NEED TO KNOW

• Tucker Carlson called Israel “probably the most violent country in the world” during a combative interview with U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee at Ben Gurion Airport
• Israel’s homicide rate of roughly 1.1 per 100,000 residents is a fraction of countries like Honduras, Venezuela and South Africa, which exceed 30 per 100,000
• The 2025 Global Peace Index does rank Israel 155th of 163 nations — but that metric measures militarization and active conflict, not civilian street crime

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (TDR) — Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson described Israel as “probably the most violent country in the world” during a nearly three-hour interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, filmed at Ben Gurion Airport on Feb. 18 and released Friday. The claim — one of several provocative assertions during a 25-minute opening monologue — drew immediate pushback from diplomats, data analysts and figures across the political spectrum.

Carlson’s reasoning, as stated during the podcast, centered on mandatory military service: he argued that because a majority of Israeli citizens have held a gun or fired one in service, the country qualifies as uniquely violent. The Jerusalem Post noted that this framing conflated compulsory conscription — a feature shared by dozens of nations including South Korea, Switzerland and Singapore — with criminal violence, a distinction that fundamentally changes the meaning of the claim.

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So what do the actual numbers say?

What Homicide Data Shows

The most widely used measure of a country’s violence level is its intentional homicide rate per 100,000 residents, compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). By this metric, Israel is nowhere near the top of any global violence ranking.

Israel’s homicide rate stood at approximately 1.14 per 100,000 in 2018, the most recent year of normalized peacetime data. Even accounting for spikes related to the ongoing conflict, that figure is a fraction of the countries that consistently rank among the world’s most violent.

For comparison, the 2023-2024 UNODC data shows:

• Saint Kitts and Nevis: 64.16 per 100,000
• Jamaica: 49.44 per 100,000
• South Africa: 43.72 per 100,000
• Honduras: 31.4 per 100,000
• Venezuela: 36.7 per 100,000
• Mexico: 24.9 per 100,000
• United States: 5.76 per 100,000

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Israel’s peacetime rate falls closer to Western European nations than to any country on the most-violent lists. The Jerusalem Post pointed out that Carlson’s claim conflated military service with criminal violence “in a country whose homicide rate is a fraction of Honduras, Venezuela, or South Africa.”

“Israel made phone calls, sent messages, put out drone loudspeakers — all for the purpose of warning Gazans to move away from a building about to be destroyed.” — Mike Huckabee

Where the Global Peace Index Actually Ranks Israel

Carlson’s claim does find partial support in one metric — but not the one he invoked. The 2025 Global Peace Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, ranks Israel 155th out of 163 countries — placing it among the least peaceful nations on Earth alongside Russia (163rd), Ukraine (162nd), Sudan (161st) and Yemen (159th).

However, the GPI does not measure what most people mean when they say “violent country.” It evaluates three categories: ongoing conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization. Israel’s low ranking is driven primarily by its active military conflict in Gaza since October 2023 and the highest global deterioration on military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. The GPI measures a nation’s involvement in armed conflict and defense posture — not whether its streets are safe for residents.

“I don’t want to be paranoid, but this is probably the most violent region in the world. Is there any other place in the world where the majority of people have guns and have shot at someone?” — Tucker Carlson

The distinction matters. A country can rank low on peace indices because of external military operations while simultaneously maintaining a low civilian crime rate domestically. Israel’s situation reflects exactly that paradox — a nation at war whose internal homicide rate resembles Western Europe’s far more than Latin America’s or sub-Saharan Africa’s.

What Else Carlson Claimed — and What Was Verified

The “most violent country” line was far from the only contested claim in the interview. During the 25-minute monologue and subsequent conversation, Carlson made a series of assertions that drew immediate fact-checking from multiple outlets:

Claim: Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. Carlson alleged during the interview that Herzog “apparently was at Pedo Island.” The claim was based on an unspecified reference to a “Herzog” in one of over three million pages of recently released Epstein files. Isaac Herzog‘s office categorically denied any connection to Epstein. Carlson issued a public apology on X within 24 hours, removed the segment from the interview and acknowledged he had acted without concrete evidence.

