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(A7) Attorney Marc Zell, Chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel and Vice President of Republican Overseas International, spoke to Arutz Sheva – Israel National News about the recent Trump-Harris debate and upcoming elections.
Atty. Zell says that the net result of Tuesday’s Trump-Harris debate was a tie. “Kamala Harris kind of outperformed what we expected her to do, she was well prepared, at least in terms of her delivery. The content of she had to say was close to zero. But the moderators really ambushed Donald Trump. You could see it right from the beginning. They were fact-checking Trump on a number of things, they didn’t bother to fact-check her one time. This was not a surprise. With ABC, in particular, there was a survey done just before the debate showing that of all their election coverage, they covered Kamala Harris 100% positive and Donald Trump 93% negative. But you always hope that the moderators will do a fair job, but in this one, they weren’t ashamed at all. They just did what they did. As a result, she looked a lot better than she would have. It really was Trump against three.
“What was surprising was the snap polls afterward. The first one was a CNN poll which showed Harris with a 63% result saying she won the debate. But there were two other polls that came out with very large samplings – one with 86,000 participants, and one with over 100,000 participants – that showed Trump winning with 60% to her 40%. So roughly the public didn’t see Harris as the overwhelming victor in this debate. That’s why I say the result was kind of even and like most debate results, this one will have relatively little effect on the ultimate outcome of the election,” estimates Zell.
Zell says: “One of the things Trump has to do is make it clear to the public that Kamala Harris is simply the alter-ego of Joe Biden and his Obama controllers. Kamala is not a new face. It’s not a new turn toward the future. It’s even worse than the same old because Kamala Harris is a bona fide San Francisco Progressive. She has not really jettisoned her radical left-wing beliefs and she’s just trying to conceal them. Bernie Sanders said the other day, ‘Kamala Harris’s politics haven’t changed. She’s just putting on airs for pragmatic reasons.”
Regarding the US-Israel friendship, Zell states: “I’m not sure about Trump’s ultimate projections for Israel, in the event of a Kamala Harris-Tim Waltz victory, but they are bad news for Israel. You can see this by the way she treated Netanyahu when he came to speak to the joint session of Congress last month and the way she treated him when she actually met him, after having snubbed him at the Capitol. I understand he got a real tongue-lashing during that meeting. More than that you can see what she and Tim Waltz are saying about the US with Israel. On the one hand, she says that Israel has the right to defend itself; well, that’s very nice of her. Every sovereign state has that right. We don’t need permission from the US to defend ourselves, but she always balances that with a pivot towards the so-called plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. For example, she strictly warned Israel about going into Rafah, saying that there’s no place for the million refugees there to go and it’s going to be a humanitarian catastrophe. After we went in, after having delayed our entry into Rafah for far too long, we found the hostages and they were executed. So this is what we can expect from a Kamala Harris-Tim Waltz administration.”
According to Zell, “Sanctions are an executive order that was issued by the Biden White House on February 1st of this year. It was advertised as a way of dealing with extreme settlers in Judea and Samaria, but when you actually read this executive order, you saw that it had relatively little to do with extremist settlers and everything to do with people who oppose the administration’s two-state solution policy, with respect to Judea and Samaria. So, the executive order allows for sanctions to be imposed on anyone basically who objects to, and actively opposes, the two-state solution, which includes me, and then subjects us to potential financial sanctions in the US. What that means for those of us in Israel is that the Israeli banks will immediately go in and shut down all our banking activity in Israel. It’s a real blow. It also bars anyone under sanctions from getting a Visa to enter the US, so we filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Texas to challenge the constitutionality and legality of this executive order. The Biden administration basically imposed sanctions on a few individual Jewish farmers in Judea and Samaria, and then later systematically extended it further and further.”
As an example, Zell talks about, “Tzav 9, an organization that protested the so-called humanitarian aid to Gaza, with 15,000 Israelis, got together and said why is Israel allowing this aid to get to Gaza, while our hostages are in there and the aid goes to Hamas, who took the hostages in the first place and are still holding them. This protest was unacceptable to the Biden administration and they put sanctions on the leader; a mother of eight kids from Netivot. She has nothing to do with Judea and Samaria and the protest has nothing to do with Judea and Samaria. This is only the beginning. They recently imposed it on an IDF soldier who was simply carrying out his job to keep the peace and while they’re imposing these very heavy sanctions on Israelis and dual Israeli American citizens, they are not doing anything in the way of sanctioning the actual terrorists.
Turning to US citizens who live in Israel and are eligible to vote, but wonder if their vote ‘will make any difference if they live, for example, in New York, and only the swing states are important,’ Zell emphasizes that, “There are about 500,000 US citizens in Israel eligible to vote. That’s more than a lot of states in the US. What we really need to remember is that in 2016, when Trump won, he won the electoral votes 306 to Hillary Clinton’s 232. Throughout his presidency the Democratic party branded Donald Trump as an illegitimate president. Why? Because Hillary Clinton received 2.5 million more votes nationally. So, they lost the electoral vote, but they won the national popular vote. When you count the national popular vote, every single vote, from every single state, blue, red, and purple or whatever, counts. Therefore, we urge and are pushing everybody here. We have a lot of New York voters here, a lot of California voters here, to vote even though their votes may not affect the Electoral College result, but they will affect the national popular vote.”
“Many of these states are key for the Senate and for the House of Representatives. For example my home state of Maryland, we’ve got eight children who are voting and those votes will be very important. In the House of Representatives is even more true. Take a state like New York; there are four or five congressional races in New York that are close and if we lose those seats, lose those races, the Republican majority, which is very narrow in the house at the moment, will be affected negatively. In fact, you know that the House Majority that we do have now, that narrow majority, was caused primarily because of winds that we made in 2022 in New York and California. So, there’s again another reason why we need to be voting.
