He may break with Trump on Putin, but his visit to Israel this week shows nothing else has changed
Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence told a group of Republican donors that,“There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.” If you thought that this meant Pence was in any significant way breaking with his former boss or tacking back toward the center of the political aisle, think again.
Yesterday, Pence was in Israel, where he went out of his way to meet with far-right Jewish settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron at one of their favorite pilgrimage sites, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, which sits in the heart of the city and which is also holy to Muslims. Pence tweeted that the visit was a “great honor” for him and his wife Karen to visit the site. Standing with Pence on the literal far-right of the first photo shown in Pence’s tweet is one of the most right-wing politicians in Israel, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is a member of the Knesset, the country’s parliament. In other photos of Pence’s Hebron visit, Pence stands talking not only with Ben-Gvir, but also another Jewish hyper-extremist, Baruch Marzel.
It’s hard to translate what this appearance means in the American context. Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, compared Pence’s meeting to a “foreign leader coming to the US and hanging out with the Proud Boys,” but it’s really worse than that. Imagine if Pence went to Harrison, Arkansas, to meet with Thomas Robb, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Or if he went to meet with the families of the three men who killed Armand Arbery.
In Israel, Ben-Gvir and Marzel have long been publicly understood as inhabiting the far-right fringe of the political spectrum. Both are followers of Meir Kahane, an American-born rabbi who long advocated expelling all of the Arabs living in Israel and the occupied territories (and who was assassinated in New York City in 1990). As a youth, Ben-Gvir was actually exempted from doing military service, which is compulsory for all Israeli Jews, because of his extreme right background. Until recently, he had a photo of Baruch Goldstein hanging in his home; Goldstein was another Kahane follower who massacred 29 Muslims while they were praying at the very site Pence visited in Hebron. (Goldstein was killed by an angry crowd in the aftermath.)
Marzel, who was also born in the US, was Kahane’s right-hand and spokesman for many years. Like Ben-Gvir, he has sought to get a seat in the Knesset, but was barred from running in 2015 because of statements he made calling for violence against Arabs as well as left-wing Israeli Jews. Among his many inflammatory and racist actions, he has organized parties at Baruch Goldstein’s grave on the anniversary of the Hebron massacre, where celebrants dress up as the deceased gunman. Marzel is also a fierce bigot against gay rights and has called Barack Obama an “anti-Semitic Jew hater.”
These are the people Pence was smiling with as he toured the Tomb of the Patriarchs. His team is now claiming that he didn’t visit the holy site “with” them, but rather that they greeted him at their own initiative. Pence’s own pictures don’t lie, however.
There’s long been an unholy alliance between rightwing Israelis and rightwing Republicans; Christian Zionism is a real thing. The fact that it’s rooted in evangelical beliefs in prophecies about how Israel’s emergence augurs the coming of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ doesn’t appear to bother some American Jewish groups aligned with the Israeli right. The decision a few days ago by AIPAC, long the leading pro-Israel lobby group in America, to endorse 37 House Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results show that the alliance runs in both directions.
Notably, Pence flew to Israel on the private plane of Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. In addition to investing in Israeli media and backing longtime prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, the couple have given more than a half billion dollars to Republican campaigns and causes.
What Pence’s manuevering now suggests is that he is hoping to cash in on his four-year investment in smiling at everything Trump did — except his attempt to overturn the election — and now inherit the mantle of leader of the American right. By meeting with the most racist and violent fringe of Israeli society, he’s sending a clear message back home: don’t listen to what I say; watch what I do.