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Eve Harow, public speaker, podcaster and activist, spoke to Arutz Sheva – Israel National News on the upcoming US elections, joining the call to Israelis, who are US citizens to register and vote.
Harow says that, “It’s critically important to vote. First of all, people are tracking the numbers, seeing how many US expatriate Israelis are still involved in the US elections. Also in addition to the presidential elections there are senatorial races and other smaller races that are also critical. There is ‘no representation without taxation,’ I’m an American citizen, I pay American taxes, and I absolutely am going to use my right to vote as should everybody who has made aliyah from the US.”
She adds that, “people must remember that second and third generation US citizens living in Israel, so if you made aliyah and your children are US citizens, they still have the right to vote. Four of my seven children were born in Jerusalem. They are all US citizens and they have the right to vote based on my last address. I did not leave the US because I had a problem with the country, but because I wanted to raise my kids in a Jewish country, the biggest miracle the Jews have seen in 2,000 years and wanted to be a part of it. But, when I look at what’s going on with the Biden-Harris administration, and I’m talking about the administration, not the American people, the US is actually not a friend of Israel. It’s not that they are friends anyhow in the political arena, but they are mutual interests. But in the last few months I’ve seen a definite tilt towards Iran and trying to rein Israel in is very frightening to me.”
“Despite this,” says Harow, “I have to say that former president Trump doesn’t make it easy to vote for him by some of the things that he says. But, there’s no choice. I judge somebody by their deeds and when he was President, he did some phenomenal things for Israel; moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the Abraham Accords, and surrounded himself with people who cared deeply about the state of Israel. So that’s where my vote is going.”
On the claim that Harris will be worse than Obama, Harow says, “Well first of all, she’s being run by Obama. Barack Obama is still over all over Washington. I don’t think she’s bright enough to be making some of the decisions on her own, but she is running a campaign that’s based on not saying what her policy is and with the collusion of most of the American press, which is just amazing to me that people aren’t asking ‘but what do you stand for and where are you going.’ Even so, statements that she has made about Israel in the past, because that is my focus, even though, of course, I’m concerned about the direction America will take, are very frightening. Yes, I think that she will be even worse than Biden, who maybe because of his age and his past connection with Israel, I feel he still has some caring for the country, I don’t feel that way about her at all.”
“I would like to think that every Israeli American sees what I just said about Harris, but it’s not true. There are a lot of people who dislike Trump so much that they will not vote for him, but also feel that there’s value in her, whether it’s because she’s a woman and things that she has said. But I don’t vote for someone based on their gender; I think that’s actually anti-feminist. I vote for people based on what they’re offering and if they can do the job well,” admits Harow.
She reiterates that, “I think people should get out and vote. We’re a very important constituency. I think we’re the third or fourth largest group of expatriates, after Canada and England, maybe Mexico, and we do have an impact. We are still involved with America, we have a lot of relatives there, we care very much about their future and care about the future of America. I think the United States is still irreplaceable on the world stage. It is a needed superpower. The democracy that shines from America got a little tarnished recently, but is still something the world needs even more than ever. These are critical elections and I think everybody needs to get out and vote.”
Harow emphasizes the urgency, “You have to register now, within the next couple of days. There are several websites you can do it on. One is called ‘I vote Israel.’ Everything’s being done online. There’s a phone number on the website, so if you have trouble filling out the ballot, you can call somebody and they’ll walk you through it.”
“I think that as much as none of us Israelis want war, and I have my one of my sons already in reserve duty and a son-in-law on the way, we have all our skin in this game. So, everybody knows the cost of going to war and if we invade Lebanon on the ground, it’s definitely going to cost lives. But our residents of the north have to go back and Israel right now has a momentum, not just about killing Nasrallah, which was huge. But if you noticed the people in the Arab world, who were very happy with what Israel did, Syrian rebels etc., were lauding Netanyahu. That’s why it was so huge to take out Nasrallah and why we need to keep going with this, because right now we have the momentum. We have the intelligence, which is unbelievable. It’s like God is hand in hand with the Israeli Army and it’s just an incredible time to be a Jew. This weekend I was just floating, but we know that there’s waves. I think that a ceasefire is a recipe for letting Hezbollah reconfigure, get some new leadership, reload on their missiles, Iran is going to keep supplying them and it just means that Israel will face an even more devastating war down the road,” she believes.
Harow says that, “We’ve seen this in the last 20 years. Nobody wants to go to war in Lebanon. We ignored what Hamas was doing in Gaza and in the end it happened. One of the things that I’ve learned since living in Israel is that our ideas of peace in the west and democracy are flawed, because it doesn’t apply here to the Middle East. It doesn’t apply to Muslim states. It doesn’t apply to Islam. They hate Israel for a variety of reasons. They hate the US for a variety of reasons. They will never get past that. They will die to fulfill their ambitions of Jihad and we have to understand that it’s not going to be the kind of peace that the US looked for in Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many American soldiers died in that failed attempt. I believe strongly in the biblical verse, “May the LORD grant strength to His people; may the LORD bestow on His people wellbeing.” We will get peace, but only if we’re strong enough that they won’t mess with us. They’re not going to like us. Again we’ll have mutual interests. I think Saudi Arabia is a classic example of a country that people are not singing Hatikva (Israel’s national anthem) before they go to sleep at night, but if Israel has something that they need and they have something we need, we can make it happen. That’s the mindset that has to change, because that’s the Middle East.”
We are a shining light of democracy and of freedoms here in Israel. I am very proud to be an Israeli, very proud to be a Jew, and I think that Americans need us also to be strong because we’re that bastion in the Middle East that reflects what I hope are still American values,” concludes Harow.
