As part of his round of media appearances JD Vance was asked today about critics of Donald Trump’s Iran deal in the Israeli government. 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. 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.
Just on the facts it’s pretty hard to disagree. This is not only an example of how fast things can change for you in Trumpworld. It is also a perfect illustration of how your own loyalism, your own Trumpiness almost always gets wheeled around and used against it as soon as you zig when you were supposed to zag. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has left Israel marvelously exposed and isolated. And he seems increasingly likely to pay the price for that in October.
And what is Israel going to do now? Leverage its relationships with Democrats to push back against Trump’s diktats? Good luck with that.
For decades, it was central to Israeli geopolitical and security doctrines that it needed to maintain strong ties with both dominant political parties in the United States. Needless to say that has changed pretty dramatically.
Let me sound one discordant note. There’s a decent argument that the Trump-Netanyahu alliance isn’t really matter of personalities. It’s the inevitable result of the increasingly rightist/authoritarian bent of Israeli politics and the growth of authoritarianism within the American Republican Party. There’s real truth to that. But Netanyahu leaned into that in ways that transcend those structural realities. He made his primary interlocutor in the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship a former GOP Republican operative, under Republican and Democratic administrations. In the most noteworthy example, he connived with House Republicans not only to meddle in U.S. domestic politics but to gratuitous insult and humiliate the then-President, Barack Obama. In those and countless other ways, he’s made Israel as a political and geopolitical force into a sidecar of the Republican Party.
As I and many others noted at the time, young Americans love President Obama (that was certainly true in 2015). They are different ideologically and demographically than previous generations of Americans. You are providing a lesson to a generation of young Americans who will now see Israel through the prism of this gratuitous insult to a beloved, Black president. Now you have a generation of Americans who see Israel almost entirely through the prism of that snub, Gaza and the country’s general role as Donald Trump’s best friend.
And here we are. Trump and Vance are both now saying to Netanyahu and really the whole country: don’t fuck with us. We’re all you’ve got. And they’re mostly right.
