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By Jonathan S. Tobin (JNS)
It’s ironic. Vice President Kamala Harris’s efforts to ingratiate herself with her party’s Israel-hating left wing are being drowned out on social media by criticisms that she is too pro-Israel. And because the mainstream liberal corporate media is so desperate to aid her cause and not give coverage to stories that might undermine her, they are ignoring her latest attempt to demonstrate her empathy with those attacking Israel.
The context for this dust-up are the contrasting gaffes made by the two leading presidential candidates as they campaigned in recent days as the contest headed into its last two weeks.
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In one, Harris encountered a left-wing, keffiyeh-clad pro-Hamas heckler at a campaign appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The protester interrupted her by loudly ranting about Israel committing “genocide” and killing “19,000 children,” a false statistic promoted by Hamas.
After the man was led out by security, Harris chose to say, “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real, and I respect his voice.”
Sympathy with the mobs
Taken at face value, it was not just an indication of her sympathy with the mobs of people whose actions have been the most obvious indication of the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism in the United States. Nor was it the first time she had behaved in this manner.
In September 2021, during an appearance at George Mason University in Virginia, she had similarly endorsed the views of a questioner who claimed that Israel’s existence was an act of “ethnic genocide.” Earlier this year during an interview with The Nation, Harris lauded the mobs who have demanded that the terrorists be allowed to survive, as well as backing their calls for Israel’s destruction and terrorism against Jews. While saying she didn’t endorse everything they said, she made clear her sympathy for their point of view. “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” said the vice president.
But the incident in Wisconsin was the first time that she had seemingly endorsed the libelous and transparently false charge that Israel was committing “genocide” against the Palestinians.
It bears repeating that while Democrats falsely accused former President Donald Trump of saying that the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 were “very fine people,” Harris has done just that when speaking of antisemites who want Israel destroyed.
It’s true that later Harris’s campaign issued a clarification that she didn’t endorse the genocide libel. It’s theoretically possible that she didn’t hear all of what the heckler said. But that attempt at cleanup stands in direct contrast to the video of the event, where it appeared she had heard what the heckler said and then claimed that his assertions were “real.” It also seems similar to her past efforts to show opponents of Israel that she regards their views as legitimate even though they are directly linked to a wave of antisemitism that has swept the country in the last year that she claims to deplore.
Curiously, this kerfuffle received no news coverage throughout the mainstream media that favors Harris. Instead, the liberal press was obsessing over a tasteless, vulgar joke told by Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. The headline of the first of a number of news stories about the incident in The New York Times showed that “Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity.” Trump’s manner of speaking and his willingness to offend is not news, and anyone who considers his manners disqualifying came to that conclusion eight years ago.
Mainstream media blackout
Yet the interesting thing about these two incidents is that neither the Times nor any of the other liberal mainstream outlets had any interest in reporting Harris’s comments about Gaza.
Given the openly partisan nature of the coverage of the election in the legacy media, it’s not unreasonable to speculate about the reason for suppressing the story. It was likely motivated by the knowledge that there are far more votes to be lost by the Democrats among pro-Israel centrists than to be gained on the anti-Israel left.
That was backed up by another Times story labeled “news analysis” in which they made the case that Harris would be unlikely to break from Biden on Israel and Gaza, and take a harder line against the Jewish state as her Republican opponents assert.
Yet the buzz on the left in recent days is all about its dissatisfaction with Harris’s intermittent attempts to take a centrist position on a wide range of issues, including illegal immigration, crime and the economy, on which Trump is perceived to have an advantage.
Curiously, the anti-Israel left seems unpersuaded by Harris’s expressions of sympathy for their position, as social media has been flooded with posts excoriating her for being unwilling to falsely claim that Israel is committing “genocide.” Whether that means that they—and Arab and Muslim-American voters in Michigan—won’t vote for her is a question that won’t be answered until November.
