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.
Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson is recognized during a special plenum session in honor of U.S. President Donald Trump at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, on Oct. 13, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
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.”
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