Israeli officials need to stop demonizing JD Vance, in doing so they prove him right - comment

ByZVIKA KLEINJULY 21, 2026 22:45Somewhere in the past few months, JD Vance stopped being a politician Israelis argue about and turned into a demon. The man Israeli ministers brief against, sometimes on the record, which takes a special kind of strategic genius.The subject of a thousand furious WhatsApp forwards, including, I'll admit, in groups I'm in. Even Fox turned. Brian Kilmeade, the Fox and Friends co-host who has spent two decades as one of the friendliest voices Israel has on American morning television, went after him on air.When Kilmeade is rough on you, you're officially in the doghouse of the pro-Israel world.Maybe he earned it. Some of what Vance says lands badly, and is meant to. When the Iran deal was signed in June, I wrote in these pages that Israel had just met the post-Trump America: colder, interest-driven, personified by Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.I stand by every word. What surprised me was our response. Faced with a new kind of America, we reached for the oldest tool in the drawer. The effigy.US Vice President JD Vance said recently, ‘We want our allies to be like Israel – strong, independent, and capable of defending their own interests so we don’t have to.’ (credit: Spencer Platt/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)Before we finish building it, two uncomfortable facts.First: the verdict was reached by people who, overwhelmingly, never watched the three-hour Joe Rogan interview that triggered it. They watched 40-second clips with furious captions. I know because I asked around, including in my own newsroom.American politics lives on Rogan's podcast now, in front of tens of millions of listeners, most of them young men who will never open this newspaper, and who ask, without embarrassment, whether Jeffrey Epstein worked for the Mossad. That's the room Vance walked into. Judging what he did there from a clip is like reviewing a boxing match from a photo of one punch.Second: I spent recent days with people close to the administration who did watch all three hours, some more than once. Their account annoyed me and persuaded me in places, and you should hear it before you decide.Their versionVance, they argue, walked into the most conspiratorial room in America and refused to feed it.When Epstein came up, he skipped the routine we've come to expect from Mike Huckabee, the evangelical former Arkansas governor serving as Washington's ambassador in Jerusalem, for whom Israel can simply do no wrong. That act would have died in Rogan's studio anyway.Vance said the obvious, that Epstein was a criminal, then went out of his way, several times, unprompted, to insist there was no connection between Epstein and the Israeli government. Try to name another American politician who spent hours arguing with the Mossad conspiracy crowd on their home turf. I'll wait.The chill from Washington, in their telling, is a campaign decision. Elections are coming, theirs and ours, and somebody decided the administration needs air between itself and Jerusalem until November. One of my interlocutors reached for the word "daylight," Barack Obama's old word, with a straight face. Until further notice, I asked? Until further notice.They walked me through the Republican map to make the point. The national camp of President Donald Trump, Vance, and Rubio. The party's liberal wing, where most Jewish Republicans live. And the corner belonging to Tucker Carlson, the former Fox host turned podcast baron whose flirtations with anti-Israel material are by now a genre of their own, and who has quit the party to build something new.In a base tired of the Iran war and marinating in talk of Washington serving Israeli interests, Vance's job is to keep those voters without signing their story. When the aid package came to the floor, exactly one Republican voted no: Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the libertarian gadfly who votes no on nearly everything and whom Carlson has adopted as a cause.Watch the rhetoric if you want, my interlocutors said. They count the votes.The shift the demon story hidesHere's what the effigy-building blinds us to, and it will outlast Vance and probably this whole argument.The line that scandalized Israeli ears was Vance calling Israel "an ally, like Britain and France." We heard a demotion. Listen to the vocabulary instead.For 50 years, American presidents spoke about Israel in the language of family. Bill Clinton loved us. George W. Bush loved us. Joe Biden told anyone who'd listen that you don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. Lindsey Graham, may he rest in peace, built a Senate career on Genesis 12:3. And the love always arrived with an invoice, usually itemized in Jerusalem neighborhoods and a Palestinian state.Vance talks like Lord Palmerston, the Victorian foreign secretary who gave diplomacy its most durable one-liner: no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, permanent interests. In that vocabulary, Britain and France sit at the top of the ladder. There is no higher rung.Where interests align, we work together. Where they clash, we say so, as friends. Cold? Sure. But nobody ever handed Britain an invoice made out in love.I started telling this story in June, and the Rogan interview is a chapter of it, one man's tone in one very long conversation. The bigger book is the arrival of a post-covenant generation of American leadership. It was Vance himself, remember, who described Trump as the only head of state in the world sympathetic to Israel.We heard a warning about our isolation. He was telling us the era of automatic sympathy retires with his boss. Burn every Vance effigy you can build; the shift stays.His successors will speak the same language, because his voters do.Where I get off the trainMy interlocutors' theory has soft spots, and I'd be a poor journalist if I buried them.The campaign explanation explains too much. Every cold word is strategy, every warm gesture is the real Vance, and a theory that wins every argument should make you nervous.Campaigns change the men who run them, too. The base Vance is courting sticks around after election night and becomes the coalition he answers to.When Ariel Kahana and Omer Lachmanovitch of Israel Hayom interviewed Trump in March 2024, he told them that 15 years ago an American politician who spoke against Israel was finished on the spot, and that today it's nearly the reverse.Trump was describing the weather.Politicians hear a forecast like that as permission. And the people making Vance's case to me spent decades building the movement he now fronts, so when they defend him, they're defending their life's work. They may still be right. Motivated witnesses sometimes are. You just check their math twice.The homeworkI'm writing this because we're embarrassing ourselves, and doing it expensively.Every thin-skinned outburst from an Israeli minister confirms the exact story Vance's base already tells about us, and it burns capital with an administration we'll need on the next October 7, whenever that comes.Graham is dead. The Bidens and Bushes are history. The Americans who loved us out loud are aging out of politics, and the ones replacing them talk about interests and mean it.After a joint war against Iran, our shared-interest file with Washington has rarely been thicker.That's the relationship on offer, and by any sober measure it's a good one.But 50 years of being loved taught us to hear anything less as betrayal. That's a hearing problem. And it's on our side of the ocean.Follow us on Google