But their anger at her desire to have it both ways on the issue seems to demonstrate not merely how their ideological rigidity seems influenced by deeply entrenched attitudes of Jew-hatred. It also shows how oblivious they are to the stands of an administration that, while not breaking completely with Israel, has been determined to try to undermine its efforts to defeat Iran’s terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Throughout the year since the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, Harris has been clear that she wanted the war in Gaza to end, regardless of whether it meant that Hamas would not be disarmed and left in power. She supports Israel’s right to self-defense but seems to oppose any exercise of that right. In the spring, she claimed to have studied the maps, and any Israeli action to eliminate Hamas’s remaining military formations in Rafah would be unacceptable and might lead to a U.S. arms cutoff. She repeated that recently when she said that the death last week of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—in Rafah—is the latest reason to end the war.
Though loathe to take action against Israel that might hurt Harris’s chances of defeating Trump, the administration’s foreign-policy team has not been shy about their desire to end the Jewish state’s offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iranian terror proxy that continues to fire on northern Israel. They also want to prevent the Israeli government from striking sensitive Iranian targets like the Islamic Republic’s oil or nuclear facilities.
The fact that Israeli plans to attack Iran were leaked by Washington by the White House, intentionally or not, is also part of a series of incidents that calls into question whether Jerusalem can trust its American ally.
This is why the significance of Harris’s comments about the beliefs of Israel-haters is not so much a question of misspeaking. Rather, it’s linked to the way she and President Joe Biden have been speaking out of both sides of their mouths about the post-Oct. 7 war for the past year.
Most Jewish voters satisfied with Harris
Democrats argue that the continued flow of U.S. arms to Israel over the last year proves that Biden and Harris are faithful friends of the Jewish state. And despite the continued threats of arms cutoffs, coupled with the civil war being waged inside the party between its intersectional and increasingly antisemitic left wing and the aging establishment that doesn’t wish to break with Israel, that seems to be still good enough for the majority of Jewish voters.
As a recent survey published by the conservative Manhattan Institute showed, Harris is beating Trump among Jewish voters by a 67% to 31% margin. That’s a slight improvement over past results for the GOP. Still, it affirms that the overwhelming majority of American Jews remain politically liberal and partisan Democrats, no matter how leftist antisemitism has impacted Jewish life in the past 12 months.
This is hardly surprising. The same poll demonstrates that the majority of Jewish voters are firmly ensconced among the college-educated credentialed elites who have increasingly rallied to the Democrats in recent years as working-class Americans flipped to the Republicans.
When broken down by the issues, the same point is made.
The top priority for Jewish voters in the Manhattan Institute survey was abortion, followed by the economy, with “democracy” ranking third. Israel and antisemitism ranked fourth on their list of priorities with only 22% saying that it was the most important issue. According to the annual Gallup poll on what are the major concerns for Americans, among all voters, abortion ranked only ninth in terms of priorities.
Harris could prove the Times right by continuing, if elected, Biden’s bifurcated stand on Israel. Four more years of criticism mixed with arms supplies, even if slow-walked, is a real possibility. That’s especially true for a politician like Harris, who may understand that the consequences of an open break with the Jewish state might cause problems that will not be compensated for by the cheers of leftists who will never be happy until Israel is wiped out.
Yet the long-term impact of her various affirmations of the pro-Hamas mobs’ false charges against Israel may have more to do with the security of American Jews than that of Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated over the course of the last year that he is willing to ignore brickbats thrown at him by Washington and stick to his goal of defeating his country’s enemies rather than appeasing them by agreeing to a ceasefire that will make more atrocities like the ones that occurred on Oct. 7 possible.
But the safety of American Jews and their ability to study safely on college campuses and walk on the streets of major cities is called into question by the way mainstream culture, the media and politicians continue to refuse to draw a line in the sand and unreservedly condemn the lies that fuel the surge in antisemitism.
Contrary to Trump’s assertions, Israel will survive no matter who wins the presidential election. And should he win, there are important questions that have yet to be answered about the influence of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish figures like Tucker Carlson, who may have Trump’s ear, and whether the same sort of pro-Israel stalwarts that staffed his first administration will be put in positions in power in a second one.
Regardless of the outcome of the vote, the growing respectability afforded anti-Zionists who support those who intend to commit genocide against Jews even while spreading lies about Israel committing genocide against Palestinian Arabs in mainstream media, culture and politics is something that cannot be ignored. The Harris comments about genocide deserved more coverage not because it might hurt her campaign. Rather, it is because this was exactly the sort of incident that is making antisemitism respectable in 21st-century America.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him at: @jonathans_tobin.
