US Vice President JD Vance on Thursday issued an extraordinary rebuke to Israeli critics of the Iran deal, warning them not to alienate their “only powerful ally” left in the world.
Vance told members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet to “wake up and smell the reality,” amid growing tensions between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. “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, and he happens to be the head of state of the world superpower,” Vance told reporters in a briefing at the White House.
“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.”
Vance credited Netanyahu for not personally criticizing the deal, but explicitly raised the huge amounts of military aid that the United States gives Israel, its key ally in the Middle East. The two countries jointly launched the war on Iran on February 28 but Trump has chastised Israel for continuing attacks on Lebanon that threatened to derail the deal with Tehran.
“Over the last three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars,” Vance added.
“The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump — and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the president of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation.”
In an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, Vance directly named Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as having attacked the deal.
“I guess my response to them would be — what is your exact proposal? You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Vance told the Times.
Trump himself has been increasingly critical of the high death toll from Israeli attacks, particularly on the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.