PROFILE/WORRIES ISRAEL AFTER OCT. 7 MAY REPEAT POST-9/11 US MISTAKES
Trump VP pick JD Vance aims to balance Israel support with ‘America First’ mantra
Freshman senator rejects US ‘micromanaging’ Israel on overhaul, Gaza war; after once likening him to Hitler, Vance now defends Trump for claiming Jewish Dems hate their religion
MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin — James David Vance, a freshman US senator who has made support for Israel an exception to an “America First” foreign policy vision, was tapped on Monday as former US president Donald Trump’s running mate for the upcoming presidential election.
The selection of the 39-year-old Vance represents a full embrace of the growing isolationist wing of the Republican Party, which has pushed back against US military aid for Ukraine while maintaining support for security assistance to Israel.
Vance’s foreign policy approach was tested by Joe Biden’s administration in recent months as it coupled aid for Israel with aid to Ukraine in a funding package that it managed to advance through Congress in April.
The package was delayed for months, in no small part by Vance, who was one of 15 Senate Republicans to vote against the inclusion of aid to Ukraine.
Explaining his philosophy in a speech at the Quincy Institute in May, Vance said: “I’m supportive of Israel and their war against Hamas. I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia, but I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine.”
“It’s sort of weird that this town assumes that Israel and Ukraine are exactly the same. They’re not, of course, and I think it’s important to analyze them in separate buckets,” he added.
A delegate holds a sign with ‘Vance’ penciled in as Republican US vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance arrives on the floor during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
“If we’re going to support Israel, as I think that we should, we have to articulate a reason why it’s in our best interest,” the Republican senator continued.
“A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means that a majority of citizens of this country think that their Savior — and I count myself a Christian — was born and died and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory on the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous,” Vance said.
He has spoken ardently in favor of giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the political space to determine on its own how to operate, be it with its judicial overhaul last year or the prosecution of its war against Hamas.
“The people who say they love democracy are actively pressuring Israel to give up their democracy to judicial supremacy. Almost all of the ‘democracy’ worship in Washington is from elites who hate when the people dare to disagree with them,” Vance tweeted in March 2023, tearing into Biden for criticizing Netanyahu’s effort to radically curb the Israeli legal branch’s power.
He again repudiated Biden’s Gaza war policy in a May interview with CNN, arguing that the US should not be dictating to Israel how it should be fighting against the Hamas terror group following the latter’s October 7 massacre.
“I think that our attitude vis-a-vis the Israelis should be, look, we’re not good at micromanaging Middle Eastern wars, the Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute this war the way they see fit,” he said.
US Senator JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, right, points toward Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump at a campaign rally, March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)
He conceded that “Palestinian civilian casualties [are] a real issue,” but said Hamas is responsible for them and that the only solution to addressing the high reported death toll in Gaza is by dismantling Hamas as “a viable military organization.”
“You’re never going to defeat the ideology of Hamas, but you can root out those commanders, those final military-trained battalions, and I think you should empower the Israelis to do it,” Vance said.
While he has pushed back at efforts to criticize Israel, he has voiced concern regarding its future following the October 7 onslaught.
“I’m very worried about Israel – very worried about it as a country [because] I think what’s happened the last couple months has revealed deep fissures in Israel’s support around the world,” Vance told Politico in March.
And while the Republican senator has criticized Biden, he echoed the president’s hope that Israel not repeat some of the mistakes that the US made after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I have a big fear for Israel, right now, it’s [about] the same exact dynamic – that they’re going to need to try to f**k something else up, because the psychology impact of October 7 was so, so powerful,” Vance said.
Republican US vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance is introduced during the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Meanwhile, Vance has backed expanding the Abraham Accord normalization agreements Trump brokered between Israel and several Arab states in 2020.
“Our goal in the Middle East should be to allow the Israelis to get to some good place with the Saudi Arabians and other Gulf Arab states,” he said in the CNN interview in May.
“There is no way that we can do that unless the Israelis finish the job with Hamas. If they can’t even do that, the attitude in the Middle East will be, ‘You can’t trust these guys, they’re not pursuing their own national security.’ So we’ve got to let them finish this job, and I think hopefully, on the other end of it, get to a new era in the Middle East,” he added, echoing stances voiced by Netanyahu.
The Biden administration has also tried to build on the Abraham Accords, while arguing that Trump advanced those agreements at the expense of the Palestinians, which exacerbated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Vance would likely take a different approach. Asked whether he backs a two-state solution during a primary debate ahead of his 2022 Senate election, Vance went further than any other Republican candidate in distancing himself from the framework, saying he’d defer to Israel on the matter.
Vance instead views the Abraham Accords as “the perfect way of building a counterpoint to the Iranians in the Middle East.”
Republican US vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance gestures toward Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, right, during the first day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
He visited Israel for the first time shortly after he was elected in 2022 to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference.
The young senator gained national attention with his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling account of his Appalachian family and modest Rust Belt upbringing, which gave a voice to rural, working-class resentment in left-behind America.
Vance was harshly critical of Trump before and after Trump’s 2016 election win against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, calling him an “idiot” and “America’s Hitler,” among other epithets.
But as Vance geared up for a successful run for the US Senate in Ohio in 2022, he transformed into one of the former president’s most consistent defenders, supporting Trump even when some Senate colleagues declined to do so.
Vance defended Trump amid criticism of the former president’s claim that Jewish Democrats hate their religion and Israel.
“Do I think it’s reasonable to look at this situation and say that if you’re a Jewish American who cares about the State of Israel, who cares about these antisemitic riots, and say you should be on the side of Republicans in 2024 because they govern effectively on some of the issues that you care about? I think it’s a totally reasonable argument to make,” he said in the CNN interview.
A month earlier, he slammed the anti-Israel Gaza encampments as they sprung up on campuses across the US.
Far-left activists launch a March on the RNC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 15, 2024. (Jacob Magid/Times of Israel)
“My view on the campus protests is very simple: I don’t care what your cause is, whether you’re pro- or anti-Israel or anything else. You don’t get to turn our public places into a garbage dump. No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them,” Vance tweeted.
But the firebrand lawmaker has also employed what some watchdogs have warned are antisemitic dog whistles, claiming in 2022 that Jewish billionaire and philanthropist to progressive causes George Soros would send “a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.”
Commenting on the participants of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Vance said: “This neo-Nazi movement is actually really driven by well-to-do, middle-class folks, people who have a good education.”
The 2017 protest saw white nationalists surround counter-protesters, shouting “Jews will not replace us!” and throwing burning tiki torches at them. The next day, an avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler rammed his car into a crowd, killing one woman and injuring 19.
Howie Beigelman, the CEO of Ohio Jewish Communities, which lobbies state officials, has said that Vance is a respectful interlocutor who listens to those who differ with him. “He’s always met with Ohio’s Jewish community, always taken meetings with pro-Israel advocates & given us probably the most unvarnished legislative truths,” Beigelman said on X earlier this month.
Vance came under fire from his 2022 rival, former Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, for accepting an endorsement from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a champion of the far right. She has repeatedly offended Jewish sensibilities by trivializing the Holocaust and peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Beigelman at the time told Jewish Insider that Vance, in a meeting with Jewish community leaders, said that his way of confronting bigotry was “doing it in the way most likely to affect change, which isn’t always a public reprimand.”
Agencies contributed to this report.
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