When I published “For Truth’s Sake: Love Vance,” I was not claiming that JD Vance secretly hated Israel. My argument was more structural and therefore more troubling: his support for Israel was instrumental. Israel appealed to the America First movement for as long as it supplied an image of the border state, militarized sovereignty, political force, and a West supposedly cured of hesitation. It was admired not as a complex political society, but as a usable symbol.

That distinction now matters. In his conversation with Joe Rogan, the vice president of the United States claimed that Jeffrey Epstein had connections to the highest levels of both American and Israeli intelligence. He presented no documents, cited no verifiable evidence, and made no distinction between social contact, political access, recruitment, and operational control. Yet he introduced the allegation into the language of executive power, and that is the real political event.

An unsupported hypothesis does not become a fact because it is delivered calmly into an expensive microphone. But once it is voiced by a sitting vice president, it ceases to be merely another internet theory. It acquires the prestige of office, the aura of privileged knowledge, and the force of mass circulation. Millions of listeners will not remember Vance’s qualifications. They will remember that the vice president connected Epstein to Israeli intelligence.

The asymmetry of suspicion

What matters most is the asymmetry with which Vance distributes innocence and suspicion. When Rogan raised the possibility that Israel had used Epstein-related material to blackmail Donald Trump, Vance rejected the suggestion. He said he had seen no credible evidence implicating the president and described the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files chiefly as a communications mistake. He also suggested that the most important evidence may have been destroyed long ago.

Trump therefore receives the presumption of innocence, while Israel receives an atmosphere of guilt. The American administration merely communicated badly. American institutions misplaced or withheld documents. American agencies may have permitted evidence to disappear, and American elites protected Epstein for decades. Yet the hidden agency behind the scandal is displaced onto a foreign power.

This is not merely a careless........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)