Vice President JD Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was recently published in Hebrew, giving Israelis an opportunity to understand this rising star in American politics. The bottom line: be careful, because Vance is not the Republican of old.
I explained why in my Shabbat column for Israel Hayom, an excerpt of which is below. You can read the piece on Israel Hayom’s website here.
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When Barack Obama rose like a meteor in American politics, Israelis too looked at him in wonder. He radiated charisma, yet offered almost no public views on the Middle East. Benjamin Netanyahu, for one, simply hoped that Hillary Clinton would not be the Democratic nominee — he didn’t care a great deal who would be in her place. In the end, that “whoever” turned out to be one of the toughest American presidents Israel has ever faced: from the settlement freeze, to the Iran nuclear deal, to the refusal to veto a UN Security Council resolution in his final weeks in office.
The lesson: get to know the next “meteor” — and how they think.
One serious contender for that title is Vice President JD Vance. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was recently published in Hebrew, is an invaluable guide for Israelis. Until I read it, I couldn’t grasp how a bearded, previously relatively unknown politician was crushing every rival for the 2028 Republican nomination and leading the polls by a mile.
Vance — second only to Obama, and quietly an admirer of him, as the book makes clear — is the updated embodiment of the American Dream, even if his telling of it sounds more like a nightmare. He paints the country’s forgotten corners and the hardships of the white “hillbilly” communities across the Rust Belt, tracing its migration from the Democratic left to the conservative right. If Obama’s message was that America is the land of unlimited opportunity, Vance’s is that it’s the land of impossible limitations: social mobility barely exists, and his own rise is the exception, not the rule.
Raised in a Democratic household, today Vance is the right’s most effective messenger to swing voters — a hybrid of Ben Shapiro and Barack Obama.
From Obama’s earliest statements, it was clear that he viewed the world through an oppressor-oppressed lens, which bode ill for Israel. Until his very last day in office, he saw Israelis as colonialists and Palestinians as the native population. In his controversial 2009 Cairo speech — an address that helped ignite the Tahrir Square revolution and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood — he told his audience that Israel was essentially compensation for the Holocaust.
And while Vance’s book barely touches on foreign policy, it still offers lessons about the new Republican Party. It supports Israel, but the warmth is largely platonic. The prevailing view is this: every spare dollar belongs at home, not in grand projects abroad. There is respect for strength and a deep distrust of radical Islam (don’t forget Vance’s suggestion that Britain is “the first truly Islamist country to get a nuclear weapon”), but no appetite for blank checks or an endless supply of weapons.
Israel’s challenge with the new Republicans is not hostility, it’s indifference, and Jerusalem needs to prepare for that reality now, perhaps by phasing out American security aid, just as Netanyahu ended civilian aid three decades ago.
Israel must start speaking the language of partnership, not patronage — of mutual benefit and joint security innovation. The old Republican Party was steeped in the Bible; the new one also keeps a hand on the gun.
