JD Vance has said, on a podcast, that people inside the Israeli government worked to kill the deal to end the war with Iran, and that they did it because they wanted the war to continue.
The US vice president told the podcaster Joe Rogan he knew "beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from that policy because they want to continue the military campaign." He described "a very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal." The interview aired on Wednesday.
Vance pointed to a report in Time magazine that tied Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, to an Israeli-government-funded operation aimed at the US-Iran ceasefire. Time described it as a roughly 1.5-million-dollar-a-month effort, run through Parscale's firm Clock Tower X, that paid conservative influencers to push younger audiences against the deal. The people on that list, Vance said, had "attacked me viciously" for pursuing the very deal the president had set as the goal. To them, he had a short answer: "Go to hell. I'm going to do what I have to do for the American people."
Parscale rejected the account. "Claims that I attacked the MOU or the Administration are false," he wrote on social media, saying there was not "a single shred of evidence" that he had acted against the administration.
Vance was careful about who he was accusing. He said he did not mind that "certain elements of the Israeli government" disagreed with the deal or criticized it, and that lobbying by a foreign government did not trouble him in itself. "It doesn't bother me that Israel tries to do this, it frankly doesn't even bother me that Russia or some of these other countries do it," he said. "What does bother me is when those operations, those influence campaigns, actually affect American political judgment."
The remarks are unusually sharp from a sitting US vice president toward one of Washington's closest allies. Vance framed the whole thing as a matter of American interests and American judgment, and he landed on a conclusion Türkiye has pressed for months. Ankara has cast the Israeli government as the party with an interest in keeping the region at war, and President Erdoğan warned openly against letting Israel "dynamite" the US-Iran truce.
The strain shows elsewhere too. Netanyahu abruptly canceled a planned trip to Washington, and Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have been reported at odds over how hard to press Israel. The Israeli government and its allies have hit back at Vance, casting his comments as a break with a core ally.
Türkiye reached its own view of Israel's war aims a year ago. This week the man a heartbeat from the American presidency said much the same, and that is the part Ankara will note.