Dear Friends,
This past week, Vice President JD Vance announced a "deconfliction mechanism" — a communications forum, he explained, so that when "a junior guy fires a drone that didn't have approval from the high command," Israel and Hezbollah can talk it through before things spiral. He seemed genuinely proud of this. I was speechless.
Hezbollah is not a militia with a rogue fringe and a moderate leadership that sometimes loses control of its troops. Hezbollah exists for one purpose: to attack Israel and kill Jews. That is not my characterization — it is their own founding manifesto, written in 1985, which pledges total loyalty to Iran's Supreme Leader and calls for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion of Western influence from Lebanon. There are no "junior guys" firing unauthorized drones. There is only an organization whose entire reason for existing is to wage war against the Jewish state.
When JD Vance describes a mechanism to "talk it through" with Hezbollah after an escalation, he is treating a genocidal terror organization like a misunderstood neighbor. It would be funny if it weren't so dangerous.
The Lebanon deconfliction agreement itself is even worse than Vance's words suggested. The deal — brokered by Qatar and Pakistan — doesn't include Israel at all. It's a direct US-Iran track. Israel, which has been fighting in Lebanon, which has lost soldiers there, which has endured thousands of rockets and drones fired at its northern towns, was not in the room. And yet the agreement contains language committing to "an immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon." The United States negotiated over what Israel can and cannot do — without Israel's knowledge or consent.
When Israeli cabinet ministers said they didn't consider themselves bound by this deal, Vance went to the podium and told them to remember who paid for their Iron Dome.
That argument deserves an honest answer. Yes, two-thirds of the specific air defense weapons used in recent months were manufactured in America. But 75% of U.S. military aid to Israel must by law be spent on American weapons — generating an estimated $40 billion a year for the American economy. The 2016 Obama-era MOU phased out Israel's ability to spend any of that aid on its own defense industry, redirecting over a billion dollars a year away from Israeli factories and into American contractors. And annual U.S. military aid amounts to just 8.4% of Israel's $45 billion defense budget. You don't get to engineer dependency and then cite that dependency as proof of generosity.
Vance also said that Trump is "the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel." There is real truth in this, and Israeli politicians would do well to remember it — the relationship with Trump matters enormously, and gratuitous public attacks on him serve no one. But sympathy for Israel does not mean that every decision made in Washington is right for Israel. Israel was not party to this agreement. It was not in the negotiations. It never saw a draft. When Israeli ministers said they didn't consider themselves bound by it, that was not an attack on the president. It was a country insisting on its own sovereignty. America first. Israel first. That is how genuine alliances work.
The lesson here is one Israel has known for decades but not yet fully acted on: full strategic independence is not optional. Israel must build its own defense industry, reduce its reliance on American weapons, and make clear that Israeli security decisions are made in Jerusalem. Netanyahu has already called for phasing out the aid relationship. The $3.8 billion is already shrinking as a percentage of Israel's actual defense spending. The direction is right. The pace needs to be faster. Because when even a friendly administration can use military assistance as a lever to silence Israeli objections to a bad deal, that lever needs to go.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki
Executive Director, Israel365 Action
