Vice President JD Vance condemned Israeli officials on Thursday for criticizing President Donald Trump’s interim Iran agreement, saying they should fall in line with the proposal because they receive support from the United States.
Israel has been leery of the 14-point memorandum of understanding, signed by the U.S. and Iran on Wednesday, in part because it requests that Jerusalem withdraw military forces from Lebanon, where it is fighting Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists.
Vance pushed back during an interview with the New York Times, saying, “I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal?”
“You’re a country of 9 million people,” he said. “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
During a press conference at the White House, also on Thursday, Vance said that Israel owes Trump some gratitude, as he is “the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment.” He warned Israeli members in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet against “attacking the only powerful ally that [it has] anywhere left in the entire world,” arguing that speaking out against the U.S.-backed deal ignores “the reality of the situation.”
“To some of these Cabinet members in Israel who are attacking the president of the United States, the other thing that I would say is that over the last three months, two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected your homeland have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars,” Vance said. “The problem for Israel is not Donald J. Trump, and anybody in Israel who thinks their biggest problem is the President of the United States needs to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that country is in.”
“This does bother me, is that you have seen people within Bibi’s Cabinet who have come out and attacked the deal, and in some ways very personally attacked the President of the United States,” he added. “Bibi, to his credit, has not gone down this path.”
In Israel, leaders ranging from Cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotricht to party leader Yair Golan, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, have expressed a range of concerns over the memorandum of understanding, including that it fails to sufficently target Iran’s nuclear program, stonewalls efforts to wipe out Hezbollah terrorists, and hands over billions to the Iranian regime without sufficient oversight.
“We must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah,” Ben-Gvir wrote on X.
But Vance pushed back against the Israeli leadership on Thursday.
“The Israelis, just like everybody else, have to respect this peace process that is fundamentally good for them and good for the entire region,” he told reporters.
The agreement reached over the weekend and signed on Wednesday is a short-term one designed to get Iran to sign a broader deal, targeting its nuclear program. The MOU halts hostilities and opens the Strait of Hormuz. Over the 60-day period named in the memo, U.S. and Iranian negotiators will continue to hash out disputed details about nuclear weapons, a top concern for Washington, Israel, and other allies.
