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Conservative students grill Vance on support for Israel at Turning Point USA event
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance fielded skeptical questions about American support for Israel, including one conspiratorial remark about Judaism, from conservative college students while headlining Wednesday’s stop on the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s nationwide tour.
The event, at the University of Mississippi, was a further sign of shifting priorities among young conservatives when it comes to support for Israel, a long-held GOP tenet that has seen sharp erosion since Oct. 7 and the Gaza war.
Following the talk, Vance — who recently declined to condemn a group chat of Young Republican leaders joking about Hitler and gas chambers — received criticism from Jewish conservatives for failing to take another opportunity to condemn antisemitism.
Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist and TPUSA founder whose legacy on Israel has been sharply debated since his death, was invoked by both Vance and his questioners.
“I’m a Christian, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this multi-hundred-billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel, to cover this, to quote Charlie Kirk, ‘ethnic cleansing in Gaza,’” one student wearing a MAGA hat asked the vice president.
That student went on to assert, of Judaism, “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” The student did not elaborate, though young right-wing Christians have taken Israel to task for recent videos of Jewish Israeli extremists spitting on Christians in the country.
His was the second critical Israel-related question of the night. An earlier questioner had asked Vance, “Do you think it’s a conflict of interest for Miriam Adelson, an Israeli donor, to give millions of dollars to his campaign, and then Trump have pro-Israeli policies?” (Adelson, a major pro-Israel GOP donor, is Israeli-American.)
The questions mirrored a growing anti-Israel flank within the MAGA movement, as polls reflect a growing antipathy for the Jewish state among young Republicans. The movement is fueled by figures including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who maintains an influential presence on YouTube and X. Carlson in particular spoke at Kirk’s funeral, and has platformed open antisemites — most recently including Nick Fuentes — while also headlining other stops on the current TPUSA college tour and maintaining close ties with Trump and Vance.
At Ole Miss, Vance responded to both Israel questions in an America-first framing — and suggested that his own support for Israel was not unequivocal.
“He pursues the interests of Americans first,” Vance said about his boss to the student who had asked about Christian allyship with Israel. “That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time.”
Vance continued, ”Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes, they don’t have similar interests to the United States.”
In praising the recent ceasefire and hostage return deal brokered by Trump, Vance said the president succeeded by “actually being willing to apply leverage to the state of Israel” — something many left-wing activists had pressured former President Joe Biden to do, largely unsuccessfully.
That “leverage,” Vance said, proved that Trump was acting in America’s interests, not Israel’s. He then hinted at a conspiracy theory of his own. “So when people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States,” he said.
He then attempted to address the student’s comments about the divide between Jews and Christians.
“Jews disagreeing with Christians on certain religious ideas, yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the realities, is that Jews don’t believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. Obviously Christians do believe that,” he said. “My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them.”
Vance named protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a holy Christian site, as an area “I really, really care about” and wanted to work with Israel on. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, attended mass at the church during his state visit to Israel last week. The church is primarily tended to by Palestinian Christians, and has been the site of contested real-estate disputes as far-right Israeli settlers have sought to secure control of historical Christian sites in Jerusalem.
To the student who asked about Adelson, the vice president denied that Trump was influenced by her Israel views — even as he acknowledged that Israel appeared to be her primary cause as a top Republican donor.
“She is very clear about the fact, she doesn’t hide the fact, that she really loves Israel, and that is part of what motivates her political giving. That is a reality. At the same time, the president of the United States is America first, through and through,” Vance said, adding that he, too, had “a very good relationship” with Adelson. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was present at Trump’s Knesset address announcing the Gaza ceasefire, and received several shout-outs from the president.
Vance also said that Trump’s anti-war critics, some from his own party, hadn’t given him enough credit for the ceasefire.
“I remember when people said that the president of the United States was going to get us into a multi-hundred-thousand troop, regime-change war for Israel,” the vice president said. “I wonder if they stepped back and said, ‘You know what, we were wrong about that.’”
Vance’s performance has attracted ire from Jewish conservatives who increasingly have been warning of rising, unchecked antisemitism on the right.
