Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Protesters gather outside a gate at the White House in Washington, March 4, 2024, while Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Benny Gantz, chairman of Israel’s National Unity Party.
It’s all but official: With President Biden stepping aside, and virtually the entire party lining up behind her, Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president.
But that raises the question of just what Harris would do as president. In the arena of foreign policy, the president has sweeping authority, and nowhere has that power been more consequential of late than with the Biden administration’s firm support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
On another of the major foreign-policy initiatives of the Biden administration, namely support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, Harris has been consistently on the same page. This would make some sense, as the Ukrainian cause is widely popular within both the American population and the Washington foreign-policy establishment.
On Gaza, the picture is less clear. Here the Biden administration’s lockstep support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s frankly genocidal war—which has now killed something like 30 times as many people as the 10/7 attacks, the large majority of them civilians—has badly split the Democratic Party. In particular, it seems to have deeply alienated certain blocs of young and minority voters, especially in vital swing state Michigan.
Biden’s timid and half-hearted attempts to ease the carnage have only made him seem feckless and incompetent. When Israeli troops and mobs of extremist West Bank civilians blocked aid trucks from reaching Gaza in a deliberate attempt to starve civilians, rather than forcing the issue, Biden had a floating pier built, which fell apart in a storm and was later abandoned. When Biden personally said that if the IDF invaded the city of Rafah he would cut Israeli military aid, and they then proceeded to invade, he did nothing.
As vice president, Harris has largely stayed mum on Gaza. This is hardly surprising—the vice president has practically no formal powers, and for most of American history the office was famously a boring political cul-de-sac. More recently, vice presidents have had more responsibility, but only due to presidents assigning it to them, as both George W. Bush and Barack Obama did. Had Harris publicly attacked her boss, it would likely have meant her being sidelined in the administration, and damaged her chances of being endorsed as Biden’s successor, which she now has been.
That said, Harris did call publicly for a cease-fire back in March. “The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses,” she said. “Our hearts break for the victims of that horrific tragedy and for all the innocent people in Gaza who are suffering from what is clearly a humanitarian catastrophe. People in Gaza are starving.”
I would expect the administration of any other Democratic president to be substantially less favorable to Netanyahu than Biden’s has been.
And now that she’s the probable nominee, new reporting is trickling in from her current and former advisers. Politico reports: “As vice president, Harris privately expressed that the Biden administration needed to take a stronger stance against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the civilian death toll mounted in Israel’s war against Hamas.” (Presumably that information was leaked for a reason.) Former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned his post in protest of Biden’s position on the war, said he had “cautious and limited optimism” that Harris would not be so “fixed and intransigent” as Biden.
In an interview with Joan Walsh at The Nation, Harris said she would take a different “tone” on Gaza. When asked to clarify, she said: “OK, the trucks are taking flour into Gaza. But here’s the thing, Joan: I like to cook. So I said to my team: You can’t make shit with flour if you don’t have clean water. So what’s going on with that?”
Then on Monday, it was reported that Harris would not be attending Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress, where traditionally the vice president presides—a snub that matters especially because she would have sat directly behind Bibi, in view of the cameras.
Fundamentally, I would expect the administration of any other Democratic president to be substantially less favorable to Netanyahu than Biden’s has been, not least because the Gaza massacre has been a disaster for American foreign policy. The Netanyahu regime’s deliberate bombardment of schools, aid trucks, refugee camps, and hospitals, while continuing to receive firm American backing not only makes the U.S. look like a ridiculous hypocrite as it lambastes Russia for carrying out the same indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Ukraine. It also makes a farce of the vaunted “rules-based international order” the Biden administration has spent so much effort promoting.
And politically, it was beyond senseless for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—Congress’s top Democrats—to welcome Netanyahu’s speech. The guy openly campaigns for Republicans. The last time he gave an address to Congress, it was part of an attempt to blow up then-President Obama’s top foreign-policy priority, and he is plainly itching for Donald Trump to win back power so he can finish his ethnic-cleansing campaign without a peep of American protest.
The truth is Biden is an outlier in his party. As Jonathan Guyer wrote in a recent print issue of the Prospect, Biden’s position on Gaza can be explained simply: He is a die-hard Zionist, and has been for more than 50 years. Biden came of political age, and formed his attachment to Israel, in the 1970s when Israel was not the violently racist right-wing ethnostate it has become. In 1969, for instance, the Labor Party got 37 percent of the vote—but in the most recent elections, it got 4 percent. When Harris first won national office in 2010, by contrast, none other than Netanyahu had just started his second term as Israeli prime minister.
Obviously, one cannot predict with any certainty how a Harris administration would behave should she win, or whether she’ll have the stomach to bring the enormous pressure to bear on Israel that would be required. But her actions, statements, and political realities suggest she will at least be tougher on Israel than her predecessor.
