The omens for the future of the Israel-US relationship were not good last week. A majority of the Democratic congressional caucus voted in favor of a resolution put forth by outgoing representative Thomas Massie (R–KY) calling for the cut-off of all arms sales to Israel. And among those voting against the resolution, a number said that they would have voted in favor had it been limited to offensive weapons.
It is widely assumed that the Democrats will take back control of the House in November, and their ranks will include many new members whose campaigns focused almost exclusively on their intense hatred of Israel.
On the Republican side things look better. Only one Republican — Massie — voted in favor of his resolution, and 215 voted against. But things are not so hunky-dory there either. Vice President J.D. Vance went on Joe Rogan's three-hour podcast last week and leveled two serious charges against Israel. Vance is at present the presumptive presidential nominee in 2028, and currently leads Secretary of State Marco Rubio by about 20 points.
Vance himself was having, in the words of a Wall Street Journal headline, a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week," as the memorandum of understanding with Iran for which he was the chief American negotiator blew up, with President Trump declaring it null and void after Iran struck two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States responded with over a week of military strikes on Iran, and President Trump announced the resumption of the American blockade of Iranian ports.
For its part, Iran responded with strikes on American bases throughout the region — one of which, on a base in Jordan, killed two US servicemen, with a third still missing. And the current Iranian supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, mirrored President Trump in terming the MOU "invalid."
When Trump appointed his vice president to head the negotiations over the MOU, he joked, "If negotiations succeed, I'll take all the credit. And if they fail, I'll blame J.D." Except no one, least of all Vance, thought he was joking.
The latter nevertheless accepted the role, eager to establish his foreign policy chops. And early on in the negotiations, he boasted that an unprecedented rapport had been established with Iran's leaders. He described both the Iranian leadership and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as having renounced the past 47 years of animosity with the United States as a mistake and having embarked on a new diplomatic path.
Thus, the failure of the MOU, long before negotiations even commenced over Iran's nuclear program, left Vance with egg on his face. That is the context in which his appearance on the Joe Rogan Show must be viewed.
To deflect blame for the failure of MOU, Vance told Rogan that there is a "very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign" to derail the negotiations and to keep the war with Iran going "indefinitely.... Not toward any objective, but just indefinitely." In support of his claim, he pointed to a Time magazine article sent to him by a friend, which described an Israel-funded campaign run through Brad Parscale's lobbying outfit to push pro-Israel content into the MAGA ecosystem.
The first and most important thing to be noted about Vance's comments is their absurdity as an explanation for the blow-up of the MOU. The alleged campaign did not succeed in preventing the signing of the MOU. And if the MOU failed at even the most basic level of ensuring the freedom of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and is now dead-on-arrival, it is because Iran did not stop attacking oil tankers in the Strait.
Does Vance think that Israel paid Iran to resume attacks on oil shipments via the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran did so in order to provoke renewed American attacks on it? Yet if not, then Israel had absolutely nothing to do with the resumption of hostilities.
Before trying to shift blame for the failure of the MOU to Israel, Tablet's Lee Smith suggested sarcastically, perhaps Vance should have asked himself whether Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir, who hid Osama bin Laden for five years, might not have been a questionable choice for an intermediary for negotiations. And perhaps he should not have taken counsel from the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi, whose work has been described by one US district court judge as "not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the [Iranian] regime."
Moreover, the Time magazine article does not support Vance's claim. It describes Israel's efforts to reverse the anti-Israel momentum in sections of the MAGA movement, not a campaign against the MOU. Parscale, who worked for the Trump Organization for years, headed Trump's digital campaign in 2016 and was Trump's first campaign manager in 2020, flatly denied that he had ever worked to undermine President Trump or the memorandum of understanding. And nothing in the Time article, apart from the comment of one anonymous official, suggests otherwise.
It is true that Israel opposed the manner in which President Trump initially ended hostilities with Iran, for reasons that we have explained at length in the past. But they have nothing to do with the desire to endlessly "prolong the war" just for its own sake.
Israel would have been content for the United States to have simply continued its original blockade of Iranian ports, with the resultant negative impact on the Iranian economy and the stability of the regime. President Trump has himself said that Iran always loses the war and wins the subsequent negotiations, and Israel rightly feared that would be the case with respect to the MOU and any subsequent negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.
Those concerns were expressed openly and echoed by many American foreign policy experts, including leading Republican senators like Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and the late Lindsey Graham. They feared that Iran would secure billions of dollars in unfrozen funds and sanctions relief up front — as indeed happened — and that those funds would be directed to its proxies, in particular Hezbollah, and to shoring up the regime.
