Netanyahu says Israel did not kill Charlie Kirk, rejecting an idea circulating on the far right

On Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video to X: a preemptive denial that Israel was involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk.

“Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, said that the bigger the lie, the faster it will spread,” the Israeli prime minister said in the video, in English. “Well, somebody’s fabricated a monstrous big lie: that Israel had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder.”

Without getting into specifics about the accusations, Netanyahu asserted that the young conservative pundit “loved Israel” and “loved the Jewish people.” Quoting from a letter he said Kirk had sent him a few months prior to his killing, Netanyahu said that advocating for Israel was one of Kirk’s “greatest joys as a Christian,” adding, “He told me, ‘The Holy Land is so important to my life, it pains me to see support for Israel slip away.’”

“Now, some are peddling these disgusting rumors, perhaps out of obsession, perhaps with Qatari funding,” Netanyahu continued. “What I do know is this: Charlie Kirk was a great man, and a great man deserves honor, not lies.”

No law enforcement official has raised the possibility that Israel was involved in the assassination that sent shockwaves through the United States last week. The FBI has charged only 22-year-old Tyler Robinson with Kirk’s murder, and text messages reprinted in his indictment suggest he acted alone.

What Netanyahu is responding to, instead, are theories being loudly entertained by popular right-wing Internet pundits and politicians — figures standing to inherit Kirk’s mantle of influence. They include Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, and white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes.

Few if any of the most prominent voices have outright said they believe Israel is behind Kirk’s assassination. But they are posing questions — and at times citing the questions as a cause for suspicion.

“I severely mistrust people who rush to misrepresent things,” Owens said on her streaming show on Monday. “And it’s not a good sign when somebody has to ask you, as Greta Van Sustern asked Bibi Netanyahu … if you did have anything to do with the assassination. Doesn’t make you a great person, OK.”

Responding to Van Sustern, Netanyahu said on Newsmax that the theory was “absurd” and “insane.”

Fuentes, the streamer who launched what he called the “groyper war” against Kirk in 2019 because he believed the Turning Point USA founder was insufficiently antisemitic and anti-Israel, posed the question himself.

“DID ISRAEL KILL CHARLIE KIRK?” Fuentes titled an episode of his show on Monday. The stream, rife with sinister imagery of Jewish stars and Jewish politicians, garnered around 1 million views in 24 hours.

Some of these figures were themselves close with Kirk; others, such as Fuentes, were his sworn adversaries. A minority, like the Jewish anti-Zionist blogger Max Blumenthal, are more readily identified with the left. But they now share a growing fury with Israel and Netanyahu, often in the process echoing progressive arguments against Israel’s war in Gaza. The growing MAGA divide over Israel, fueled by young voices in particular, threatens to splinter a formerly ironclad base of support for Israel on the American right.

For his part, Kirk expressed public fondness for Israel, and the Zionist Organization of America said after his death that he was planning to address its upcoming gala in November. He also publicly rejected antisemitism, even as he trafficked in some ideas, including the Great Replacement theory, that critics denounced as antisemitic.

But Kirk was also willing to publicly entertain more debate about Israel than many other leading conservatives, particularly at his conferences and on his podcast. Soon before his death, with support for Israel on the decline within his party, he said he loved Israel but also wanted to see the United States focus on other priorities.

Those on the far right who have turned to attacking Israel following Kirk’s death are particularly infuriated by Netanyahu’s insistence, starting even before Kirk’s death had been confirmed, that Kirk’s support for Israel was unwavering.

“I was shocked and sickened by the ghoulish, and really repulsive, reaction of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie’s death,” Carlson, the former Fox News host and a close associate of Kirk, said in his own video this week prior to Netanyahu’s own. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything lower than his attempt to hijack Charlie’s memory and use it for his own political ends.”

Days earlier Carlson had made similar comments, condemning “foreign heads of state” whom he said were exploiting Kirk’s death, on a posthumous episode of Kirk’s show hosted by Vice President J.D. Vance. But at the time, Carlson did not say which heads of state he was referring to.

On his own show, he was now clear: he meant Netanyahu.

Kirk, Carlson said, “felt that Bibi Netanyahu was a very destructive force. He was appalled by what was happening in Gaza. He was, above all, resentful that he believed Netanyahu was using the United States to prosecute his wars, for the benefit of his country, and that it was shameful and embarrassing and bad for the United States.”

In the video, Carlson claimed he had recently spoken with Kirk backstage before an event in July about whether he should highlight the Jewish disgraced financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein’s purported connections to “Israeli intelligence,” a line Carlson has promoted for months as MAGA speculation around Epstein has continued to swirl.

“I know your donors hate this,” he said he remembered telling Kirk. “He looked at me, I’ll never forget it, and said, ‘Go all the way, man. Go all the way.’” He and Owens have both said that Kirk had recently come under pressure from pro-Israel donors, specifically naming Jewish activist investor Bill Ackman — who on X has refuted the allegation.

