Even in Venezuela, We Can’t Get Away From the Bipartisan Anti-Israel Obsession

When news first broke in the early hours of a Saturday morning that the US had pulled off something many thought impossible, the successful capture of Venezuela’s longtime dictator and narco-trafficker Nicolas Maduro, I wasn’t terribly surprised to see the usual suspects outraged. AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush coming out in defense of a communist dictator is par for the course at this point.

More surprising, however, were the full-throated defenses of communist dictator Maduro coming from the right.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her opposition to the operation by noting Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado “is a strong supporter of Israel and wants to restore strong relations,” as if Israel’s existence justified defending a man who destroyed and deeply impoverished his own country.

Tucker Carlson took the argument even further on his show, asking first and foremost about why Machado would pledge to move Venezuela’s embassy to Jerusalem. His guest replied that it revealed who was really “calling the shots” in American foreign policy. Candace Owens, in case you were wondering, declared “Zionists cheer every regime change”—more or less on par with Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez claiming the raid had “Zionist overtones.”

They’re not alone, either. Scroll through X and you’ll find the same argument repeated across the right, from MMA fighter Jake Shields asking his nearly one million followers whether the raid was “for Israel,” with others circulating videos of Netanyahu congratulating Trump with captions like “orders given, orders received.”

It would be one thing if Venezuela’s future was being decided by free and democratic elections, but it isn’t. It’s the furthest possible alternative to that. Maduro has stolen multiple elections to remain in power and presided over policies which have deeply impoverished the once-wealthy country. For context, the country is sitting on 303 billion barrels of oil—the largest reserves on Earth—and still somehow managed to suffer one of the most dramatic peacetime economic collapses in recorded history, with poverty surging past 86% and eight million people fleeing abroad. Political prisoners have routinely been tortured for standing up to the regime.

This is what the critics are excusing because of people’s stances on the Middle East. Sure, Maduro might be a thug, but at least he hates Israel, right?

That moral absurdity isn’t exactly new, though. It’s the same reactionary instinct which led the Cold War-era left to defend Castro, Ortega, and just about every other Soviet client state that pointed its guns at Washington while starving their own people and torturing dissidents. But they were anti-American, and allegedly anti-imperialist, and that made them heroes to ideologues who measured virtue entirely by opposition to the United States.

Today, that focus has shifted somewhat from anti-Americanism to anti-Zionism, but the underlying obsession remains equally misguided in terms of foreign policy towards states that simply have very little to do with the Middle East. 

The horseshoe theory has come full circle. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker, and company are now making fundamentally the same argument as Ilhan Omar and the pro-Palestinian activist networks that have been championing a defense of Maduro. Meanwhile, actual Venezuelans who fled life under the regime’s rule have been dancing in the streets of cities the world over, celebrating the action.

Critics opposing this operation on Israeli grounds are inadvertently defending what amounts to be an Iranian client state with Hezbollah operatives embedded inside its government. Maduro has openly declared Venezuela to be a member of the Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” signed a 20 year cooperation pact with the regime just a few years ago, and allowed his country to become what US officials have described as a “forward-operating base” for Iranian and Hezbollah operations in the Western Hemisphere. 

The policy implications of these trends extend well beyond just Venezuela. When bipartisan members of Congress are openly defending the continued rule of a narco-dictator who harbors terrorist operatives—and Hezbollah itself issues statements of “full solidarity” with that dictator—hostile countries around the world are taking notice. The calculation is really quite simple at this point: align yourself against Israel, and a ready-made constituency will mobilize on your behalf in the US regardless of how you treat your own people or the alliances you form with terrorist organizations.

While it is at time of writing unclear what the future has in store for Venezuela, arresting Maduro was ultimately the right call—and the fact that his opponents support Israel shouldn’t change the calculation, no matter how badly some people wish it did.