Kamala Harris is Going to Have an Israel Problem
Despite being portrayed as the sympathetic member of the Biden regime to Palestinians, Vice President Harris's stance on Israel is no different from President Biden's
I wrote previously about how the power brokers in the Democratic Party and the corporate media have clearly coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party nominee, creating and pushing the narrative that she has essentially already won the nomination despite nobody having gained a single vote from a single delegate as of yet. I also pointed out that I believe that Harris will have all of the same downsides that President Biden will have had as a candidate, absent cognitive decline, as she is a major figure in his administration. One of the issues that I specifically pointed out was how the Biden regime is seen as enabling Israel in their destruction of the Gaza Strip and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
Nor will the fact that she is a major figure in the Biden regime which is perceived by many Arab and Muslim Americans as having given the green-light to Israel to decimate Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023. This was a problem that the Biden campaign was going to face that the Harris campaign will almost certainly inherit. While this is not likely to give votes to Donald Trump, who is as openly pro-Israel as anyone, it may convince many otherwise reliable Democratic voters to not vote at all, which could possibly cost her an important state like Michigan and the election.
There is a large portion of the Democratic electorate, and independents, who view the Biden regime’s policies on Israel as abetting genocide and apartheid, and, as I said before, while this may not make them vote for Donald Trump, it may make them not vote at all or for an independent or third-party candidate like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. instead of Harris. This will cause a big problem in a state like Michigan, which is nearly a must-win for the Democratic nominee, which has a large population of Arab and Muslim voters.
Now Jeremy Scahill has an article at his new outlet, Drop Site News, talking about Harris’s open support for Israel.
Soon after being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris earned a reputation as an ardent defender of Israel. She spoke two years in a row at AIPAC conferences and co-sponsored legislation aimed at undermining a United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s illegal annexation of Palestinian land. One of her first international trips as a senator was to Israel where she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017. “I support the United States’ commitment to provide Israel with $38 billion in military assistance over the next decade,” Harris told an AIPAC conference that year. “I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable, and we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us. … As long as I’m a United States senator, I will do everything in my power to ensure broad and bipartisan support for Israel’s security and right to self-defense.”
Harris has compared building support for Israel to the coalitions forged during the U.S. civil rights movement and embraced President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states that circumvented demands for an independent Palestinian state. Harris co-sponsored legislation that called the agreements a “historic achievement.” In a 2016 interview Harris charged, “The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” She added, “the BDS movement seeks to weaken Israel, but it will only isolate the nation and steer Israelis against prerequisite compromises for peace.”
At a private AIPAC conference in 2018, Harris was asked why she is so adamant in her support for Israel. “It is just something that has always been a part of me,” Harris said. “I don’t know when it started, it’s almost like saying when did you first realize you loved your family, or love your country, it just was always there. It was always there.”
“Her support for Israel is central to who she is,” Harris’s campaign communications director, Lily Adams, said in 2019 when Harris was running for the Democratic nomination.
I suspect that trying to portray herself as somehow dissenting from the Biden regime’s stance on Israel will not fly with people who see this as a major issue in the 2024 election, and once the excitement of Biden stepping down and having a new Democratic nominee wears off in a month or so, I expect the polling to start looking a lot like it looked with Biden as the presumptive nominee if not worse. There is a reason that Harris never even made it to the Iowa Caucuses in the 2020 election, and it’s hard to see how someone Democrats don’t even like is going to do better than Joe Biden against Donald Trump with his motivated supporters.