J.D. Vance’s Israel Comment Puts Him in Strange Company

Vice President J.D. Vance’s response to an antisemitic college student this week raises troubling questions.

Following his speech at an Oct. 30 rally on the campus of the University of Mississippi, the vice president was asked by a student whether Israel or its supporters are secretly shaping President Trump’s Mideast policy.

Vance replied that the fact that Trump recently “applied leverage to the State of Israel” (to make concessions to Hamas) proves that “when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States.”

Vance seemed to leave open the possibility that he believes Israel or Jews may have “manipulated or controlled” previous presidents. If that is what the vice president intended to say, he has placed himself in some very undesirable company.

Extremist Arab leaders have been circulating slurs about Jewish control of U.S. presidents for many decades. They were staples in the rhetoric of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria’s Hafez Assad, and Libya’s Muammar Gadaffii, among others.

During the administration of Bill Clinton, the Palestinian Authority’s official daily newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, declared: “Washington’s decisions are not made in the White House, which is busy cleaning up its bedrooms, but in the offices of Netanyahu, who is feverishly trying to recruit America and its allies to serve the hated agenda of Torah.” (March 25, 1998)

Likewise, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu, which rejoiced over the 9/11 attacks, claimed President Clinton “would make no decision without getting the approval” of “the childish Jewess Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, [who] spared no efforts in her support for Israel.”   (Nov. 3, 2002)

An editorial in the PA’s Al-Hayat Al-Jadida during the George W. Bush administration declared that “the Zionist lobby runs even over the bedrooms of the senior Members of Congress and the White House. It whips them in the morning and evening for fear lest they awaken from their servitude. It castrates them and supplies them with ‘Viagra Monica’.” (Aug. 29, 2001)

Such slurs have continued in more recent years. Ilhan Omar tweeted in 2012 that “Israel has hypnotized the world,” including, presumably, Barack Obama, who was then president. Kamala Harris’s director of Arab-American outreach, Brenda Abdelall, last year accused “Zionists” of “controlling a lot” of American politics.

One of the loudest voices claiming Israel or American Jews have controlled some U.S. presidents is a left-of-center critic of Vice President Vance—Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. Friedman has described Vance’s statements on other issues as “venomous” and “contemptuous.”

But Friedman must have been delighted to hear what Vance said about Israel and U.S. presidents. After all, in a column on February 5, 2004, Friedman asserted that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office…surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, [and] by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates…”

Friedman claimed Sharon, Jewish lobbyists, Cheney, and unidentified “political handlers” were “all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing [unfavorable to Israel].”

Sometimes, the slurs have focused on Congress rather than the White House, but it’s the same antisemitic imagery of Jews controlling the U.S. government.

Thus Friedman claimed in a Dec. 13, 2011 column that the standing ovations which Israel’s prime minister received in Congress that year were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” In a Nov. 19, 2013, article, Friedman wrote that “many American lawmakers [will] do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”

In the same spirit, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) asserted in January 2019 that congress members who support Israel “forgot what country they represent,” meaning, in effect, that they are controlled by Israel. Rep. Omar followed the next month by tweeting that U.S. support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins, baby,” accusing American supporters of Israel of bribing members of Congress.

These are not the kind of individuals or sentiments with which one would expect Vice President Vance to align himself. Like Friedman, Tlaib and Omar have been strongly critical of Vance on various issues.

It’s not too late for the vice president to state clearly that he did not mean to suggest that Israel or Jews controlled previous American presidents. Until he does so, that troubling and dangerous impression will stand.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.)