Carlson is no mere fringe figure: He has more than 16 million followers on X, where he took his interview show after leaving Fox News, and campaigned with President Donald Trump in 2024. He is also scheduled to speak during Kirk’s televised memorial Sunday in Glendale, Arizona, along with Trump and several other top members of the administration, including Vance and Stephen Miller.

Carlson’s prominence has alienated many Jews, including conservatives, for his willingness to not only vocally criticize Israel but also interview Holocaust revisionists and entertain conspiracy theories. Sometimes, as in his manner of addressing theories about Israel’s involvement in Kirk’s murder, he does so obliquely.

“By the way, I’m not accusing anyone of being involved in that murder,” Carlson said on his show, adding, “There was a lot we don’t know about who murdered Charlie and why.”

Other right-wing influencers have been even more forthright about their belief that Israel had something to do with Kirk’s death. And some are taking Netanyahu’s denials as further evidence.

“I don’t know who specifically said that Bibi killed Charlie Kirk, but now that he’s… denying that he is, people are going, ‘What’s actually going on here? This is weird,’” Owens, a far-right commentator who was close with Kirk and has a long track record of antisemitic comments, said on her show following Netanyahu’s video.

Owens added, “Zionists control a lot of publications in America. That is just a reality.” She had left Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire company last year after she began openly embracing antisemitic talking points, and has continued to do so on her own YouTube and X accounts.

In other videos following Kirk’s death, she has suggested that he was privately beginning to turn on Israel more forcefully and had become fearful of its allies, and went so far as to suggest that a letter Netanyahu shared purportedly from Kirk had been fabricated or written under duress.

Owens has also claimed since his death that the country was now united by “bottomless hatred for the ADL and their perpetual victimhood,” sharing an article from the Anti-Defamation League about online posts blaming Jews and Israel for Kirk’s death. Owens also claimed Kirk was “fighting with his donors over Israel,” as did Carlson.

Owens’ contention that she, not Israel, was the authority on Kirk’s feelings about Israel was backed up by others including Taylor Greene, who said Kirk had backed her appearance at a conference after she had called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a “genocide” and called for AIPAC to be registered as a foreign agent.

“If you don’t know who to believe, between Bibi Netanyahu (a foreign country’s leader) or Charlie’s personal friends Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson,” Greene posted on X, “Believe Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.”

Kirk’s assassination came amid rapidly faltering support for Israel within both major political parties. The outpouring of grief from the Israelis — which included encomia from officials as well as public tributes in multiple cities — seems to have felt to some like the country was protesting too much.

The liberal pundit Tommy Vietor asked on X whether Netanyahu “realizes how angry he made large swaths of the MAGA world at his gross attempt to hijack the memory of Charlie Kirk. It was a huge unforced error that did real damage.”

Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, told Carlson on his show that Kirk had been responsive to the sentiments of his supporters.

“Charlie was like an unofficial spokesperson for the youth of America, in particular conservative youth. And I don’t know if people have checked, but they no longer support Israel. Everybody under 30 is against Israel,” she said. She added that she had been offered a chance to interview Netanyahu in recent months but declined: “I didn’t want to platform him.”

Jewish right-wing pundits who were close with Kirk have been quick to denounce the groundswell of anti-Israel sentiment. “Opportunists using the murder of Charlie Kirk to undermine Israel and attack the Jewish people are despicable,” Marissa Streit, the Jewish CEO of the conservative education project PragerU, wrote on Twitter.

Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who is Jewish and avowedly pro-Israel, called out Carlson and Owens specifically as trying “unambiguously to drive a wedge” between Christian conservatives and Jewish conservatives — and speculated that their ultimate goal might be an Inquisition-style expulsion of Jews from the United States.

Some prominent conservatives have also tried to refute the claims, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

“It’s painful to see people back in the US attempt to get clicks & make $$ by making up outrageous lies while exploiting the death of Charlie Kirk whose impact & character the propagandists will never have,” Huckabee tweeted, sharing Netanyahu’s denial video. Shapiro, the Orthodox Jewish right-wing pundit who formerly employed Owens (and whose company donated $1 million to Turning Point USA in Kirk’s honor), retweeted the post.

“I’m getting really tired of Tucker & his cronies falsely claiming ‘Charlie agreed with me that Israel is terrible & the problem in America is all the damn Jews,’” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted Wednesday.

Cruz, whose own contentious interview with Carlson over whether Republicans and Christians should support Israel went viral earlier this year, added that the last conversation he’d had with Kirk “was about the rising, toxic wave of antisemitism on the right.”

Kirk was a prolific streamer who addressed the topic of Israel repeatedly on his hours-long shows in the weeks prior to his death. In one July episode, he said he rejected “Jew hate” but also said, “If you call everyone an antisemite if they don’t take a puritanical view of the Netanyahu government, then I think that’s bad for everybody.”

He said he had been warning leading conservatives that the old way of talking about Israel could no longer be sustained. “I’ve been trying to tell them that there is an earthquake coming on this issue and in the country,” he said, “and they don’t believe me.”