US Vice-President JD Vance said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has certainly gotten some things wrong,” according to excerpts of an interview set to air Sunday on CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. While Vance would not provide examples, he told CBS News that Netanyahu “aggressively asserts the interests of his country” but that those interests were not always aligned with those of the United States.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu, look, he governs a country that has obviously been a very close partner of the United States,” Vance said in the interview. “But, even when we’ve been close partners, sometimes we have interests that are perfectly aligned and sometimes we have interests that are misaligned.”
The vice-president added that the Trump administration’s job was to focus on what is in America’s best interests, “and where that diverges, we — unfortunately for the Israelis — have to choose the side of the American people.”
Asked for examples of instances in which Netanyahu had gotten things wrong, Vance said “those conversations sometimes are better left in private.”
The comments mark a further public admission that relations between the two allies have come under pressure in recent weeks. Last week, Trump told an Axios journalist that he had called Netanyahu “effing crazy” in a phone conversation, saying he had been “a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon,” according to reports.
The US and Iran exchanged strikes for a second consecutive day overnight, straining a ceasefire between the two nations that has remained in place since April. Trump has said Tehran took “too long to make a deal” to end the war, though the renewed hostilities were triggered by events in Lebanon, where Israel has continued an operation aimed at the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah.
Israel has conducted strikes across Lebanon and occupied a significant portion of the south of the country in its campaign against Hezbollah fighters, who launched strikes on northern Israel shortly after the Iran war began in retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader. At least 3,696 people have been killed in the conflict, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, while Israeli authorities say 30 soldiers and four civilians have been killed on both sides of the border.
Trump is seeking a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz — ending a global energy crisis caused by an Iranian blockade — and limit Iran’s nuclear program, a long-held ambition of the US president. Tehran is demanding that any peace agreement also cover Lebanon, which Israel has argued was not part of the ceasefire struck two months ago.
The souring of relations reflects sentiments in the US: opinion polling suggests the Iran war is increasingly unpopular among Americans, who will vote in Midterm elections this November and who are taking a dimmer view of Israel, the BBC reported. Netanyahu, too, faces elections this year, in which he will have to convince Israeli voters that he is winning the war with Iran and its regional proxies.
Netanyahu, for his part, has sought to downplay any rift with the Trump administration. “Sometimes we have, as in the best of families, you have these tactical disagreements,” he told CNBC last week. “We always find a way to work them out, and we do so as great friends.”