“Everyone knows why we lost,” J.D. Vance said yesterday. “The reason we lost was the war.” The post distancing the Vice President from Trump is the most quoted postmortem of the election. But as usual the media have not told the whole story.
Vance also blamed Israel for the Republican debacle. He said that former Trump voters switched sides on Tuesday for four reasons, according to a smart pollster he knows. One was “Change our relationship to Israel.”
Vance’s post echoes the charge by Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, who resigned after Trump and Israel launched the illegal and murderous war against Iran in February. Kent was appalled that Israeli officials who were promoting all the supposed benefits of a war had greater access to Trump than American officials. Prime Minister Netanyahu was in the White House situation room weeks before the war was launched, making a “hard sell” for regime change, The New York Times reported, and as Hillary Clinton later said, Netanyahu pushed the same war throughout the Obama administration. He finally found someone stupid enough to do it.
Trump got “pulled into” the war by Netanyahu, “let’s be clear about that,” Kamala Harris said. Harris understands the dangerous politics better than anyone. Joe Biden committed war crimes by supplying Israel with endless bombs and political support when it was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, killing over 70,000 people including at least 20,000 children. Gaza complicity played a role in Harris’s defeat by Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Now J.D. Vance is doing his utmost to escape Harris’s fate by turning on his president on Israel, well before 2028.
Vance is obviously thinking of Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan. El-Sayed is a Muslim epidemiologist who Trump did everything to smear and libel. El-Sayed barely defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary in August. But in the general election Tuesday El-Sayed crushed Republican Mike Rogers by 52-45, even after Stevens endorsed Rogers in the closing days of the campaign saying that El-Sayed was unfit for the Senate. The reason El-Sayed was supposedly unfit is that he said many critical things about Israel and the Iran war. Israel is “taking us to a war we don’t need to fight,” he said in the spring. And then in a signature moment in a debate with Rogers last month, El-Sayed declined to say which was a “bigger threat” to the United States, Iran or Israel.
For decades, such a statement would have destroyed a candidacy. And this time around, AIPAC and other branches of the Israel lobby spent over $31 million to make sure that no one ever heard El-Sayed’s name again. But the Israel lobby failed miserably, and J.D. Vance took notice.
On CNN last week, the pollster Harry Enten said that bashing Israel wasn’t hurting El-Sayed, it was helping him. Because American attitudes are so negative on Israel. Over 54 percent of all Michigan voters want to reduce or end military aid to Israel. 61 percent of Independent voters back that move.
Enten says that “nationally as well” – voters think we give too much money to Israel, especially military aid. (So when Joel Rubin the Obama aide says on i24 that only the “far left” of the Democratic Party wants to end military aid to Israel, he’s wrong.) For years, this is all that my side has been asking for. For Israel to be an explicit issue in a political race. For Democratic candidates not to be bought by the lobby out of the gate. For the American people to get to weigh in on the question of supporting Israel.
El-Sayed framed the Israel question and he won. The American people spoke, and the American people don’t like Israel.
They have good reason not to do so. Israel committed genocide for years using American weapons and aid. Israel helped push the United States to an illegal and hateful war that began with the slaughter of over 100 children in Minab, and the assassination of the entire political leadership of a foreign country. (Not to mention the escalation of oil prices, which is all that Americans care about, according to the newspapers.)
These attitudes are not being driven by the New York Times’ or Dana Bash and Wolf Blitzer’s “dreamcastle” view of Israel on CNN. They are being driven by the videos coming out of Gaza and the West Bank of the slaughter of children and goats. They are being driven by European opinion, with such leaders as the British defense secretary Wes Streeting saying that Israel is a “pariah state” that espouses “ethnic cleansing” even as it commits “calculated brutality” against women and children.
Everyone in the Democratic Party understands that the ground is slipping under their feet. Liberal Zionists are trying to restrain the anti-Israel currents in American politics. They have urged us not to blame the war on Israel. They are trying to prop up Israel’s image as a supposed democracy even as its leading Jewish parties once again say they want nothing to do with Palestinian voters and all the human rights groups say that Israel is practicing apartheid.
The Israel lobby is trying to make sure that the bigotry of Zionism is never an issue for American voters.
Those days are over. Many young voters were surely thrilled when they heard El-Sayed refuse to say whether Israel or Iran is a greater threat. They see Israel as the greater threat, for good reason.
Support for Israel has damaged too many American presidents and policies for it not to be controversial – from Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush losing second terms in part over opposition to illegal settlements, to the second Bush launching the calamitous Iraq war in part for Israel, to Obama trashing his promise to oppose settlements so as to get a second term, to Genocide Joe Biden, to Trump breaking all his promises to his base to join the war on Iran.
No doubt Israel is in a desperate place. That’s why it is addicted to war. The only way to save its people and Palestinians from further bloodshed is for the U.S. to cut off support and treat it like a normal country. Politicians are finally getting the message.
