United States Ambassador says it would be “fine” if Israel absorbed the entire Middle East because Genesis says so, we have left the realm of policy and entered the realm of apocalyptic real estate speculation. And we have done so at precisely the moment when American military assets are massing in the region and the United States and Israel have commenced a war against Iran.

But Huckabee’s Zionism is only one station on the line. To understand what’s at stake, we need to go back to the beginning—or at least to several different beginnings.

Three Stations on the Zion Line

The word “Zion” is ancient Hebrew, a name for Jerusalem and the hill on which the Temple stood. But like most words that survive long enough, it has accumulated meanings far beyond its etymology. By the time it reached the twentieth century, it had split into at least three distinct and politically irreconcilable concepts—three trains running on very different tracks, all claiming the same departure platform.

The first train is Bob Marley’s. In Rastafarian theology, Zion is not a place on a map—it is a condition of liberation. It is the spiritual destination of a people cast into Babylon, the Rastafarian name for the entire apparatus of colonial oppression: the slaveholder, the plantation system, the Western metropole, and the mental prison of internalized subjugation. Marcus Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement gave this theology its political skeleton, and Marley’s music gave it its nervous system. When Marley sang “Zion Train,” he was not issuing a land claim or invoking a divine deed. He was singing about the collective spiritual journey of the African diaspora toward wholeness, dignity, and return—to a self and agency (in the parlance of our times). There is no state apparatus in Marley’s Zion. No tanks. And no ambassador. Just the train and the invitation to board it.

The second train belongs to Louis Brandeis. Before he became the first Jewish Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Brandeis was one of America’s most prominent progressive lawyers—the “people’s attorney,” champion of workers and small businesses against concentrated corporate power. He came to Zionism late in life, and he came to it—characteristically—through Americanism. “My approach to Zionism was through Americanism,” he wrote. He saw in the aspiration for a Jewish homeland not a divine mandate but a democratic one: the universal right of a people to self-determination, to a place where they could govern themselves, develop their culture, and live free of the persecution that had defined Jewish existence in Europe for centuries.

Brandeis is progressive and legible throughout. His Zionism was inseparable from his broader commitments: to democracy, to labor rights, to the rule of law, and to the proposition—stated with characteristic bluntness—that “we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” His most famous aphorism—”sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”—was an argument for transparency, accountability, and the exposure of power to public scrutiny. Brandeis University, the nonsectarian institution founded in 1948 in his honor and his spirit, carries that legacy: open to all, committed to social justice, a secular institution wearing a Jewish name. He also warned, with eerie prescience, that “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” He might have been describing Huckabee directly.

The third train is Huckabee’s. This is biblical literalism deployed as geopolitics. Here, Zion is neither a metaphor for liberation nor a democratic aspiration grounded in universal rights. It is a property deed, witnessed by God, recorded in Genesis, and apparently enforceable by the United States military. Christian Zionism—the evangelical theology that underpins Huckabee’s worldview—holds that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. In this framework, supporting Israeli territorial expansion is not merely foreign policy. It is an eschatological obligation. The dispossession of Palestinians is a divine plan to be facilitated.

These three trains share a platform and a name. They share almost nothing else.

The Shared Grammar of Exile

What unites them, at the deepest level, is not theology but anthropology. The longing for Zion—for a return, a home, or somewhere else that is also an origin—is not a uniquely Jewish narrative. It is one of the oldest stories the human species tells itself. The Abrahamic faiths share it. The African diaspora shares it. Every people that has been scattered, colonized, enslaved, or displaced has reached for some version of it: the promised land, the ancestral homeland, the garden before the fall.

Even Eden itself — the mythological ur-home of all humanity in the Abrahamic tradition—is more contested than the Sunday school version admits. The traditional location of the Garden of Eden, based on the rivers named in Genesis, places it somewhere in Mesopotamia—conveniently within the very territory that Huckabee declared it would be “fine” for Israel to absorb. But recent scientific speculation, drawing on genetic and geographical evidence, has proposed an alternative: that the cradle of anatomically modern humans was not the Middle East at all, but sub-Saharan Africa—somewhere in the region of present-day Botswana or the Okavango Delta. The Zion the scripture-miners are fighting over may not even be the original turf. The deed may be for the wrong house.

