The morning after Republicans lost Congress, Vice President JD Vance wrote on X that two of the reasons were the Iran war and the American relationship with Israel. He listed four things that would bring back the voters who abandoned the party: end the war in Iran; focus on the cost of living and inflation; put America first; and "change our relationship to Israel." Trump called the post "largely true." President Herzog answered that Israel has great respect for the president and vice president, which is what one says when the other side has just changed the subject.
Because that is what Vance did. His post matters, but not from a Jewish perspective. It matters from an American one, and precisely because it is an evasion.
Here is what it evades. America has become what Joe Biden himself, in 1977, warned it would become if it kept going down the road of engineered integration: a racial jungle. It is now also an identity jungle — a country in which every public question is first sorted by who you are, and only then, if at all, by what is true. A midterm electorate that lists "put America first" and "change our relationship to Israel" in the same breath is not making a foreign-policy judgment. It is reaching for the one item on the menu that lets it name the jungle without naming itself.
And here is the second thing it evades, the one conservatives will not say in public and Jews will not say at all: Jews were among the leaders of the process that built the jungle. The institutions, the law, the universities, the language of grievance as civic virtue — American Jews were not bystanders to any of it. And they still are not. Election after election, a large majority of American Jews vote for the party whose ascendant wing treats Israel as the villain of the identity map and the American tradition as its crime scene. They do this while the same wing marches against the state where their grandparents' survivors live.
So let us say the thing the vice president circled around. From a right-conservative perspective, there is no doubt that Israel and the Jews are a problem. But they are not a problem because of Israel. They are a problem because of what American Jews do in America — and what American Jews do in America has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with a community that chose, two generations ago, to make its home inside the structure of universal grievance, and that cannot now leave it without admitting what the structure has done to the country.
Israel, by contrast, is not a problem for America at all. It is a global asset of the first order — for the dollar, for the empire, for the simple fact that it is the one state in its region whose army, intelligence and technology are permanently aligned with Washington's. Israel is not itself a structure of power. It is what allows power to be consolidated: the fixed point around which the Gulf, the Mediterranean and the American security order can be arranged. A vice president with "realist" views, which is how Vance describes himself, should be the last person to confuse an asset with a liability because the asset is unpopular with the people who built the jungle.
Why, then, does "change our relationship to Israel" poll at all? Because hatred of Israel has a structural organizing power that almost nothing else in politics possesses. The Israeli historian Shulamit Volkov described the mechanism half a century ago, for a different country: antisemitism as a cultural code, a single sign through which a whole cluster of resentments — against liberalism, against modernity, against the city, against the market — could be expressed and recognized at once. Hatred of Israel is that code's present form, and it is stronger than the original, because it is respectable. It can connect the theological and the political inside the social. It can connect the myth to the economy — the sacred victim to the price of gasoline. It can connect the front of the stage, where candidates speak of peace and cost of living, with the back of the stage, where coalitions are actually assembled. No other issue can hold an isolationist nationalist and a campus progressive in the same sentence. That is an enormous power, and anyone who pulls that lever, whether he means to or not, has pulled it.
Vance did not invent this. He noticed it, which is what politicians do, and then he gave it a name that sounded like foreign policy. The honest version of his post would have been longer. It would have said that the war was unpopular because it was expensive; that it was expensive because the country has been living on borrowed money and borrowed myths; that the myths were built with Jewish hands as much as anyone's; and that the one actor in the whole story that owes America nothing it has not already repaid is the state he proposes to hold at arm's length.
American Jews can hear that or not. But they should not expect the right to go on pretending the problem is in Jerusalem when it is in Brooklyn, Cambridge and Los Angeles — and they should not expect the vice president to say so, because he has just shown that he would rather lose the argument than name the jungle.
