Vice President JD Vance Speaks Truth to Israel

 Vice President JD Vance Speaks Truth to Israel: “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem you have”

 

By New Trend Staff

 

In a June 18 White House press briefing, Vance expressed concern that members of the Israeli cabinet were attacking President Trump. To those within Netanyahu’s cabinet who have attacked the Iran deal and “in some ways very personally attacked the President of the United States,” he said, “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time. And he happens to be the head of state of the world’s superpower. If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

 

This in itself is shocking, because the US has seldom acknowledged Israel’s isolation and lack of support around the world so bluntly. It may be an indicator of permanent change in the region, a change brought about not through the goodness of US government, but through the immense sacrifice of the Palestinian and Iranian peoples.

 

Then, Vance told the truth (coated with a bit of Orwellian double speak) on who supplies the weapons for genocide: “Over the last two months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars.”

 

He let Netanyahu himself off the hook, saying Netanyahu was not the one attacking Trump, but focused on the Israeli cabinet.

 

In an interview with New York Times reporter Ross Douthat the same day, Vance said he would tell Israeli cabinet members like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who had attacked Trump’s Iran deal, “You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem you have.”

 

Vance continued, “Fundamentally, we’re worried about what’s in the best interest of the American people. And to the extent that—and I think the president has shown this—where he sees misalignment between the goals of the political system in Israel and the goals of the American people, he’s willing to say that we’re going to pursue America’s interests where there are divergences.”

 

This is one of the few instances where an American president or vice president—or for that matter—any mainstream US politician—has differentiated US interests from Israeli interests. For a long while, this was simply not done by US politicians, if they didn’t want to get unseated by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. In fact, elected officials from both parties usually try to portray US and Israeli interests as one and the same. Vance’s statements seemed to reflect a growing awareness in the US government that that the majority of Americans no longer support Israel. And all of this is due to hard work and prodigious organizing by a multitude of anti-war, anti-Apartheid, and anti-Zionist groups across the nation.