This issue fundamentally undermines the intellectual viability of biblical literalism as a political program; it is more than a mere geographical quibble. The texts are ancient, composite, multiply authored, and translated through chains of hands across millennia. They encode the cosmological anxieties and territorial ambitions of Iron Age peoples in the Eastern Mediterranean. To treat them as legally binding real estate documents—superseding international law, moral philosophy, and the living claims of millions of people who actually reside on the land in question—is not faith. It is the weaponization of nostalgia.

But here is the paradox: the longing itself—the ache for Zion, the dream of return, the need for a home that loves you back—is real. Brandeis understood this. Marley understood this. Even Garvey, whose back-to-Africa movement was itself a kind of secular Zionism, understood this. The question is never whether the longing is legitimate. It always is. The question is what political form it takes and whether that form produces liberation or produces fresh dispossession.

Abbie Hoffman and the Choice

I want to bring in a witness whose presence at this particular table might seem unlikely but is, I think, essential: Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie, the clown-prince of the American New Left, the man who threw dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and ran a pig for President in 1968. Hoffman was Jewish. Abbie Hoffman was deeply and constitutively Jewish, but his connection to the Jewish tradition of rebellion was more significant than his religious affiliation.

“Judaism has never been so much a religion to me as a noble history and a cluster of stereotypes,” he said. Jews, especially first-born male Jews, must quickly make a significant choice in life: whether to pursue wealth or take risks. Wiseguys who go around saying things like ‘Workers of the world unite’ obviously choose to go for broke. It’s the greatest Jewish tradition.”

Hoffman also took a bold stance on Zionism, a decision that ultimately cost him. At the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, he declared, “I am very pro-Jewish, but anti-Zionism.” Later, in private letters to his wife, Anita, he was more visceral: “I am violently anti-Israel and no longer believe they have a right to exist. During the past ten years they have forfeited any right they might have ‘earned.’ Zionism was the cause of [the Yom Kippur War of October 1973].” These are not positions I would express in precisely that form today—the question of Israel’s right to exist is more complex than Abbie’s fury allows for—but the animating impulse is recognizable and important. Hoffman, raised in the Reform Jewish tradition in Worcester, Massachusetts, looked at what Zionism had become by the early 1970s and saw a movement that had inverted the values he understood as fundamentally Jewish: solidarity with the oppressed, suspicion of state power, and the refusal to become what had been done to you.

He was not alone. From 1967 onward, the American New Left, with a disproportionate Jewish membership, experienced bitter division over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Students for a Democratic Society published pamphlets comparing Zionism’s dispossession of Palestinians to what white settlers had done to indigenous North America. Jerry Rubin, Hoffman’s fellow Yippie, cheered for Arafat at Hebrew Union College. Irving Howe lamented Jewish youth who “hate democratic Israel and celebrate the Egyptian dictatorship.” The American Jewish left suffered a deep-rooted fracture, which has yet to fully heal.

Abbie Hoffman understood what Brandeis had also understood, though from a very different political vantage point: that the same tradition which produced the prophetic demand for justice—the tradition of speaking truth to power, of siding with the widow and the orphan and the stranger at the gate—was absolutely incompatible with a nationalism that displaced the stranger and made the widow. Brandeis had warned that democracy and concentrated power cannot coexist. Hoffman saw that a Zionism that became a colonizing force had forfeited its claim to the progressive tradition it purported to inherit.

Between Brandeis and Hoffman, you have the essential argument of the secular-progressive Jewish conscience on this question: Is Zionism consistent with democracy and universal human rights, or has it become their negation? Brandeis thought it could be consistent in 1917 if it was based on liberty, limited by democratic norms, and didn’t require dispossessing another people. By the 1970s, Hoffman believed a two-state solution was impossible given the occupation, settlements, and IDF’s systematic brutalization of Palestinian life.

Today, in 2026, with a sitting U.S. Ambassador declaring it would be “fine” for Israel to take the entire Middle East, with American warships in the Persian Gulf, with the Gaza Strip having endured over two years of devastation, and with the Biden and Trump administrations both having provided military and diplomatic cover for what multiple international courts have described in terms of possible genocide and starvation as a weapon of war—the tension Brandeis and Hoffman represent has become a civilizational question.

The Secular-Progressive Choo Choo

I am an atheist. I have no stake in which version of the covenant is theologically correct or whether any covenant ever existed. What I have a stake in is the political consequences of treating mythological texts as operational military and territorial doctrine in the twenty-first century.