“Tonight the vice president had an opportunity to denounce antisemitism amid its historic surge,” Jewish conservative activist Sloan Rachmuth wrote on X. “He could’ve set an example for the young people who are steering in that direction. JD Vance chose not to.” Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg wrote that Vance was “a profile in cowardice.”
“At a Turning Point USA event this week, a young man said something that should have been met with instant moral outrage,” the pro-Israel commentator Daniel Mael wrote on his Substack. “Instead, the Vice President of the United States treated it as a legitimate question.”
Mael took issue with several of Vance’s phrasings, including his remark about Trump not being “controlled by Israel.”
“The meaning was obvious. It implied that past presidents—Biden, Obama, and George W. Bush—were controlled by Israel,” he wrote. “With one careless phrase, the Vice President of the United States echoed one of the most poisonous lies in history: that Jews secretly control governments and act against others for their own gain.”
Vance’s failures to respond to claims that Israel was committing “ethnic cleansing” and to the remark about Judaism targeting Christians were also troubling, Mael wrote. “The claim that Judaism attacks Christianity is not ignorance; it is the sewage of the alt-right media machine…. If conservatives do not confront this now, the movement will rot from within. The world’s oldest hatred has returned, speaking the language of patriotism and pretending to defend faith. ”
At the conclusion of his Q&A, Vance —- who also raised eyebrows by stating he hoped his Hindu wife, Usha, would convert to Christianity — thanked the Israel critics in the audience for strengthening the conservative movement.
“We don’t need, in our political movement, people who agree with us on every single issue. We got a couple of questions about Israel,” he said. “What we need is people of good faith who love the United States of America and are willing to work hard to save it.”
The post Conservative students grill Vance on support for Israel at Turning Point USA event appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Says It Kills Senior Hamas Commander Raed Saed in Gaza
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a car in Gaza City, December 13, 2025.REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
The Israeli military said it killed senior Hamas commander Raed Saed, one of the architects of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, in a strike on a car in Gaza City on Saturday.
It was the highest-profile assassination of a senior Hamas figure since a Gaza ceasefire deal came into effect in October.
In a joint statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said Saed was targeted in response to an attack by Hamas in which an explosive device injured two soldiers earlier on Saturday.
The attack on the car in Gaza City killed five people and wounded at least 25 others, according to Gaza health authorities. There was no immediate confirmation from Hamas or medics that Saed was among the dead.
HAMAS SAYS ATTACK VIOLATES CEASEFIRE AGREEMENT
An Israeli military official described Saed as a high-ranked Hamas member who helped establish and advance the group’s weapons production network.
“In recent months, he operated to reestablish Hamas’ capabilities and weapons manufacturing, a blatant violation of the ceasefire,” the official said.
Hamas sources have also described him as the second-in-command of the group’s armed wing, after Izz eldeen Al-Hadad.
Saed used to head Hamas’ Gaza City battalion, one of the group’s largest and best-equipped, those sources said.
Hamas, in a statement, condemned the attack as a violation of the ceasefire agreement but did not say whether Saed was hurt and stopped short of threatening retaliation.
The October 10 ceasefire has enabled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to Gaza City’s ruins. Israel has pulled troops back from city positions, and aid flows have increased.
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Hezbollah Chief: Disarmament Would Be ‘Death Sentence’ for Lebanon
Lebanon’s Hezbollah Chief Naim Qassem gives a televised speech from an unknown location, July 30, 2025, in this screen grab from video. Photo: Al Manar TV/REUTERS TV/via REUTERS
i24 News – Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said on Saturday that it was not the responsibility of the Shiite terror group “to prevent aggression,” but rather the Lebanese state’s, and it is the responsibility of Hezbollah to engage “when the state and army fail to do so.”
In a recorded televised statement, Qassem sarcastically posed the question whether it was not Hezbollah that should be demanding the Lebanese Army’s disarmament if the latter fails to stop “Israel’s ongoing aggression.”
On the issue of disarming Hezbollah, Qassem said that disarming it in the manner currently proposed is a death sentence for Lebanon.
“Even if the sky falls, we will not be disarmed, not even if the entire world unites against Lebanon. We will not allow this and it will not happen,” Qassem said.
