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The vice president says the war in Gaza is not a binary issue. Yet seeking to please both liberal Jewish donors and those who want Hamas to win isn’t honest or moral.
By: Jonathan S. Tobin
Since she became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency in the last week, backers of Vice President Kamala Harris have been doing their best to redefine her image. That has involved a considerable amount of positive spin about her past and personality, all intended to create a wave of support for the effort to defeat former President Donald Trump.
It’s also involved a healthy dose of what can only be considered an almost Stalinist rewriting of history, such as their claim that President Joe Biden hadn’t put her in charge of the disaster on America’s southern border, which has been dutifully repeated by their cheerleaders in the mainstream corporate media. The same treatment has been given to coverage of her support in 2020 for a fund that bailed out Black Lives Matter rioters and other criminals, including those guilty of violent offenses.
However, when it comes to defining her views on Israel and the war being waged against it by Iran and its terrorist proxies, such shameful deceptions aren’t considered necessary. Instead, the vice president believes the way to navigate the campaign is a careful effort to signal both friends of the Jewish state and those who oppose it that she sympathizes with their positions.
Splitting hairs on the Middle East
That’s the only way to characterize her comments following her July 25 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which she posed as not only a supporter of Israel but also someone who sides with its most harsh and dishonest critics. In doing so, she provided ammunition for her supporters to fend off the arguments of those on the right who claim that she is nothing less than an open foe of the Jewish state. At the same time, she gave Democrats seeking to persuade hard-core leftists who do hate Israel—and who had threatened not to vote for Biden—that they have reason to hope that she may be more hostile to Jerusalem than Biden was.
Harris’s comments demonstrated that while she has been a flawed messenger for the administration who often inspired more ridicule than praise, she can also be a savvy politician who knows how to split hairs when necessary.
Since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Biden has struggled mightily to articulate a coherent position on the war on the terror group in Gaza. At times sounding like the lifelong Zionist he claims to be while at other moments repeating Hamas propaganda, Biden sewed confusion when he should have been sending clear messages to Iran and its terrorist proxies. But while Harris’s position was similarly equivocal, it was delivered with the sort of assurance and steely discipline, as well as a degree of calculated hostility towards Netanyahu, Biden was incapable of pulling off.
This should give no comfort to those who worry about how a Harris administration will treat the Jewish state. Jewish Democrats will harp on her statements of support for Israel, its right to exist and her horror for the crimes of Oct. 7—all of which are, if viewed in isolation, exemplary. But her declaration that the ensuing war post-massacre, carried out by Hamas and Palestinian operatives, “is not a binary issue” should send chills down their spines. By championing the notion that the two sides are morally equivalent, she made it clear that Israelis should not be counting on the United States to have its back should she prevail in November.
That Harris wished to accentuate her hostility to Netanyahu and the democratically elected government he leads became apparent the day before the meeting when, along with half of the Democrats in the House and Senate, she boycotted his address to Congress. She was determined to avoid any pictures or videos of her applauding or treating the prime minister with the courtesy and honor she has given other foreign leaders, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Any thought that this gesture was followed by a friendly chat was dispelled by her opening remarks, characterizing the meeting as “frank and constructive.” In the language of diplomacy, that can only describe a conversation conducted with hostility and distrust.
Speaking to two audiences
That was followed by a ritual declaration of “unwavering support” for Israel and her claim that she raised money as a child for the Jewish National Fund. It’s possible that this undocumented anecdote is true, but the idea that the daughter of a Marxist economics professor went door to door asking for donations for planting trees in Israel in far-left Berkeley, Calif., sounds like one of the tall tales Biden likes to spin about his life.
This was followed by her not only denouncing Hamas’s crimes but also saying aloud the names of the Americans still being held hostage by the terrorists. That was not only entirely praiseworthy—and a signal to Netanyahu’s Israeli critics who favor prioritizing the ransoming of the hostages over finishing off the terrorists—but a smart way to signal support for Israel that Biden failed to articulate.
It was immediately offset by qualifying her support for Israel’s right to defense with the caveat that “how it does so matters,” followed by a repetition of Hamas’s claims about the plight of the Gazans who have been harmed by the war.
Her talk of “food insecurity” showed that the claims of a famine in the Gaza Strip are now so thoroughly debunked that not even Harris will repeat it, while also being absurd since how can any people who launched a terrorist war—as the Palestinians did on Oct. 7—expect that the supply of food to their kitchens will not be affected. Nor did she mention that the only reason why the massive amounts of aid that have poured into Gaza since the war started with Israeli help have not lessened Palestinian suffering is that Hamas seizes most of it. Also missing was any mention of Iran, which has played a key role in fomenting the war. Unfortunately, appeasing the Islamist regime remains an article of faith among liberal Democrats like Harris.
In this section of her statement, Harris was all sympathy and concern for Palestinians and their suffering, yet she didn’t state the most important point to be made about what is a genuine crisis, even though it has been exaggerated: All of it is the fault of Hamas. To speak of “images of dead children” without saying that the only reason they died is that their leaders intended to start a war in which as many Palestinians as possible would perish to blacken Israel’s image is an act of moral obtuseness.
