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Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/07/08/not-isolated-not-bloodthirsty/
Israel Is Not Isolated, Not Bloodthirsty
(Israel Hayom) Amb. Michael Oren - I was asked if Vice President JD Vance was right in saying that, apart from the U.S., Israel has no friends in the world. I answered "no," and listed the many friends Israel has in South America, Africa, the Arab Gulf, and India, a country with a population four times that of the U.S. If I was asked "is JD Vance right when he said that Israel 'can't just kill (its) way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]?'" - the answer is even more adamantly: "No!" The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly and historically false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it. This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him. Israel is the country which, arguably more than any other in the world, has done more to avoid having to kill our way out of our security problems. Still, there are some problems that Israel has no choice but to address with force. As Vice President Vance knows full well, there is no diplomatic solution for Israel's problems with Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran - enemies sworn to wipe us off the map. Though we must never cease striving to preserve our crucial alliance with the U.S., we must respectfully but forcefully correct American leaders when they spread falsehoods about Israel, defame our national character, and distort our history. Israel defends itself when it must but makes peace whenever it can. The writer was Israel's ambassador to the U.S., 2009-13.