Netanyahu Cites India to Rebuff Vance's 'Only Ally' Jab
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- Netanyahu rebutted Vance on Fox News by invoking India: 'We have some other friends, like a small country called India. It has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have tremendous support there.'
- JD Vance said Trump is 'the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment' and warned Israeli leaders against attacking 'the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left.'
- Vance challenged Israel's security doctrine on population grounds: 'You're a country of 9 million people. You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.'
- Vance linked two-thirds of Israel's defensive weapons — 'built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars' — to demands that Israel back US-Iran diplomacy, calling Beirut civilian-center strikes 'not acceptable.'
- Netanyahu dismissed any rift with Trump, calling him 'the greatest friend we ever had in the White House,' while acknowledging he doesn't agree with 'everything' Vance says.
- Netanyahu claimed Lebanese Christian villages 'have actually asked to be annexed to Israel' to escape Hezbollah, defending Israel's military presence in southern Lebanon.
Why it matters: Vance weaponized the two-thirds American-built weapons figure to publicly pressure Israel, marking an unusually blunt US reproach of an ally. Netanyahu's India-and-cyber counter reframes Israel as a partner with options rather than a US client, complicating Vance's leverage without resolving the Lebanon operations dispute that triggered the exchange.
