US-Israel rift deepens as Vance rebukes critics of Iran deal

WASHINGTON

U.S. Vice President JD Vance has issued an extraordinary rebuke to Israeli critics of the Iran deal, warning them not to alienate their “only powerful ally” left in the world.

The rift between Israel and the United States continues to grow, as Tel Aviv insists on its rejection to halt its attacks on Lebanon.

The two countries jointly launched the war on Iran on Feb. 28, but U.S. President Donald Trump has chastised Israel for continuing attacks on Lebanon that threatened to derail the deal with Tehran.

The newly signed deal to end the Middle East war was already under strain on June 19, after talks in Switzerland were postponed and fighting flared between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Vance told members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet to “wake up and smell the reality,” amid growing tensions between Netanyahu and Trump.

“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time, and he happens to be the head of state of the world superpower,” Vance told reporters in a briefing at the White House on June 18.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance credited Netanyahu for not personally criticizing the deal, but explicitly raised the huge amounts of military aid that the U.S. gives Israel.

“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 added. “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.”

In an interview with the New York Times published on June 18, Vance directly named Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as having attacked the deal.

“I guess my response to them would be, what is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” Vance told the Times.

Trump himself has been increasingly critical of the high death toll from Israeli attacks, particularly on the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon.

“When two drones are shot into the desert and drop harmlessly, you don’t have to knock down buildings in Beirut. They could behave better and frankly they could do a better job,” Trump said in a press conference at the G7 summit in France on June 17.

Trump on June 18 urged Israel and other Middle Eastern countries to stick to the truce.

The developments came after Iran’s supreme leader announced he had only allowed the preliminary deal to the stop war to go ahead despite reservations, and as his top negotiator warned Washington the Islamic Republic stood ready to retaliate in the event of any breach.

Iran’s top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that Tehran would deliver a “decisive response” in the event of “breach of contract” or “excessive demands.”