LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told the annual leadership summit of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) on Saturday that Hamas attacked Israel because of U.S. talks with Iran’s rival, Saudi Arabia.
Calling this a “hard truth” of American culpability in the current crisis, Ramaswamy added that Israel should feel free to use maximum force — without direct U.S. involvement. He called this a return to Israel’s “founding” principles and spirit.
Ramaswamy entered to cheers — as well as a few boos, owing to the equivocation he has shown in recent weeks on Israel. Recently, for example, he opposed an Israeli invasion of Gaza to remove the Hamas terrorist organization that attacked on Oct. 7.
The 38-year-old entrepreneur began by denouncing the Hamas terror attack of Oct. 7 and speaking passionately against the antisemitism on university campuses and in the streets, saying that they were a violation of the American promise to be “free to be who you are without fear.” He traced the hatred of Jews to “wokeism” — a “self-loathing, anti-Ameican orthodoxy” that, he said, he had long said was “always destined to end in antisemitism.”
Ramaswamy then went on to tackle what he called the “elephant in the room.”
Many, he said, had heard him “described by the press as unfriendly to Israel. Some have even described me and my views as anti-Israel. That’s dead wrong. We have enough antisemitism in this country that we don’t need to artificially manufacture more of it.”
He then said he would offer the “most pro-Israel vision that you will hear today,” though he said it would be “brutally candid.”
That vision was shared in a tweet from Ramaswamy’s account while he was onstage: that Israel should feel free to use force against Hamas, Hezbollah, and its other enemies — but should do so on its own, without direct American involvement.
Now is the moment for Israel to return to its founding premise: the Jewish State has an absolute right to exist. A Divine gift, gifted to a Divine nation, charged with a Divine purpose. Israel has an absolute and unequivocal right and responsibility to defend itself to the…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 28, 2023
Ramaswamy said that the alliance between the U.S. and Israel was “special,” and that both had an interest in making sure Iran never obtained a nuclear weapon. But he added what he called a “hard truth,” saying that it was “sheer lunacy” for the U.S. to have had discussions a”bout the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran’s Sunni rival, Saudi Arabia.” He was referring to talks, held with the approval of the Israeli government, to discuss potential peace and normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
He added that Israel should feel free to dismiss the “two-state solution” after the recent Palestinian attack. “But these are decisions for Israel to make, not America,” he said. Citing founding Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, he said that just as it was “time for Israel to return to its founding premise” of self-reliance, so, too, it was time for America to return to its own “founding premise” of staying out of international conflicts, citing George Washington’s argument for American neutrality.
He called this the essence of “America First,” though that policy, as articulated under former President Donald Trump, meant supporting Israel in facing down the threat of Palestinian terror and a nuclear Iran, not abandoning it to its own devices.
Ben-Gurion had courted U.S. support for Israeli statehood during the Second World War, notably at the Biltmore Conference in 1942, when the Jewish leadership of America threw its weight behind the Zionist cause as a refuge for Europe’s Jews.
Ramaswamy said that if Israel wanted to invade Gaza, which he thought was a bad idea, that should be Israel’s decision on its own. “Go win this war for your homeland without asking anyone for permission, and without asking anyone for forgiveness.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
