Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who former President Donald Trump announced as his vice presidential partner, believes the United States should want Israel to complete its war against Hamas “as quickly as possible.”
Vance, during his debut television interview as Trump’s running mate, echoed previous sentiments from the former president, arguing, “You want Israel to get this war over and as quickly as possible” because the longer it goes on, the more difficult it becomes.
“Joe Biden’s made it harder and harder for Israel to win that war,” he told Sean Hannity. “The longer it goes on, the harder their situation becomes. But second, after the war, you want to reinvigorate that peace process between Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Jordanians, and so forth.”
Trump shared that sentiment back in April when he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Israel has “to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to — you have to get back to normalcy and peace.”
The former president, in that interview, said Israel was “absolutely losing the PR war,” and he added, “They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down. And people are imagining there’s a lot of people in those buildings, or people in those buildings, and they don’t like it.”
During the first Trump administration, the U.S. was able to formalize normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan. The Biden administration has sought to further those efforts with a major normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia but Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza derailed those efforts.
Current U.S. officials, including President Joe Biden, have speculated that Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack — which included the murder of roughly 1,200 people and the kidnapping of roughly 250 others — was an attempt to halt those negotiations.
Israeli leaders have said their military objectives in their war against Hamas are to demilitarize the terrorist group and remove them from power in the strip. But there are questions about whether the ideology can, in fact, be defeated militarily.
Over the course of the war, which has spanned nearly 10 months, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 people, and estimates from even Israeli officials indicate that at least half of them were civilians. Hamas intentionally embeds itself within and underneath civilian populations in Gaza, putting them at risk in any Israeli military operation, which is a war crime, but that does not obfuscate Israel’s responsibilities under international law to protect them.
The Biden administration has repeatedly argued that the Israeli military needed to take more precautions to protect civilians, going as far as to hold up a shipment of large bombs that the administration did not want Israel to use in the densely populated areas of Gaza. Biden also threatened to withhold future offensive military aid if they carried out a complete ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, where more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering, though it was Hamas’s last remaining stronghold.
“What Biden has done is the worst of all possible worlds. He’s prolonged the war, Israel’s war to actually take out Hamas, but in the process has made it harder for us to really move toward a sustainable peace,” Vance added.
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Back in March, prior to his selection as Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator expressed concern that Israel could be going through its own version of what the U.S. experienced in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“A more short-term worry that I have with Israel is that something analogous to what happened after 9/11 will happen, right?” Vance told Politico. “And I worry about that with Israel. I think the Hamas thing — obviously, there are a lot of civilians who have died — but Israel expected to lose more troops going into this, and I think they’ve had a more successful military operation than they expected to. And if I have a big fear for Israel, right now, it’s [about] the same exact dynamic — that they’re going to need to try to f*** something else up, because the psychology impact of Oct. 7 was so, so powerful.”