Vance Wants the Jews to Keep Quiet

Vice President J.D. Vance wants the Jews to keep quiet.

At his June 18 press conference, Vance was asked whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized the Trump administration’s agreement with Iran.

The vice president could have simply said “No.” Instead, he seized the opportunity to blast several Israeli cabinet ministers who have expressed concern about America’s surprising concessions to Iran.

“Anybody in Israel” who doubts President Trump’s support for the Jewish state “needs to wake up,” the vice president said. He warned the cabinet ministers that they “should not be attacking” the Iran deal, since the U.S. is “the only powerful ally” that Israel has “anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance is not the first political leader to lose his temper because somebody, somewhere, criticized a policy of his. And it’s not the first time the vice president has tried to bully an American ally through the tactic of public shaming.

Recall how he tried to humiliate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky last year by haranguing him in front of the news media, falsely accusing the Ukrainians of “not being grateful” for the assistance America has given them.

Israeli leaders have been the targets of such diplomatic ambushes on more than one occasion. In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tried to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to make risky concessions to Egypt, by telling reporters (as “a senior American official”) that Rabin was being “intransigent” and therefore the U.S. had no choice but to “reassess” its relationship with Israel. That included suspending American arms shipments to Israel for several months.

In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker—acting on a suggestion made by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—sarcastically recited the White House telephone number in front of the news media and declared that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir should call “when he is serious about peace.”

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush tried to intimidate American Jews who were seeking U.S. loan guarantees for Israel. He complained to reporters that he was “one lonely little guy” who was surrounded by “something like a thousand lobbyists.”

In 2010, President Barack Obama abruptly left a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu and kept him waiting for hours while he went to dine with the First Lady and their children. Obama’s aides then leaked the snub to reporters to show how the president had put the Israeli leader in his place.

Seven years ago, I wrote a book called The Jews Should Keep Quiet (published by the Jewish Publication Society and University of Nebraska Press). The title was a close paraphrase of something that President Franklin D. Roosevelt said to the era’s foremost American Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, on multiple occasions when he wanted to prevent the Jewish community from criticizing his policies regarding Jewish refugees or Zionism.

In one instance, President Roosevelt spoke to Wise about “the necessity of Jews lying low.” On another occasion, FDR warned Wise that if Jewish leaders were too vocal, it would “enable Americans to say that the fellows who wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some justification.”

Roosevelt’s strategy of intimidation was successful. Rabbi Wise refrained from publicly challenging the administration’s abandonment of European Jewry, and even declined to support several pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist congressional resolutions because FDR opposed them.

It sounds as if Vice President Vance is hoping for a similar outcome today. If so, he’s likely to be disappointed. Today’s American Jewish community is not the same as that of the 1930s and 1940s. The U.S. Jewish protest movements for Israel and Soviet Jewry demonstrated that this is a generation committed to not repeating the mistakes of earlier times.

Israeli cabinet ministers and American friends of Israel alike understand that speaking their minds is part and parcel of a democratic society. Given the dire threats facing Israel and world Jewry today, keeping quiet is not an option.

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. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.