Vance tells anti-Israel student Trump secured truce by using ‘leverage’ over Jerusalem

US Vice President JD Vance says President Donald Trump was able to secure a ceasefire in Gaza because he used “leverage” over Israel.

“The most recent Gaza peace plan that all of us have been working on very hard for the past few weeks — the president of the United States could only get that peace deal done by actually being willing to apply leverage to the State of Israel,” Vance tells students at the University of Mississippi where he was participating in a campus tour organized by the recently killed, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organization.

Vance’s comments were in response to a question by a Christian-identifying member of the audience who asked about the “notion that we might owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally.”

The student incorrectly quoted Charlie Kirk as having accused Israel of “ethnically cleansing Gaza” and said he didn’t understand why the US should be providing foreign aid to Israel, “considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”

The question was met with applause from the packed student hall at the University of Mississippi.

JD Vance gets asked about j*wish control in America and disagreements with Christians ????

“J*ws do not believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah” pic.twitter.com/7g1WiG8HVv

— Charging… (@RedPillSayian) October 30, 2025

Calmly responding to the question, Vance began by saying, “First of all, when the president United States says ‘America first,’ that means that he pursues the interest of Americans first, That is our entire foreign policy.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have alliances, that you’re not going to work with other countries from time to time,” the vice president said. “That is what the president believes — that Israel, sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case. Sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States.”

He then used the example of Trump’s plan for ending the Gaza war and suggested that Israel needed to be leveraged in order to get on board with the plan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly endorsed Trump’s 20-point plan during a White House visit in September, which also featured a US-orchestrated apology call to his Qatari counterpart for Israel’s botched strike targeting Hamas’s leaders in Doha.

“When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the President of the United States — they’re not controlling this president in the United States, which is one of the reasons why we’ve been able to have some of the success that we’ve had in the Middle East,” Vance says, notably trying to hit back at a similar accusation that has been lobbed at Netanyahu in recent weeks.

The Israeli premier has repeatedly insisted that Israel is not a client state of the US as Washington has taken increasing control over how the ceasefire is maintained in Gaza.

Vance went on to respond to the student’s claims regarding Judaism, acknowledging that members of the faith don’t view Jesus as the Messiah as Christians do, calling this “one of the realities.”

“My attitude is, let’s have those conversations. Let’s have those disagreements when we have them. But if there are shared areas of interest, we ought to be willing to do that too,” he said.

“One thing I really, really care about is the preservation of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Christians believe that that is the site where Jesus Christ was crucified and also that his tomb is right there as well. My attitude is, if we can work with our friends in Israel to make sure that Christians have safe access to that site, that’s an obvious area of common interest,” said Vance, who paid a visit to that church when he was in Israel last week.

At the end of the visit to Israel, he lashed out over the Knesset’s advancement of legislation aimed at annexing parts of the West Bank, calling it a personal insult, after Trump had said last month that he would not allow the move.

Vance has long presented himself as an ally of Israel but is seen as part of the more isolationist, MAGA wing of the Republican party.

“What I am not okay with is any country coming before the interest of American citizens,” Vance told the students, who applauded his answer.