“They didn’t know each other, they never emailed with each other, never been in the same room. They had no relationship of any kind. So I just want to say clearly I’m sorry to imply that I knew something I didn’t know.” — Tucker Carlson

Claim: Israel is a “police state” that installs surveillance software on visitors’ phones. Carlson stated that “they put software on your phone” when visiting Israel. This appears to reference documented cases of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which has targeted specific individuals — journalists, dissidents and political figures — rather than ordinary visitors. The Jerusalem Post noted that Carlson overstated the scope significantly, as no evidence supports blanket surveillance of all travelers.

Claim: DNA testing should determine who has a right to live in Israel. Carlson suggested testing all Israeli citizens to determine who is “descended from Abraham,” a proposal Huckabee rejected. The ambassador later denounced the question on social media as reflecting the “Khazar theory” — a debunked conspiracy theory claiming Ashkenazi Jews descended from a Turkic minority rather than from ancient Israelites.

“This odious conspiracy theory is peddled by the likes of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and by people who love David Duke.” — Mike Huckabee

Claim: 60 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. The Jerusalem Post flagged this figure as three to six times higher than any credible estimate. The most widely cited figures from the Department of Homeland Security and nonpartisan research organizations place the undocumented population between 10 and 20 million.

The Fallout: Apology, Backlash and a Diplomatic Crisis

The interview’s repercussions extended far beyond Carlson and Huckabee. While Carlson’s claims dominated right-wing media criticism, it was Huckabee’s response to a question about biblical land promises that triggered an international diplomatic incident. When Carlson pressed the ambassador on whether Israel had a right to land “from the Euphrates to the Nile,” Huckabee replied: “It would be fine if they took it all” — before clarifying that Israel was not seeking such expansion.

The foreign ministers of 14 Arab and Muslim nations — including U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain — issued a joint statement calling Huckabee’s remarks “dangerous and inflammatory” and a “flagrant violation of the principles of international law.” The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council signed on as well, and Saudi Arabia demanded the State Department clarify its official position.

Conservative intellectual Yoram Hazony, an architect of the national conservatism movement, offered one of the sharpest critiques from within the right. After recounting private conversations with Carlson about antisemitism accusations, Hazony concluded: “Whatever his motives for turning his podcast into what seems to be a circus of anti-Jewish messaging, right now that project is clearly more important to him than helping the administration keep its coalition together.”

Meanwhile, left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan praised Carlson’s interviewing technique — creating the unusual spectacle of a progressive applauding the same interview that conservative critics called antisemitic.

“I’ve never met an American who thinks the imminent threat to America is anything having to do with Iran. The imminent threats to America include bankruptcy from too much debt, your son OD-ing on fentanyl, your neighborhood completely changing.” — Tucker Carlson

The Bigger Picture

The Carlson-Huckabee clash exposed a fault line running through the Republican coalition that predates this interview but now has a public face. On one side: evangelical Christian Zionists like Huckabee who view the U.S.-Israel alliance as both strategic and biblical. On the other: an isolationist populist wing that views foreign entanglements — including those with Israel — as a drain on American resources and attention.

Both positions carry real policy implications as the U.S. weighs its posture toward Iran and the broader Middle East. But the specific claim that launched the conversation — that Israel is “probably the most violent country in the world” — does not survive contact with the data. By standard criminal violence metrics, dozens of countries rank dramatically higher. By peace index measures, Israel’s low ranking reflects its military posture and active conflicts, not the day-to-day safety of its residents.

The question of whether U.S. foreign policy disproportionately favors Israel is legitimate and debated across the political spectrum. But that debate is not well served by factual claims that collapse under scrutiny.

When commentators conflate military conscription with criminal violence and peacetime homicide data with active conflict metrics, does the resulting debate inform the public — or mislead it?

Sources

This report was compiled using information from the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, NBC News, Al Jazeera, Euronews, Al Arabiya, Jewish Insider, Israel Hayom, The Wrap, the 2025 Global Peace Index, UNODC homicide data, YNet News, and Our World in Data.

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