On June 8, 1967, the Israeli military machine-gunned, bombed and torpedoed the U.S.S. Liberty, an American vessel floating off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 service members.
Those facts are not in dispute. But almost everything else about the attack is driving a wedge through the MAGA movement.
On one side are prominent voices like the podcaster Ben Shapiro, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Rich Lowry, editor in chief of The National Review. They insist the attack on the Liberty was a tragic case of mistaken identity amid the chaos of the Six-Day War, a conclusion shared by a U.S. Navy Court of Inquiry and the Israeli government.
Those on the other side include the podcasters Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona. They insist Israel knew the Liberty was an American ship and say the attack is proof that the Israeli government cannot be trusted and is no ally to the United States.
While many Americans have never heard of the Liberty, it has become a topic of obsession on the right, which is increasingly divided over America’s relationship with Israel. Conservatives are split between those who are adamant supporters of the country and those critical of the Jewish state who sometimes employ openly antisemitic views to make their case.
The debate over the six-decade-old maritime disaster, playing out at conservative events, in social media and on viral podcasts, has become a litmus test within President Trump’s movement. Talking about the Liberty has become a thinly coded way to figure out which side someone is on.
“There really were 34 Americans who really were killed — it really was a tragedy,” said Richard Stern, vice president of economics at Advancing American Freedom, a conservative group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. “But every single time I’ve heard it brought up, it’s because people are looking for something to blame on the Jews.”
History buffs have long been fascinated by the Liberty. More than two dozen books have been written about the attack, along with countless magazine and newspaper articles. There are also a handful of full-length documentaries.
Many of those accounts conclude that the attack was the result of friendly fire: Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering ship, for an Egyptian vessel and opened fire, injuring 171 in addition to those killed.
But those who say Israel intentionally attacked an American ship point to the day’s clear weather, distinctive markings on the ship’s hull and the U.S. flag it flew. They also point to statements by Dean Rusk, the secretary of state at the time, that the attack was “outrageous” and no accident, as well as by other military officials who cast doubt on the official account and suggested there was a cover-up — though the motives ascribed to such a plot vary widely.
The topic stayed out of the mainstream until the recent Israel-Hamas conflict. In 2022, there were fewer than 250 posts a day on X about the Liberty, according to data analyzed by Tweet Binder; last year, there were 10 times as many. Over four days in December during AmericaFest, an annual convention held by the conservative group Turning Point USA, where the Liberty attack was widely discussed, accounts on X posted about it 81,000 times.
A major moment came in December 2024 when Ms. Owens invited a Liberty survivor, Phil Tourney, on her popular podcast. Mr. Tourney, who is 79 and president of the Liberty Veterans Association, spoke at length about watching friends die as the ship took fire. He also pushed a claim that the U.S. government had conspired with Israel to stage the attack as a “false flag” operation meant to draw America into the Six-Day War.
“We were betrayed,” Mr. Tourney said on the show.
The episode has been viewed 6.3 million times on YouTube, making it one of Ms. Owens’s most popular ever.
“When you hear that story for the first time, it gives you chills,” Ms. Owens said in an interview. “We’ve reached critical mass on the topic of Israel.”
Other influential voices soon jumped on the topic, including Mr. Carlson, who dedicated a large portion of a podcast episode to the Liberty, endorsing the false-flag theory and calling the attack “evil.”
Younger conservatives seem particularly interested in the Liberty. For decades, supporting Israel was a bedrock tenet of the American right. But recent polling shows that attitudes among Republicans under 35 have been diverging from that allegiance.
At the National Conservatism Conference in September, a college student took advantage of a question-and-answer session to ask a pro-Israel panelist about the Liberty.
“What kind of supposedly good ally does that to another country?” the student asked Max Abrahms, a political science professor who is an expert on terrorism. “And is Israel actually our greatest ally or is it even a good ally in the first place?”
Mr. Abrahms, who is a strong Israel supporter, called questions about the Liberty “conspiracy theory talk” and added that “what’s much more useful is what’s going on today, especially on issues which are not so empirically contested.”
The next month at the University of North Dakota, a young man asked the right-wing pundit Glenn Beck about the incident; at Auburn University several weeks later, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, was confronted with a question about the Liberty. Mr. Cruz, who was onstage at the event, called the question “viciously antisemitic.”
And in December, on the first night of Turning Point’s convention in Phoenix, a college student named Nicky Rudd asked Mr. Shapiro about the Liberty before a live audience of thousands.
Mr. Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, had been asked about the ship before. “I suspect that the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so in order to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America,” he said. “It is connected generally with a larger point. I wonder if that’s your point.”
Later that evening, Mr. Carlson took the same stage and framed the Liberty as a free-speech issue. “It’s totally fine to ask about why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967,” Mr. Carlson said. “That doesn’t make you an antisemite.”
Clips of the back and forth went viral, setting off days of discussion about the Liberty on right-leaning podcasts. Mr. Rudd posted a video on X calling Mr. Shapiro a liar, and it got two million views. In an interview, Mr. Rudd said that the controversy had landed him a job with a right-wing news outlet and that he had asked the question to show that “our relationship with Israel has been to our detriment and the detriment of everyday Americans.”
All the attention spurred Mr. Lowry of The National Review to write a column titled, “No, the USS Liberty Attack Wasn’t Israeli Treachery.”
Cam Higby, a pro-Trump influencer, said people who brought up the Liberty were primarily using it as a dog whistle for antisemitic ideas, hiding broadsides against Jews behind a military tragedy.
“This specific issue is used all the time by antisemites,” said Mr. Higby, who last year debated Mr. Tourney, the survivor, for 90 minutes about the Liberty, arguing it was an accident. “It’s like their favorite toy.”
In social media posts, Mr. Tourney has repeatedly blamed Jews for the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Charlie Kirk, as well as for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and frequently says American politicians are controlled by “Zionists.”
“Don’t think I’m a Jew hater. Don’t think that, because I’m not,” Mr. Tourney said in an interview. “I’m American. I love all people.”
He recently started a podcast and is preparing to publish his third book about the attack.
Not all Liberty survivors seem so enthusiastic about the attention.
Bryce Lockwood was a 27-year-old Marine sergeant at the time of the attack and spent months in a military hospital recovering from his injuries. Like many survivors, he believes that Israel fired on the ship intentionally and has called for congressional inquiries.
Still, he and other survivors bristle at the often antisemitic invective that accompanies much discussion of the Liberty.
“It is very concerning,” Mr. Lockwood said. “The Liberty has been politicized, and it’s wrong.”
Daniel Flesch, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Liberty was being used as a weapon in a “larger anticonservative agenda.” Heritage itself has been in turmoil in recent months after its president defended a friendly interview that Mr. Carlson conducted with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite who has pushed narratives about the Liberty for years.
“There is a struggle now going on in the movement,” Mr. Flesch said. “The Liberty is being weaponized by people who seek to use the issue for other ends.”
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.
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