Vance and the War in Gaza

Vance wants to let Israel "prosecute this war the way they see fit.”

J.D. Vance sometimes talks like a non-interventionist, but most of his foreign policy positions don’t match his rhetoric. The other day, he was talking about foreign conflicts and he said, “Sometimes, it is just none of our business and we ought to stay out of it.” That is a reasonable and defensible position, and I agree with it, but that can’t be squared with Vance’s own support for the war in Gaza and his calls for Israel to “finish the job.” If ever there were a time for the U.S. to “stay out of it,” it is when a U.S. client is waging a monstrous war that kills tens of thousands of civilians while they also create a man-made famine.

U.S. weapons and support have been essential to Israel’s military campaign, so it’s not as if we can pretend that the U.S. hasn’t enabled the horrors in Gaza. The only involvement that the U.S. should have here is to use its leverage to press for a lasting ceasefire and to stop the slaughter and starvation. Instead Vance wants to “let them prosecute this war the way they see fit.” Well, this is how the Israeli government has chosen to prosecute the war, according to the account of two American surgeons that went to Gaza to help treat victims of the war:

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

One of the surgeons, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, also spoke to CBS News this week about what he had seen:

And the civilian casualties, he said, are almost exclusively children. "I've never seen that before," he said. "I've seen more incinerated children than I've ever seen in my entire life, combined. I've seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority. We've taken shrapnel as big as my thumb out of eight-year-olds. And then there's sniper bullets. I have children that were shot twice."

"You're saying that children in Gaza are being shot by snipers?" asked Smith.

"Definitively," said Dr. Perlmutter.

The U.S. should have no part in such atrocities. Vance believes otherwise.

Supporting this war is profoundly wrong and it is harmful to American interests. It is exactly the sort of war that a principled non-interventionist would denounce and fight to end. Vance doesn’t do that. He has no problem with it and thinks the only problem with Biden’s policy is that it doesn’t provide Israel with enough support. He makes all the same excuses for the Israeli government’s war crimes and crimes against humanity that you would expect to hear from the most zealous hardliners.

The U.S. has been deeply involved in this war from the beginning. Our government’s support for Israel has been critical to their ability to wage the war. U.S. weapons transfers have been massive and constant. Those weapons have been used in indiscriminate attacks on the people of Gaza for more than nine months. If the U.S. halted arms transfers, the Israeli military would find it much harder to continue their war. The U.S. may not have troops on the ground in Gaza, but it owns this war because of its extensive backing.

Support for the war has also exposed American forces in the region to attack. The U.S. is at considerable risk of getting into a wider unnecessary regional war because of its continued support. The U.S. also has started a new conflict with the Houthis rather than put pressure on the Israeli government to end its war. So much for Vance’s theory that backing Israel to the hilt will allow the U.S. to play a smaller role in the region.

Vance talks a good game about putting American interests first, but no American interests are served by any of this. He rails against past U.S. foreign policy disasters in the Middle East while he cheers on a new one. When it comes right down to it, he supports a policy that damages U.S. interests and reputation for the sake of backing a government run by war criminals as it displaces, kills, and starves innocent people.