Tim Walz Is Scared

T o hear Tim Walz tell it, you could be forgiven for thinking that Israel executed six people last weekend, including a U.S. citizen.

Of course, Walz got all the perfunctory throat-clearing out of the way first. The October 7 massacre was a “horrific act of violence,” and Israelis “have the right to defend themselves,” he recently told a Michigan-based NPR affiliate. With that yadda, yadda out of the way, Walz revealed that his passion was reserved for castigating the victims of Hamas’s ongoing atrocities.

“But,” he began (remember the rule of “buts”), “we can’t allow what’s happened in Gaza to happen.”

“We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on [Israel] to make sure we move towards a two-state solution,” Walz continued. He added that “getting a ceasefire with the return of the hostages, and then moving towards a sustainable two-state solution is the only way forward.” Indeed, those who are calling on Israel to stand down in the face of murderous aggression, like “those folks who are speaking out loudly in Michigan, are speaking out for all the right reasons.”

What a display of moral cowardice. If Hamas tortures, starves, and slaughters a few more innocent Jews, maybe Walz will call on Israel to retreat behind the 1967 borders.

The Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee, like so much of his party, has withdrawn into a solipsistic conception of the conflict in Gaza that bears no resemblance to the one that is being prosecuted on the ground. The Hamas terrorist sect is not clamoring for a two-state solution in partnership with its Palestinian enemies in control of the West Bank. Even if you believe that the conflict will end only when blood-soaked terrorists are rewarded for their murders (which is deluded to the point of derangement), Walz is negotiating with himself. So, too, is the Biden administration, which is only now coming to terms with the fact that Hamas, not Israel, is the party that has rejected each of the cease-fire proposals that Washington attempted to craft with Hamas’s intermediaries in Doha.

Walz is articulating what has become the Democratic line on Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. Of course, Israel can defend itself, but not in the way it has. They are vague enough to avoid the specific infractions of which Israel is supposedly guilty, allowing you to fill in the blanks with your priors. Of course, the only way out of this conflict is Palestinian statehood. They hope you aren’t aware of the many times Palestinian parties rejected statehood proposals on offer, or the speed with which normalization agreements between Israel and its erstwhile enemies in the region were being reached precisely because the Palestinian question had finally been put on the back burner. Of course, Israel’s critics in critical swing states have the moral high ground. Given the baselessness of the claims that Israel is engaged in genocide or even carelessness on the battlefield in Gaza (where large-scale combat operations are largely over), we can assume the virtue enjoyed by Israel’s American critics is entirely in their electorally significant residencies.

At least, the fantasy of the war in Gaza that Walz has constructed is consistent with the one in which Kamala Harris and Joe Biden languish. As Biden ad-libbed from the Democratic nominating convention stage, “the protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” Likewise, the menacing protesters who shut down campuses, holiday parades, bridges, and airports are “‘showing what human emotion should be,” Harris opined. If flattering the grotesque and irrational pretensions of Israel’s defamers is what it takes to win Michigan, then so be it.

The thing is, this desperately cynical calculation was one to which Biden’s handlers committed themselves when it was clear that the outgoing president had lost the support of his base. The substitution of Harris as the party’s presidential nominee was supposed to have united and enthused the Democratic coalition, freeing up the Harris camp to make overtures to a broader universe of voters whose attachment to reality is a little more reliable. But the Harris-Walz ticket is sticking to Biden’s strategy.

We can deduce that either the Harris campaign is faring far worse than the Democratic euphoria of the late summer suggested, or that the Democratic Party’s leading lights genuinely believe that Israel is to blame when terrorists capture, torture, and slaughter innocents. Maybe it’s both.

Either way, the continuity between Harris and Biden is instructive. The Democratic ticket is betting that it will gain more voters than it loses by catering to the most odious and unmotivated fringes of its coalition. They are still more scared of their tormentors on the anti-Israel left than they are of the majority of Americans who believe terrorists who murder Americans deserve no special dispensation. Whatever else we can say of this amoral posture, it is not one that a confident political operation would strike.