Carlson’s challenge to Huckabee—whatever one thinks of Carlson’s broader politics, and there is much to think ill of, including his history of racism and his embrace of the Great Replacement Theory—was in this narrow respect correct and important. The appeal to scripture as a territorial deed is anachronistic, logically circular, and morally catastrophic. It is, as Carlson put it, using “the original deed” to justify the displacement of living people. The fact that Carlson arrives at this critique from a place of MAGA nationalism and the fact that I arrive at it from secular progressive humanism does not make us allies. But it does reveal something about how extreme the biblical-literalist position actually is: it has managed to alienate people across an almost comically wide ideological spectrum.

So what does the secular-progressive Zion Train look like? What is Zion without God, without the deed, without the chosen-people framework—but also without Abbie’s rage, which, however understandable, forecloses rather than opens?

It looks like Brandeis at his most lucid: the proposition that every people has the right to self-determination, to cultural continuity, and to a home that is not premised on the elimination or subjugation of another people. It looks like Marley’s train, which carries not a nation but a principle: the liberation of the colonized, the return of the dispossessed to their full humanity. It looks like a political imaginary in which Israeli Security and Palestinian rights are interdependent, not in zero-sum competition. No lasting security is built on another people’s dispossession. History has never once suggested otherwise.

The secular-progressive Zion Train does not run on scripture. It runs on the proposition that human dignity is non-negotiable and non-selective—that it applies to Jewish children in Sderot and Palestinian children in Rafah, to Yazidi women in Iraq and to Uyghurs in Xinjiang, to the homeless veteran in Chicago and to the climate refugee crossing the Mediterranean. It runs on Brandeis’s insistence that sunlight—transparency, accountability, the relentless exposure of power to public scrutiny—is the only disinfectant that actually works. It runs on Abbie Hoffman’s willingness to go for broke rather than go for the money—to refuse the comfort of tribal loyalty when that loyalty requires moral bankruptcy.

All aboard, then. But let’s be honest about which Zion we’re heading for.

Who Drives the Train?

We are living through a moment when the third train—Huckabee’s train, the biblical-deed train, the Greater Israel train—has seized the controls and is accelerating toward a destination that looks increasingly like regional war. The United States Ambassador to America’s closest ally in the Middle East has said, on camera, to an audience of millions, that it would be perfectly acceptable for Israel to absorb the entire region from the Nile to the Euphrates. This is not a fringe position, muttered in a church basement. This is official American foreign policy adjacency, spoken by a man confirmed by the United States Senate.

And the countries in that region—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab states—noticed the clip on WhatsApp and responded with “fury,” as the news reports put it. My Zion Train thought experiment is not merely theoretical for them. They are the station Huckabee’s train is rolling toward.

Brandeis warned us about men of zeal. Hoffman warned us about the consequences of a Jewish nationalism that forgot what it was supposed to be liberating people from. Marley sang about Babylon—the system of oppression—and he sang about it with the specific understanding that Babylon has a tendency to wear many faces. It wore the face of the British Empire in Jamaica. It reflects the face of the carceral state in America. In 2026, it also wears the face of a theology that turns a people’s ancient longing into a license for conquest.

The question Carlson accidentally opened—by going to Israel, by sitting across from Huckabee and reading Genesis aloud and asking “is this the original deed?”—is not a question that can be answered by theology. It can only be answered by politics and the moral commitments that it either reflects or betrays. The deed argument fails not because Genesis is wrong about God’s intentions, but because the jurisdiction of ancient texts does not extend to living people. Every human being has the right to remain unaffected by a claim they do not share. Because the ground beneath your feet is not transferable by covenant—not by any covenant with any God, real or imagined.

Abbie Hoffman understood that the greatest Jewish tradition is not loyalty to the state. The rebel, the questioner, and the one who risks it all for money must trade their conscience. Louis Brandeis understood that democracy—real democracy, not ceremonial democracy—is incompatible with the concentration of power in the hands of the few, whether that few is a financial oligarchy or a theologically anointed ethnostate. Bob Marley understood that Zion is not a place you conquer. It is a condition you arrive at when you stop being what Babylon made you.

I’ll take the secular-progressive Choo Choo. It’s running late, it’s underfunded, and the track ahead is full of obstacles. But it’s the only train on the line that’s actually going somewhere worthwhile.

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