Within a week there were these three Washington Post articles questioning if PA Gov Shapiro “was ever a foreign agent for Israel” or a “member of a foreign military/the IDF.” This got me researching how these rumors got started and it didn’t take long to discover they were started by none other than some guy named Josh Shapiro. Seems he himself had bragged that he had been “a past volunteer in the Israeli army” when he was in college (See Below). What really surprised me was that none of these crack Washington Post columnists or contributors bothered to do a little research or include this little Insignificant Fact in their articles. A minor oversight I’m sure.
23
January 2026
By James
Kirchick
James Kirchick is the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”
The Harris campaign’s suspicion of
Shapiro reveals an ugly truth
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro revealed a disturbing encounter with the Kamala Harris campaign in 2024.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s revelation that a member of Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign vetting team asked him if he had “ever been an agent of the Israeli government” marks yet another sad chapter in the Democratic Party’s ongoing betrayal of American Jews.
The most charitable explanation for this implication of dual loyalty, one of the oldest of antisemitic defamations, is incompetence. Since Shapiro’s emergence as a national political figure, many progressives have alleged that he “served” in the Israel Defense Forces. This butchers the truth, which is that Shapiro participated in a high school service program that included working on a kibbutz and volunteering at an Israeli military base.
Even if Shapiro had served in the IDF, the left’s fixation on him represents a glaring double standard. For the entirety of their country’s existence, Americans have joined foreign armies not as mercenaries but as idealists.
Many if not most of those on the left assailing Shapiro for his tenuous link to the IDF presumably have a different opinion of those Americans who joined the Lincoln Brigade, as well as the brave young Americans who violated the 1930s Neutrality Acts by serving in the Royal Air Force before America joined World War II.
25 January 2026
By Salena Zito
What I discovered about Josh Shapiro
at the Pennsylvania Farm Show
The governor champions a 67-county strategy to win voters in a critical battleground state.
Nationally, Shapiro is most often discussed as someone Harris considered for vice president in her presidential run. Just days after the Farm Show, excerpts from Shapiro’s memoir, “Where We Keep the Light,” came out and detailed how the Harris vetting team asked him if he had ever been an agent for Israel. He said he was offended by the question.
18 January 2026
By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Colby Itkowitz
Gov. Shapiro, in book, says Harris team asked him if he was ever Israeli agent
Shapiro was told the question was part of the vetting process but said he still found it offensive, he wrote in his upcoming memoir.
As he was preparing for a face-to-face meeting with Harris in Washington, he writes, a member of Harris’s team called him with a question: “Have you ever been an agent of the Israeli government?” Shapiro said he found the question highly offensive.
“Well, we have to ask,” the questioner responded, according to Shapiro. He said she then added, “Have you ever communicated with an undercover agent of Israel?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/01/18/shapiro-harris-2024-israel/
So where did these “butchers of the truth” come up with this “implication of dual loyalty” by “alleging he served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)?” Could it be the claim came directly from Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro himself? In a September 1993 op-ed titled “Peace not possible” published in the Campus Times, the student newspaper at the University of Rochester where Shapiro was at the time a student and student body president, Josh himself claimed to have been “a past volunteer in the Israeli army.” (See Below for the Article)
By his own account it appears Gov Shapiro at least thought he was serving with a foreign country’s military while his own country was engaged in the Gulf War. Don’t think that will play well if he decides to run for President.
As for Americans serving in foreign Militaries in past Wars,
James Kirchick failed to mention in his article that Americans who joined the
British or Canadian military at the beginning of World War II DID LOSE their
U.S. citizenship. Under US law at the time, it was illegal for U.S. citizens to
join the armed forces of a foreign nation. When the US finally entered the War,
it took these two Special Acts of the US Congress to fully restore their
citizenship:
> The Second War Powers Act (1942): After the U.S.
entered the war, this act authorized the expedited naturalization of Americans
who had lost their citizenship through service in Allied militaries.
> The 1944 Blanket Pardon: Congress passed a statute in
1944 that effectively restored the citizenship of those who had served in the
forces of nations at war with the Axis powers.
> Most of these volunteers were eventually absorbed into the US Military with their citizenship status fully restored.
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