US Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that Israel \u201ccan\u2019t just kill\u201d its way out of its national security challenges and defended President Donald Trump\u2019s position that Iran should be permitted to retain some ballistic missiles for self-defense under the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Washington and Tehran. <\/p>\n
Vance delivered a series of criticisms of Israel\u2019s military strategy and of Israeli opposition to the MoU, which was signed digitally by President Trump on Wednesday night in Versailles. <\/p>\n
Speaking to The New York Times, Vance characterized Israel\u2019s response to the agreement as a \u201cfreakout\u201d stemming from \u201cmistrust.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cI find this whole freakout in Israel a little bit odd because I think that it comes from a place of mistrust, and I think that America has earned the trust of that region of the world,\u201d Vance said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve done a very good job by that particular country, and that particular government, and I think that the idea that we\u2019ve made a terrible deal is not supported by the facts, but just doesn\u2019t make any sense if you consider the broad length of the relationship,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Vance defended the MoU while indicating that the United States intends to move forward with the agreement without placing heavy weight on Israeli concerns, despite Israel having fought the war alongside the United States. <\/p>\n
He described Israeli concerns over concessions to Iran as a \u201cweird panic\u201d and said any measures favorable to Tehran, including sanctions relief, would be conditioned on Iran\u2019s \u201cbehavior.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cThere is this weird panic almost in the Israeli system that I\u2019ve picked up on where they assume that everything that is contemplated that is good for Iran will happen \u2014 but that will happen without the Iranians changing any behavior. And I just don\u2019t know why anybody would think that\u2019s true.\u201d <\/p>\n
While noting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has avoided directly criticizing the MoU, Vance pointed to other Israeli officials, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who have strongly condemned the deal. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s clear that large segments of the Israeli political system and population are very sensitive about this deal,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I also think they\u2019re picking up on some misinformation about the deal and running with it and sort of panicking about it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Addressing Israeli critics of the agreement, Vance said: \u201cI guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You\u2019re a country of nine million people. You can\u2019t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.\u201d (Vance incorrectly stated the population of Israel at nine million, when the correct number is 10 million.) <\/p>\n
During a press conference, Vance also defended President Trump\u2019s remark on Wednesday that Iran should be allowed to retain some of its ballistic missiles. He appeared to equate Iran\u2019s right to self-defense with Israel\u2019s. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll the president said yesterday is that, of course, regional countries don\u2019t give up the right of self-defense,\u201d Vance says. <\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael doesn\u2019t give up the right of self-defense if Hezbollah fires rockets or drones at Israel,\u201d he continues. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell the country, whether Israel or Iran, they\u2019re not allowed to have any self-defense.\u201d <\/p>\n
Vance said Israel had destroyed much of Iran\u2019s ballistic missile capabilities and argued that the agreement would prevent Iran from building \u201cthe kind of missiles that can broadly threaten the entire world.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cAs part of the final deal, what we want to see is Iran not funding regional instability, funding regional terrorism, and of course, [not] trying to rebuild their nuclear weapons program.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that Israel \u201ccan\u2019t just kill\u201d its way out of its national…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-499661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}