Supporters of the administration’s Mideast policies were surely excited to see JD Vance in Israel today embracing the Jewish state and selling the cease-fire deal. But the visit also answered the question of how specifically Vance can help sell the deal: He is very good at telling people to calm down, and that message is useful at this moment.
Speaking in Kiryat Gat, flanked by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Vance addressed media skepticism right out of the gate: “There is this weird attitude I’ve sensed in the American media, in the Western media, where there’s almost this desire to root for failure—that every time something bad happens, that every time that there’s an act of violence, there’s this inclination to say, oh, this is the end of the ceasefire, this is the end of the peace plan. It’s not the end. It is, in fact, exactly how this is going to have to happen when you have people who hate each other who have been fighting against each other for a very long time. We are doing very well. We are in a very good place. We’re going to have to keep working on it, but I think we have the team to do exactly that.”
How Vance would approach “the Israel issue” if he were to become president is the subject of much speculation. He is far less comfortable with an active U.S. role on the world stage than Trump is. And when it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, Vance’s “What, me worry?” mien is rarely a point in his favor.
Take, for example, Vance’s response to the leak of the anti-Semitic and racist text messages from a Young Republicans group chat. “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”
Well, some of these were political officials in their thirties. And certainly there were no minors in the chat. But the other problem with Vance’s dismissiveness was that the pipeline of young conservative talent really does have an “edgy chat” problem. Treating this behavior as acceptable up through the age of 35 is a great way to ensure that it continues.
But Vance’s habit of telling the political world to calm down can be put to more productive uses, as his Kiryat Gat press conference shows. The vice president was there to inaugurate a “civilian-military cooperation center” intended to be part of a multinational rebuilding and policing effort in Gaza. It’s possible, therefore, that his projection of calm was meant for Arab states in the region as well.
But from the anti-Hamas perspective, it is of great value for the anti-Zionists in the movement—and the anti-Semites in the group chats—to hear JD Vance tell everyone that Israel is manifestly not putting the cease-fire in danger, and that to suggest otherwise is to root for American failure.
It helps that on this, Vance is right. A skirmish here or there is suboptimal, of course, but it doesn’t mean all-out war. This is a point that Israel needs the U.S. to make clearly. Israel cannot allow Hamas to reach a certain level of strength ever again. This victory needs to stick. That is what will bring peace in the long run. The last thing Israel can afford is for the world to slide back into a pre-October 7 mindset wherein anything that isn’t deemed an existential threat to Israel is dismissed as not worth responding to.
If the cease-fire is to survive, violations must be punished. What most commentators are calling a cease-fire is really about establishing a new status quo. It doesn’t depend on a complete lack of violence but on the maintenance of the power imbalance represented by the terms of the cease-fire agreement. It is far more important that Hamas remains kept in a position of weakness until it can be disarmed entirely, and that will require vigilance.
As Vance said in the presser, “If we get to the point where we’re arguing [about] exactly what the governance structure in Gaza is long term, then we should pat ourselves on the back.”
