Asked in recent television interview whether I thought Vice President JD Vance was right in saying that, apart from the United States, Israel has no friends in the world. I emphatically answered "no," and listed the many friends Israel has in South America, Africa, the Arab Gulf, and, most importantly, India. "It's a country with a population four times that of the U.S.," I explained, "whose leader, Modi, visited Israel a day before the war with Iran to declare his love for Israel on the Knesset stage."
Several days after the interview, Prime Minister Netanyahu was asked the same question about Vance's statement and gave precisely the same answer, similarly stressing our excellent ties with India. But in both cases, the interviewers posed the wrong question. What they should have asked, "is JD Vance right when he said that Israel "can't just kill (its) way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]'"? The answer is even more adamantly: "No!"
The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly and historically false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it.
The peace Israel asked
Their response was the three "no"s—no recognition, no negotiation, no peace. This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him.
Israel is the country which, with the enthusiastic support of Presidents Obama, Biden, and, yes, Trump, tried to avoid war with Hamas by paying it Qatari money.
Israel is the country which, arguably more than any other in the world, has done more to avoid having to kill our way out of our security problems. Still, there are some problems that Israel has no choice but to address with force. As Vice President Vance knows full well, there is no diplomatic solution for Israel's problems with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. With enemies sworn to wipe us off the map, there is no diplomatic option, only defense.
Blood libel in the mainstreams of both parties
But the charge that Israel kills its way out of its problems, beyond being inaccurate and unfair, is a favorite among antisemites. It reflects the same Jew hatred behind the claim that Israel killed 70,000 Palestinians without noting that half that number were terrorists and many civilian deaths were caused by terrorist rockets or natural causes. Those same racists view Israelis as a uniquely evil people who want nothing more than to murder women, children, and journalists.
Alarmingly, the blood libel that Jews kill their way out of security problems has moved from the radical Republican and Democratic fringe to the mainstreams of both parties. This is not to say that Vance has a problem with the Jewish state, but the Jewish state has a problem with the propagation, however inadvertent, of classic antisemitic tropes. Addressing that problem is the responsibility of all Israelis, especially our leaders.
Though we must never cease striving to preserve our crucial alliance with the United States, we must respectfully but forcefully correct American leaders when they spread falsehoods about Israel, defame our national character, and distort our history. Israel has many friends in the world, we must proclaim. Israel defends itself when it must but makes peace whenever it can.
