The spectacle of J.D. Vance, the American vice-presidential hopeful, presuming to lecture Benjamin Netanyahu on his errors is a grotesque pantomime of intellectual decadence.
It is a sign of our times: men who have never faced a mortar round or a diplomatic crisis acting as if they possess the keys to Solomon’s wisdom. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, ever the smug occupant of a moral high ground it abandoned long ago, maintains its ‘firm stance’ on Israel relations: a posture of feigned even-handedness that fools only the credulous. We have seen this before.
It is the fall of Rome, dressed in Savile Row suits and Twitter threads. Vance’s critique of Netanyahu’s strategy is not without merit, but it is delivered from a position of such profound historical ignorance that it becomes a weapon of self-harm. He speaks of errors as if the Middle East were a chessboard, not a graveyard of empires.
The UK, for its part, clings to the illusion that it can mediate with clean hands, forgetting that its own record in Palestine is stained with the blood of the Balfour Declaration and the broken promises of the Mandate. We are witnessing a contest of moral vanity, where both sides compete to appear more righteous while achieving nothing of substance. The real problem is not Netanyahu’s errors or Vance’s hubris.
It is the collective failure to understand that the Jewish state exists in a neighbourhood where error is a luxury and survival demands a ruthlessness that polite society refuses to acknowledge. Until we stop pretending that the rules of Victorian liberalism apply to the Middle East, we will continue to produce lectures like Vance’s and bulletins like this one: hollow, self-satisfied, and utterly irrelevant.
