Where Are the ‘Neocons’? Exposing the Left’s New Anti-Israel Narrative

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

Recently, during the confusion, the anger, the controversy over the memorandum of understanding concerning negotiations that will ensue with the United States and Iran, JD Vance, our vice president, was tasked with visiting the media and being the public spokesman on behalf of the memorandum.  

It wasn’t an enviable job. He’s very skilled. I think we all admire him a great deal. 

But one of the strange things that followed was there was criticism in Israel, and that would be natural. We are a large country and very powerful, and we’re 7,000 miles away from Iran. Israel is a very small country of roughly 10 million people, and it’s right proximate to Iran. So obviously, our ultimate strategic aims and agendas are not always identical. 

But Vance made the argument that there were people in the Israeli Cabinet who were too critical of the deal, and he wanted to kind of slap them down and say, no one likes you in the world except … I should say supports you except us, i.e., you should show more gratitude. 

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Number two, we give you over $3 billion of aid, and 75% of your missile defense is contingent upon us. Donald Trump, see, is your best friend you’ll ever have, as you have acknowledged yourself.  

And fourth, the United States policy is the United States policy. It’s not affected by other people trying to influence it. 

This was kind of extraordinary because in that speech, he was more critical of the Israelis, really, than he was of the Iranians because he talked in the sense that we’re dealing with Iranian moderates, and there are people who might emerge as a new Iran. He didn’t have that tolerance, it seems, for our ally Israel. 

The question of whether Israel is an asset? Yes, we give over $3.5 billion to Israel, but unlike all of the other money that we give—we give $1 billion to Egypt, we give almost $1 billion to Jordan. Both, by the way, are autocracies. They’re not constitutional systems or consensual governments like Israel that’s Western. And we gave $17 billion—$17 billion, six times what we gave Israel—as late as 2023. I think it’s been over $100 billion so far. 

So Israel’s not the only recipient of U.S. aid, but unlike all the other recipients, maybe with the exception of Ukraine lately, it’s a strategic partner. Its intelligence is vital to our knowledge of the Middle East, especially of terrorists, which it shares daily with us. 

It is a laboratory of U.S. weapons. Every day they are flying F-15s, F-16s—latest models of each—F-35s, using Patriot missiles. And almost daily they consult with our people and say, this is what we’ve learned as a flaw. This is what we’ve learned as unrealized advantages. And that knowledge is incorporated into our defense profile. 

Another thing that was—so it is an asset, and this is quite aside from the idea that there are commonalities between Israel and the West in general and the United States in particular.  

We both are part of a long Judeo-Christian moral tradition. We both are consensual governments. We both have freedoms. Israel is not as other nations in the Middle East, threatening death sentences to some people who say they want to break away from their religion.  

You can break away from Judaism if you want in Israel. Try that in a Gulf state or Saudi Arabia in the case of Islam, and you’re going to be in big, big trouble. 

One of the things he said was that the neocons—and we’ve heard that word neo, neo, neocons. That’s a term for people who were, in the former decades of their life, their formative decades, they were liberal, so we put the Greek prefix “neo,” meaning new cons—and then they flipped during the Reagan years or the Bush years into conservatives, and many of them were Jewish Americans, most notably people like Donald Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol.  

Their children and others in the next generation have been strong supporters, so the idea or the accusation is we are going to war against Iran because a small influential group of neocons feels their first loyalty is to Israel, and defending Israel is not in the national interest because there are 550 million Muslims surrounding Israel.  

So in terms of population or oil wealth, they are geostrategically more valuable. That is not true in itself, but what I’m curious about is: Who are the neocons? 

If you look at the primary spokesman for the neoconservative movement that happened incidentally to be Jewish, they all detest Donald Trump now. 

Bill Kristol, he was the arch spokesman of the neoconservative movement. He’s advocated voting for [Zohran] Mamdani. Professor Elliott Cohen, radically anti-Trump. Washington Post columnist Max Boot, hysterically anti-Trump. Former National Review writer Mona Charen, radically anti-Trump.  

Jonah Goldberg bolted away from National Review, radically anti-Trump. I could go on and list David Frum, radically anti-Trump.  

Some of them in cases are voting Democrat even though the Democratic Party is now a socialist-Islamist party. 

So there is no neocon movement anymore that is an inside lobby for the Israelis. 

Second point I want to make very quickly is there is a larger climate on campuses today of antisemitism. We’re seeing candidates like Mr. [Abdul] El-Sayed in the Senate in Michigan, or we’re seeing Graham Platner, who are openly anti-Israel, but also anti-Jewish. 

And I think I could be frank and say, if you are a Jewish American, you cannot run on a national ticket on the Democrat side. If Joe Lieberman were going to be nominated today, it would be impossible to be a vice presidential candidate as he was in 2004. The antisemitism is so marked and explicit in the Democratic Party.  

So we have to be very careful when we talk about inside influence and a general climate where already Jews are unfairly targeted and suspect. 

And I’ll finish with Lebanon. Donald Trump was critical as well. He said, you can’t blow up a whole building when a Hezbollah person walks in. And I think JD said something to the effect—I’m just paraphrasing—you can’t kill your way out of your problem. 

But if you say to Lebanon and you say to Israel, tomorrow, just don’t fire, either one of you. Israel will be fine with that. The people who are breaking the truce are Hezbollah, which has hijacked the Lebanese government. The Lebanese government hates Hezbollah just as much as we do and just as much as Israel does. But Hezbollah isn’t even a nation. It is terrorist thuggery. Its relation to Lebanon is like the cartel’s relation to Mexico. 

And they are attacking Israel daily. They had 160,000 missiles originally. They have shot thousands into Israel. Israel tries to be disproportionate, just like we are. If somebody attacks us, we attack them 10 times harder. Why? To create deterrence. 

So when somebody shoots missiles or drones at Israel and then runs back to the suburbs of Beirut and has them stashed in the basement and thinks, you can’t hurt me, Israel targets that basement. It does not blow up the entire apartment building by intent. It tries to blow up the particular areas within the apartment. 

It is much more careful to target individual Hezbollah killers than the Hezbollah people are willing to target the IDF. They target everybody. 

And again, if you don’t want Lebanon to be an issue—and I don’t know why it’s even in a memorandum of understanding. It has nothing to do with our effort to disarm Iran—it shouldn’t be in there at all. That should be something the Israelis handle and Hezbollah handles. And all we need to do is say, don’t give money to Hezbollah. But that’s an Israeli-Hezbollah question. 

And Iran is desperately trying to cling onto something to get leverage, but we shouldn’t allow them that leverage. 

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