She may have been the administration’s ‘bad cop’ in its dealings with the Israeli government, but her political strategists now intend to soften that image.
For semi-professional activists whose hostility toward Israel is matched only by their willingness to absolve Hamas of fault for its atrocities, Joe Biden’s decision to step away from politics at the end of his first term has come as a relief. To hear refugees in self-imposed exile from Democratic politics tell it, Biden is all that stood between them and their desire to see the United States cast Israel to the wolves.
Some of the former Biden administration officials who quit in protest against the administration’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas are celebrating their one-time boss’s forthcoming retirement. Moreover, they anticipate that Kamala Harris will better serve their cause.
“I’ve worked for Kamala,” said Lily Greenberg Call, a former Interior Department official who departed from her role over the Biden administration’s failure to halt “offensive weapons transfers” to Israel. “I know she’ll do the right thing.” Erstwhile Education Department policy advisor Tariq Habash echoed Greenberg’s optimism. “Frankly, it’s hard to imagine any Democrat [having] a worse approach to the genocide than Biden given his complete resistance to any shift over the last ten months,” he said. Low-level State Department functionary Josh Paul, whose ostentatious exit from Foggy Bottom in opposition to weapons transfers to Israel stands in marked contrast to his comfort with proposed weapons transfers to the governments of Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Thailand, and Vietnam, indulged his own martyr complex. Biden’s withdrawal statement suffused Paul with “a deep sense of relief that the Democratic party will not be nominating for the Presidency of the United States a man who has made us all complicit in so much and such unnecessary harm.”
These and other anti-Israel activists succumb to a failure of imagination when they decline to rule out the possibility that their psychological torment has only just begun.
An NBC News report published late last night promulgated the notion favored by the Biden White House that, even if Harris’s instincts incline her toward a more confrontational posture vis-à-vis Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the vice president will continue to support Israel. Indeed, the views of her foremost adviser on national-security matters, Philip Gordon, “are believed to be broadly in sync with those of moderate, left-of-center foreign policy experts.”
The Times of Israel confirmed that political strategists around Harris intend to soften her image as the administration’s “bad cop” in its dealings with the Israeli government. “The side that leaks the most, and the side that has the most hyperbolic comments on background is the side that’s losing the policy debate,” said one unnamed administration official of the loud anti-Israel minority within the Democratic firmament. “Those disappointed with President Joe Biden’s policies in the Middle East will be similarly disappointed with the policies of a President Kamala Harris.”
Israel’s monomaniacal critics in and around Democratic politics can be forgiven for thinking that Harris is one of their own. The vice president has made a conspicuous habit of blaming Israel for the excessive (as critics see it) collateral damage in Gaza that Hamas deliberately invites by using noncombatants as human shields and hiding its fighters in civilian facilities. She has heaped scorn on Israel for failing to introduce and disburse aid to the people of Gaza — even though the Israel Defense Forces have been the foremost and most reliable source of humanitarian assistance for the Strip’s residents. She has bent over backward to ignore the antisocial conduct in which pro-Palestinian demonstrators regularly engage, focusing instead on the justifiability of their anger over the existence of war in an imperfect world.
This work was shunted off to the vice president because the president himself could not engage in it lest he risk offending the majority of Americans who support Israel’s cause. For Harris, that could become a painful project. The vice president’s own stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, has been accused of supporting fundraising campaigns for organizations that assist Hamas and that participated in the October 7 massacre. Distancing herself from anti-Israel demonstrators, who we now know have received material assistance from Iran, is one of Harris’s prime directives, bitter though that exercise may be.
Transforming herself from one of the Israeli government’s noisiest critics in the Biden administration into a stalwart ally of the Jewish state is just one aspect of the total image makeover Harris will have to undergo. If she can pull that transformation off, it is sure to enrage those within her party who cannot abide Israel’s existence and cannot tolerate the presence of practicing Jews at the top of the Democratic ticket. But if she is successful, Harris can comfort herself with the fact that her most vociferous detractors are obnoxious and all but universally disliked.