CLARITY
The Israeli Response to Vance
Michael Oren
July 9, 2026

…What they should have asked, “is JD Vance right when he said that Israel “can’t just kill [its] way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]’?” The answer is adamantly “no!” The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly, and historically, false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it. Their response was the three “no”s—no recognition, no negotiation, no peace. This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch-terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him. READ MORE