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High schoolers’ ‘human swastika’ on football field shakes San Jose Jewish community
(JTA) — The photo spread swiftly after a student posted it on social media: Eight California high schoolers were lying on their school’s football field, their bodies arrayed in the shape of a swastika.
Alongside the picture was a quote from Adolf Hitler, threatening the “annihilation of the Jewish race.”
The incident at Branham High School in San Jose began on Dec. 3 and has roiled the local Jewish community in the days since, as the wrenching saga has ignited suspensions, recriminations and alarm from around the world.
The photograph and the response to it were first reported by J. Jewish News of Northern California.
“We don’t want to see hatred,” Cormac Nolan, a Jewish Branham senior, told the local Jewish newspaper. “We don’t want to see the idolization of one of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the Earth. We don’t want someone who spews out hatred like this on our campus.”
The school’s student newspaper reported that the students involved had been suspended, and that dozens of other students walked out to protest the incident.
The San Jose Police Department told J. that it is investigating the incident, and the school’s principal, Beth Silbergeld, who is Jewish, said the school was working with the Anti-Defamation League and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, a local antisemitism advocacy group, “to ensure that we receive appropriate support and guidance as we work to repair the harm that’s been done to our community.”
Silbergeld told J. that she felt pressure to learn from the incident.
“I’ve been in education for a long time and have seen, sadly, lots of incidences of oppression and hate toward many groups,” she said. “I think that we always have a responsibility as schools to do what’s right and to take action and learn from the experiences of other other schools and other incidents as a way to hopefully eliminate actions like what we’ve experienced.”
The incident is not the first time Branham High School has faced controversy over antisemitism on its campus. In April, the California Department of Education ruled that the school had discriminated against its Jewish students by presenting “biased” content about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 12th-grade ethnic literature curriculum.
It is also not the first instance of a “human swastika” roiling a school community. In 2019, nine middle schoolers in Ojai, California, also arranged themselves in a “human swastika” and faced disciplinary measures from the school.
Exactly what possessed the Branham students to do what they did is not clear. But psychologists told the J. that the teen years are a peak moment for transgressive behaviors that may or may not reflect deep-seated biases.
“It’s a developmental time where you’re doing new things, you’re trying new things, you’re making mistakes, you’re trying to fit in, you’re trying to get laughs and likes,” Ellie Pelc, director of clinical services at the Bay Area’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services, told the newspaper. “And you often do so in some hurtful or harmful ways that you don’t always have the capacity to think through in advance.”
The photo was met by condemnation by California State Sens. Scott Wiener, who wrote that antisemitism was “pervasive & growing” in a post on Facebook, and Dave Cortese, who said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident in a statement.
“What happened at Branham High School was not a joke, not a prank, and not self-expression — it was an act of hatred,” wrote San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan in a post on X. “The fact that this was planned and posted publicly makes it even more disturbing.”
By Tuesday, the uproar had sparked a response from district leaders. In a post on Facebook, Robert Bravo, the superintendent for the Campbell Union High School District, wrote that the district “will respond firmly, thoughtfully, and within the full scope allowed by Board Policy and California law.” (Displaying a Nazi swastika on the property of a school is illegal in California.)
He added that the school district considered the incident an instance of “hate violence” based on California state education code, which allows for suspension or expulsion in such cases.
“Our response cannot be limited to discipline alone,” continued Bravo. “We are committed to using this incident as an opportunity to deepen education around antisemitism, hate symbols and the historical atrocities associated with them.”
The antisemitic post comes two months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill creating a statewide office assigned to combatting antisemitism in California public schools. The office, which is the first of its kind in the country, was met with praise from local Jewish advocacy groups while some critics warned it could chill academic freedoms.
Marc Levine, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Central Pacific region, called the incident “repulsive and unacceptable” in a statement on X. The incident was also condemned by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area, which wrote in a statement that it had been working with the school about “how to ensure an effective response.”
The Bay Area Jewish Coalition also issued a statement on Tuesday, writing that the antisemitic act had “shaken Jewish families across Northern California and beyond.”
“We hope that what happened at Branham serves as a wake-up call for California and for the rest of the country to take the antisemitism crisis seriously and reverse the trend through real, meaningful action and long-term change,” the statement continued.
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