JD Vance Shows His True Colors | OPINION

The smiles at Ben Gurion Airport were convincing enough. JD Vance, the Vice President of the United States, touching down in Jerusalem, shaking Bibi's hand, mouthing the right words about Hamas and security and the unbreakable bond between two great democracies. Pro-Israel conservatives cheered. Jewish Republicans exhaled.

They shouldn't have.

Because behind the photo ops and the carefully rehearsed talking points, JD Vance has assembled a record on Israel that should alarm every Jew paying attention - and it is a record written not in rhetoric, but in votes, in silence, and in the cold calculations of a man who has never truly believed America's fate is bound up with Israel's survival.

Start with the money. Vance voted against the post-October 7 $14 billion emergency aid package to Israel, not once, but twice. He voted against it on February 13, 2024, and then again on April 23, 2024, when it finally passed, with most Republicans voting for it. Israel was bleeding. Hamas was still holding hostages. The Jewish state needed American support, and JD Vance said no, twice. That's not a nuanced policy disagreement. That's a statement.

Then there is the silence on antisemitism, which is arguably worse. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Vance's 2026 statement made no mention of Jews, Nazis, antisemitism, or the six million who were murdered. A Holocaust commemoration with no Jews in it. Think about that. When a group chat of Young Republican leaders was exposed for containing jokes about Hitler and gas chambers, Vance declined to condemn it. Jewish conservative activist Sloan Rachmuth put it plainly: Vance had an opportunity to denounce antisemitism amid its historic surge and set an example for young people steering in that direction. He chose not to.

When confronted with an audience member at a conservative campus event who claimed that Judaism supports the "prosecution" of Christianity, Vance responded only that Israel was not "controlling" President Trump, but did not rebut the antisemitic claim about Judaism itself. He could not find the words to defend the Jewish people in that moment. He simply could not get there.

Now we come to the Iran war, the existential crisis of our time, the conflict in which Israel's very existence hangs in the balance. And here the picture of Vance becomes not just troubling but alarming. According to reporting by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, Vance was the most skeptical voice in Trump's inner circle on the Iran strikes, expressing deep reservations about the U.S. joining Israel in launching a regime-change campaign against Tehran. He told the President that voters who backed the Trump-Vance ticket would feel betrayed by another Middle East war, and he raised concerns about the impact on America's munitions stockpile. As Israel faced Iranian missiles raining down from the sky, Vance was in the Situation Room running political calculations about his 2028 base.

The relationship between Vance's team and the Israeli government has since reportedly deteriorated into something darker. Vance's advisers came to believe that Israel was waging a smear campaign to draw him into the conflict, suspecting Israeli officials of spreading disinformation about him because he was insufficiently hawkish.

One administration official told Axios bluntly: "It's an Israeli op against JD." Whether or not that is entirely accurate, the fact that the Vice President's inner circle views the Jewish state as an adversary in an internal Washington power struggle tells you everything about the temperature of that relationship.

Vance reportedly criticized Netanyahu directly, accusing the Israeli prime minister of presenting an overly optimistic picture of how the war with Iran would unfold and arguing that Netanyahu had "exaggerated the possibility of regime change." Perhaps he had a point strategically. But the optics of America's Vice President publicly distancing himself from Israel's war aims, while Israeli soldiers are fighting and dying, is a betrayal of the alliance in all but name.

And through all of this, Vance has cultivated a Republican Party that is drifting away from its historic love of Israel. Favorable views of Israel have declined sharply among young Republicans, with 57% of Republicans ages 18 to 49 now holding favorable views, a stunning erosion of what was once bedrock GOP support. Vance knows this audience. He courts it. At a Turning Point USA event where he was heckled over Middle East policy, Vance told the crowd, "I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East" - and he said he understood. He did not push back. He did not defend Israel.

That is who JD Vance is: a man who understands the drift and does not fight it, because the drift is politically useful to him.

When the Israeli Knesset advanced a bill on Judea and Samaria annexation during his visit to Israel, a symbolic vote, Vance said he "personally" took "some insult" to it, and declared flatly that annexation was not going to happen under the Trump administration. The nerve of it. Jewish politicians, in the Jewish state's parliament, debating the future of the Jewish homeland, and the American Vice President was insulted. Not by Iran's missiles. Not by Hezbollah's tunnels. By Israeli democracy in action.

Just today, he said, "United States and Israel have a lot of shared interests, but we also have some situations where our interests diverge ... We’ve created the space necessary where the president believes - and I think that he’s right - that we can get the long-term settlement to Iran’s nuclear deal. Now, Israel may like that, they may not like that. But fundamentally, we think this is in the best interest of the United States of America.”

There is a word for a friend who votes against your emergency aid, stays silent when people in his own party joke about gas chambers, privately opposes the war being fought for your survival, and calls it an insult when your parliament debates your land.

That word is not "friend."

Israel has paid too dearly, buried too many sons, and built too much from too little to be sentimental about who actually stands with her when the missiles fly. JD Vance has shown us, repeatedly and clearly, where he stands.

It is not with Israel.

The views expressed in this op-ed are the author's own.