Et Tu, Brute?

He gave four reasons, sourced to a pollster he would not name, with data no one has seen.

End the war with Iran. Cost of living. Put America First. Change our relationship with Israel.

Two of those four are the same sentence wearing different hats, and everyone fluent in that dialect knows it. “America First,” in the rooms Vance is actually playing to, is not a budget position. It is a question about whose interests this country has been serving, and the answer those rooms give is not subtle.

It is Israel.

His spokesperson: “The Vice President did not blame Jews for the Republican Party’s losses in the midterms.”

True. He did not say the word.

He did not have to.

But here is the interesting thing.

He is wrong on the facts, and the facts are not hard to find.

No exit poll asked a single question about Israel. The ADL pointed out that only 4 percent of voters rated foreign policy as their primary concern at all. Voters were not angry about foreign entanglement. They were angry about gas prices.

Gasoline went from under three dollars a gallon before the war to more than $4.27 by late October. Diesel hit record highs, over six dollars in Detroit. An Institute for Global Affairs survey found 81 percent of potential voters agreeing that the war had raised their cost of living. The phrase researchers keep using is “kitchen table issue.”

Most people did not vote about Jerusalem. They voted about groceries.

Which means Vance did not misread the election. He read an economic revolt and reported it as an ideological mandate, because the ideological mandate is the one he has been waiting to announce. He needed a permission structure, the midterms handed him a loss big enough to blame on anything, and he picked the thing he already believed.

I do not think he is faking it. I said that last week and I will say it again.

One bright spot, and it did not come from us.

On November 6th, CUFI, ten million members, went straight at him. Their memo said that after the blue wave, “the Vice President seized the opportunity to blame…. Jews,” called him “clearly, demonstrably, and unambiguously wrong,” but quote of the week goes to “The Vance-Carlson movement, which we call woke rightism, is as loud as their candidates are weak.”

I wrote last week that the evangelicals never explained to their children why Israel matters and that we are a generation away from having no friends at all.

We can still change that.

We need to, as we were reminded this week. They still have our back.

I am not really surprised about Vance. I think he was very good at intimating his position without articulating it. Now he decided to say out loud what he thinks.

No, Vance was not a surprise, but what happened next really threw me.

I have voted in five Israeli national elections since I moved here.

All five times I voted for Avigdor Lieberman.

I have written about why more than once.

He emphatically said he would not join a government with the haredim and that he would make sure a universal draft becomes law.

Another strong point is that he wants to end the connection between religion and state. The draft issue is the tip of the iceberg. It is the entire subjugation of civil law to religious extremism.

He has other platform points, like transferring large Israeli Arab population centers to a future Palestinian state in return for the large Jewish populations in Judea and Samaria. I agree with the thought but it is unrealistic for many reasons. I am not even sure he believes it, but I think the point is clear.

He was also very successful as defense minister and finance minister. He is more than competent.

He also said he would not join a government with Bibi. Nice sentiment, but not a big deal for me either way. I have said in the past that I think it is time for Bibi to go, but if I have to choose between haredim in a government, which would preclude a universal draft law, and Bibi as Prime Minister on the basis that such a law passes, I choose Bibi.

Lieberman said he had to make a painful decision but in his mind Bibi is a bigger threat than the haredim. I never thought that given the choice he would join with the haredim.

He said it for years. He brought down a government over it in 2019. When the Torah Study law passed in July he called it a law that betrays IDF soldiers and promised the next government would repeal it.

He has apparently had a change of heart. He now believes that unseating Netanyahu would require “painful” compromises on enlisting ultra-Orthodox men. “It’s painful for me,” he wrote, “and I know it’s painful for many others.”

He is correct about that last part, but painful is not the word I would use.

I would say it is an utter betrayal of his electorate.

Compromise is now, in his words, “permissible and desirable” on all issues, “including on the enlistment law.” He wants 61 seats without the Joint List and Ra’am. He will not support a minority government backed by the Arab parties from outside. He does not want another election. The Netanyahu era must end.

I would take Ra’am over the haredim any day. Mansour Abbas at least recognizes the fact of Jewish statehood, even if he does not like it.

And Lieberman knows this better than anyone, because he has already done it. He sat as finance minister in the government that had Ra’am inside the coalition. The sky did not fall.

Does he really think that is worse than joining the haredim? The ones who equate their men dodging the draft with the families who made the ultimate sacrifice?

No. If a painful choice needs to be made, mine would have been that I would rather have Bibi as Prime Minister than betray our soldiers and those who lost their lives defending us.

So. Two men.

Two countries.

One week.

Caesar expected the knives. Rome was full of men who wanted him dead and he knew every one of them by name. The haredi parties, the UN, Hamas, the people who have wanted us gone since before any of us were born, none of them are news. Nobody writes a column about an enemy behaving like one.

What stopped Caesar cold was not the knife.

It was whose hand was on it.