Above all, Israel and American foreign policy hawks were concerned that having failed to open the Strait of Hormuz by military means, America would appear to be suing for peace by opening negotiations with Iran. And doing so would weaken the United States and its ability to project power internationally with respect to both China and America's traditional Gulf allies, who would seek to make their own accommodations with Iran.
From the beginning, Vance reacted angrily to those arguments. He pointedly reminded Israel that it has "no friends in the world" apart from the United States and should therefore mind its tongue in criticizing anything President Trump does.
And when Israel vigorously resisted any linkage between American-Iran negotiations to Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Vance again reacted angrily, "[Israel] can't just kill [its] way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]?" That remark is of a piece with his comment to Rogan about Israel seeking to prolong war just for the purpose of endless war. Both conjure up images of bloodthirsty Jews, just like those of Christian fable who used Christian blood to make their matzos.
Michael Oren, a historian and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, pointed out how wrong Vance's comment about Israel seeking to resolve every security problem by force is, as a matter of history. In 1948, Israel was attacked by six Arab armies, after declaring independence. Nevertheless, it signed an armistice agreement with four Arab countries a year later, after prevailing in the War of Independence.
Israel came into possession of the West Bank and the entirety of Jerusalem in 1967 only after Jordan ignored its entreaties to stay out of the war. And in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, it offered to return almost all of the West Bank in return for peace, only to receive the infamous "three noes" of Khartoum in response. For a peace treaty with Egypt, it returned the entire Sinai peninsula, a land area three times that of Israel proper.
Israel signed a peace treaty with the archterrorist Arafat, and made generous offers of peace to the Palestinian Authority, including territorial sacrifices, both at Camp David in 2000 and in 2006 to Arafat's successor Mahmoud Abbas. Both were rebuffed without even a counterproposal.
The wars with Hezbollah and Hamas since 2006 all began with missile attacks on Israeli civilians or the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. None were initiated by Israel. Moreover, Oren notes, Israel, with the support of Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump, sought to avoid war with Hamas by paying it Qatari money. In sum, concludes Oren, "Vice President Vance knows full well, there is not a diplomatic solution for Israel with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran... enemies sworn to wipe us off the map."
NOR WAS VANCE'S blame-shifting to Israel for the failure of the MOU the only cause for concern in his discussion with Rogan. He jumped headfirst into the rabbit hole of speculation about deceased trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, cheerily conceding White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles' characterization of him as a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein files.
While conceding that there is not a single document to corroborate his belief, he confidently told Rogan, "I will go to my deathbed believing there is a story there, but I can't prove it." And what is that story? Epstein "clearly had connections to the highest levels of American and Israeli intelligence."
For the second-highest American official to make such an unequivocal statement without a shred of evidence is totally irresponsible, especially when, as the follow-up discussion with Rogan revealed, it could only fuel the theory frequently broadcast by his friend Tucker Carlson — that Epstein was using information garnered from his nefarious activities to bend American officials to Israel's will. Even if the speculation posing as fact was Vance's alone, the fact that his mind jumped so readily to the most negative inferences about Israel is cause for alarm.
LAST WEEK, Politico ran a long piece entitled "Vance's tough talk on Israel is alienating some Jewish GOP donors." The article quotes Eric Levine, a prominent GOP fundraiser and board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition: "It's hard to find any support for him at all in the Jewish community." Another donor extended that angst to "pro-Israel Republicans, Christians and Jews alike." Mega-donor Ken Griffin, a Presbyterian, for instance, has already signaled his support for Marco Rubio in 2028 over Vance.
That unease with Vance in the pro-Israel community long predates Operation Epic Fury. When a group chat of Young Republicans included jokes about the Holocaust and praise of Hitler, Vance contented himself with the observation, "Kids do stupid things." Worse, at a Turning Point USA event last October, he made no effort to deny the premise when a questioner asked why the US supports Israel when their religion "supports the prosecution [sic] of ours." One GOP strategist told Politico that the Turning Point event shows up in almost every conversation with those in the pro-Israel space.
Vance himself pointed out to Rogan that younger Republicans are far more hostile to Israel than older Republicans, who remain overwhelmingly supportive. And the fear expressed by one Jewish GOP donor and bundler is that Vance "is staking his claim on the anti-Israel, woke Right. [He] seems to have that lane locked up."
Unfortunately, those concerns are far from groundless.