Granting Hamas victory
She then asserted that a deal to “end the war” was on the table, which would involve a complete ceasefire and then a total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. Israel would get its hostages back, but what this amounts to is a demand for a return to the status quo that existed on Oct. 6. And that represents nothing less than a formula for victory for Hamas, which would rightly claim that the West had forced Israel to accept defeat. Though the terrorists’ organized military formations have been largely destroyed, its remnants would quickly resume control of the Strip in spite of any possible plans for foreign forces to assume security control.
Bolstered by the triumph of their survival, the terror group would loom as an even greater threat to the alleged “moderates” of Fatah, who control the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria, than before. And without Israel administering the border between Gaza and Egypt, Hamas would quickly go about reconstructing its terrorist state with, no doubt, the assistance of Western Europe and a Harris administration.
Such a deal might gain the freedom of the Israeli hostages, though anyone who is counting on Hamas keeping its word after it gets most of what it wants is dreaming. What it would be is a guarantee that Israel could look forward to future atrocities by a Hamas movement that will have been emboldened by the sympathy of Western liberals rather than chastened by the cost of the Israeli counter-offensives. Hostage families thinking that this is a fair exchange is perhaps to be understood; still, it is incompatible with any notion that the United States supports Israel’s security or wishes to prevent more bloodshed in the future.
Harris then followed that by saying that the United States was still committed to a path towards a two-state solution sometime in the indefinite future.
Illogical and insincere
A two-state solution is a rational idea in theory. But Harris and the Democrats who cling to this notion are not listening to the Palestinians. Hamas, which now commands the support of most Palestinians, is only interested in Israel’s extinction and the genocide of Jews. The Palestinian Authority is similarly unprepared to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders are drawn. And both have demonstrated their commitment to this vile goal by their attitude towards the current war and the atrocities of Oct. 7.
At some point, leaders like Harris—who qualify their support for Israel with arguments that Jerusalem must also be forced to make suicidal concessions to people who have shown time and again that they are not interested in peace—need to be held accountable for a position that is, at best, illogical, and, at worst, utterly insincere.
It’s all well and good to repeat lines about a two-state solution being necessary for the survival of a secure, Jewish and democratic state. This is a theory that could have made sense before Israel signed the Oslo Accords in 1993—agreeing to withdraw from almost all of the territories and part of Jerusalem in 1999, 2000 and 2008 in order to create a Palestinian state—only to be turned down each time. It did remove every Jewish settlement, settler and soldier from Gaza in the summer of 2005. But the events of the last 31 years have completely discredited the land-for-peace theory among Israelis, the overwhelming majority of whom now reject the idea as not so much ill-advised as insane. That understanding of the intransigence of the Palestinians was only reinforced by the events of Oct. 7. Yet to Harris, none of this matters.
The worst element of Harris’s statement came at its end when she told “ceasefire advocates”—a euphemism for the pro-Hamas mobs that gathered this week in Washington to vent their spleen at Israel and to tear down and burn American flags, as well as to the antisemitic mobs that have turned college campuses into no-go zones for Jews—that “I see you and hear you.”
Like her previous statements along these lines, this is a demonstration of sympathy for those who, like Hamas, want Israel destroyed. It needs to be repeated that this is exactly what Democrats have falsely accused Trump of doing when they promoted the myth that he had called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 “very fine people.” For Harris, those who demonstrate for the destruction of Israel are not hatemongers to be despised but “very fine people” who need to be assured that they are seen and heard.
Moral equivalence
In saying that the war in Gaza “is not a binary issue” but a complex one, the vice president was not only directly refuting Netanyahu when he told Congress that the conflict represents a clash between “barbarism and civilization.” She was denying the essential reason why the conflict continues despite decades of peace-processing and Israeli concessions. To condemn “terrorism and violence” without understanding that these are the only tactics that Palestinians consider politically legitimate is to display both ignorance and disingenuousness.
The same is true for her closing remarks declaring her opposition to both antisemitism and Islamophobia. The surge in Jew-hatred across America among left-wingers is real. Talk of Islamophobia is merely a way to try to delegitimize those who call out Muslims for their loathing of Jews and Israel.
The events of Oct. 7—and the reality of Palestinian intransigence and commitment to anti-Jewish violence—should compel decent people to recognize that the current war is a conflict between good and evil. Yet if the goal is only to combine statements to placate liberal Jewish Democratic donors with those that might play well among antisemitic radical leftists and Muslims, then such moral clarity is neither possible nor desirable.
Americans have a right to expect more than platitudes that treat Israel and its foes as morally equivalent. The talk of rejecting binary reasoning about this war is no more defensible than it would be about the war against the Nazis, whose eliminationist goals, Hamas and the Palestinians share.
A President Kamala Harris can be expected to continue a policy of moral equivalence in which Israel might not be completely abandoned but it would be pressured, as it was under President Barack Obama, to endanger its people in order to appease people who want it dead. Some may consider that good enough. But in a Middle East that—thanks to the colossal mistakes made by Obama and Biden—has become even more dangerous for Israel, it is a formula for a future in which we can expect more Jewish and Arab blood to be shed because Palestinian terrorists believe that Washington will continue to bail them out.
(JNS.org)
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.
