In the days after Charlie’s death, an ugly conspiracy metastasized: that Charlie was “starting to criticize Israel” in the months before his death and was assassinated for daring to break ranks.
This theory, created by Candace Owens and eagerly amplified by other Israel-obsessed accounts, collapses under the slightest contact with reality.
Charlie was never afraid to criticize the Israeli government. He did it openly, repeatedly, and on the record. What he rejected was not criticism of Israel, but a specific narrative: the idea that Israel is uniquely evil, illegitimate, or undeserving of existence. He said this plainly, many times.
“I am not an apologist for Israel,” he said during a Q&A on the Live Free Tour, “but I reject wholeheartedly this [anti-Israel] narrative.”
That sentence summed up Charlie’s approach to Israel. Apologists excuse everything. Extremists criticize everything. Charlie was neither. He was clear-eyed about what he supported and what he opposed.
“There are plenty of suspicious things going on,” he said, referring to the Israeli government’s intel failure on October 7, 2023—hardly the words of a man terrified to speak.
At one college campus, Charlie told a student:
“I was one of the leading voices who said it was very suspicious, the intel failure that led to October 7th. “I was one of the few people who was willing to say that, and I stand by that.”
That doesn’t sound like someone afraid to question the Israeli government.
What made Charlie uniquely equipped to discuss Israel was that his criticism of Israel never slid into delegitimization. He didn’t use criticism of the Israeli government as as a mask for hostility toward Jews, nor did disagreement with Israeli policy drag him into dramatic delusions like “Israel is not our ally” or “Israel is committing genocide.”
“I’m not an unapologetic defender of the government of Israel,” he emphasized. “But I am a defender of the nation-state of Israel to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”
That distinction was foundational to Charlie’s stance. His support for Israel didn’t begin with policy white papers or Israeli government actions. As he explained, it began with Scripture—with walking the land where Jesus lived, taught, and died.
“I will always defend the Holy Land,” he said, “the place that let me see where my Lord and Savior lived—and I will not apologize for that.”
For Charlie, Israel was not beyond critique. But it is beyond erasure.
His refusal to join the chorus calling Israel a “genocidal power,” and his refusal to whitewash all Israeli government policies, is what earned him enemies on every side. He spoke about that too, with weary honesty.
“Any time Israel does something I don’t like, I say something about it,” he said. “And I get attacked by every side. I get called a ‘Jewish shill’ by some people, and then I get attacked as antisemitic.”
What truly broke his heart was not the predictable smears from Israel’s enemies. It was the accusations of antisemitism from within the pro-Israel camp itself—despite his years of defending Israel, Jews, and the Jewish right to self-determination even when it was unpopular to do so.
Charlie didn’t fear any government, let alone Israel’s. In fact, in May 2025, Charlie sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticizing his government’s lack of response to the anti-Israel propaganda and urging him to fight the lies with truth.
Charlie believed you could defend Israel’s existence without defending every action of its government. He believed you could criticize failures without feeding lies. And he believed that abandoning Israel’s legitimacy as the Jewish homeland was not courage, but cowardice disguised as moral superiority.
The baseless conspiracy theories about Charlie and Israel say far more about the people spreading them than about Israel. They cannot tolerate the idea that someone could have the intellectual honesty to be both devoutly pro-Israel and genuinely critical at the same time. And so they weaponize Charlie’s memory to demonize Israel—not out of reason or evidence, but out of a deep, seething hostility toward the Jewish people themselves.
And that was something Charlie never tolerated.
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