US Press
Vance courts pro-Israel Republicans without disowning Tucker Carlson
Image credit: Official Vice Presidential portrait of JD Vance, March 2026 — Executive Office of the Vice President via Wikimedia Commons (public domain) · License
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The American vice-president spent Monday night trying to reassure the Republican party's pro-Israel donors, and left the room without saying the one thing several of them had come to hear.
JD Vance addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition's leadership summit behind closed doors, Politico reported. He praised the United States' relationship with Israel, spoke against rising antisemitism and drew a standing ovation. He also told the room that not everybody in it would agree with him about the podcasters he keeps company with.
He did not denounce Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host whose programme has hosted Holocaust deniers and who argues against American support for Israel. The Washington Post's account of the evening was headlined on his sidestepping of that question.
The rebuke from his own party#
Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, answered him publicly the next day.
"In life, you must choose a side," she said, in remarks reported by The Hill. "You are either with the Tucker Carlson wing of the country or you are with the pro-Israel wing of the country. You can't be both."
The reactions split along the same line. The Washington Examiner reported that Vance had won over Republican Jews who had been hesitant about him; Jewish Insider recorded a speech against antisemitism that avoided the controversy; the MAGA broadcaster Sid Rosenberg complained that Vance had a chance to hammer Carlson and did not take it.
What a Palestinian reader should take from it#
The fight is real and it is about Israel. A vice-president with an interest in the 2028 nomination calculated that he could not afford to break with the wing of his coalition that questions American support for Israel — and calculated equally that he could not afford to say so in front of donors.
That is a measurable change from a decade in which the question did not arise inside a Republican room.
The limit is just as measurable. Nobody in this argument was arguing about Palestinians. Haley's two sides are both American factions, defined by their posture toward Israel; the Palestinians under the policy being debated are the one constituency with no wing in the room.
The debate that Joe Kent opened when he resigned from the National Counterterrorism Center in March, blaming the Iran war on pressure from Israel and its American lobby, has now reached the vice-president's podium. It has not yet reached the subject of what American weapons do in Gaza.
