Precisely what a President Kamala Harris would do about the state of Israel remains largely unknown; the Democratic nominee for president of the United States has been so busy avoiding answering questions on the record that her media defenders have resorted to praising her holding off-the-record briefings, a contradiction in terms. So in the absence of the clarity the American people deserve, we have to read the tea leaves, as steeped in political considerations.
The evidence so far suggests that Harris wants it both ways.
She does not want to come out and say that Israel and the United States are no longer close allies, or that the U.S. will no longer defend Israel, thus upending the current policy of the administration in which she serves as vice president, and those that came before. On the other hand, she also wants to signal to the Democratic left, the crowd that sees Israel and Gaza through a reductive, colonialist lens, with the former as oppressor and the latter as oppressed, that she will be a more sympathetic ear than her current boss, whose deep affection and support for the state of Israel had a decadeslong history and was worn on his sleeve.
That is the activists’ current understanding, anyway. Take what Wa’el Alzayat, the CEO of Emgage, “a family of organizations dedicated to building political power for Muslim Americans,” said to Politico: “It’s clear to us, through her statements and what’s been leaked and conversations with people behind the scenes, she does feel differently.”
Before her rally in Dearborn, Michigan, Wednesday, both Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz met with representatives of the Uncommitted National Movement, a group that has attempted to persuade Democratic voters to stay home (or post a blank ballot) during the primary season. Two of the people with whom she met, Layla Elabed (a campaign manager with the group and sister of Michigan Democratic U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib) and Abbas Alawieh (a co-founder of Uncommitted and, note, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago), gave interviews to Boston radio station WBUR and described their meeting in some detail, saying that Harris suggested an openness to chatting about an arms embargo.
It’s revealing listening. “I asked the vice president if she would be willing to meet with us to discuss an arms embargo,” Alawieh said on air. “The vice president responded and said something to the effect of, I’d very much like that.”
Thereafter, Elabed said she’d told Harris that “Michigan voters want to support you” but that “we need an arms embargo. Will you meet with us to talk about an embargo? She agreed to the effect that, yes, we should meet, and we proceeded on …”
Sure, the two activists employ language like “something to the effect of” that allows for wiggle room when it comes to their descriptions of the meeting, and they certainly are not disinterested witnesses. But they sounded honest and credible to us.
So it must have come as a surprise to Elabed and Alawieh when a campaign aide said, one day later, that, in the language of Reuters reporting, “Vice President Kamala Harris did not agree to discuss imposing an arms embargo on Israel during an exchange with pro-Palestinian activists who are pushing for changes to U.S. policy toward its ally over the Gaza war.”
That’s a direct contradiction: The statement did not merely say that Harris did not agree with an arms embargo but that she did not even agree to the discussion thereof. And that runs contrary to what the two activists said. Somebody here, logic would suggest, is not being entirely truthful.
Vagueness and mendacity are, of course, long-practiced habits and tactics when it comes to politicians and the Middle East, often for good political reason. How much the pro-Palestinian (let alone pro-Hamas) vote will matter to the eventual result in Michigan this fall is contested. But it is inarguable that any kind of anti-Harris sentiment from the large Michigan population of those deeply concerned about the population in Gaza, a concern we share, would be detrimental to the campaign’s prospects, especially when it comes to voter turnout.
On the other hand, as we noted Thursday, it’s also striking how effective free-spending, pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have been at unseating the likes of New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman and, this past Tuesday, Missouri’s Rep. Cori Bush, both highly critical of Israel and members of the so-called “squad.” The last thing the Harris campaign needs is those groups lining up for Donald Trump and other Republicans.
There is, of course, no easy solution to any of this for either the Harris campaign or, for that matter, the people of the Middle East, buffeted as they are by fear, attacks, death and destruction and keenly aware that both sides have only hardened their positions within the last year.
Biden’s longtime support of the state of Israel was well known in the Middle East, and he stuck by it after the Oct. 7 attacks. So when he expressed dissent over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics in Gaza, it was seen by Israel and its defenders in that context; no reasonable person could say there was any doubt that Biden believed in Israel’s right both to exist and to defend itself, as do most Americans.
But not all Americans, and certainly not the protesters who represent one of the few things that the currently ascendant Democrats will struggle to control when they meet in Chicago. Harris does not have Biden’s history, and that means both sides are fighting for her ear and her sympathies.
But as longtime Middle East watchers know, discussing an arms embargo as Israel braces for an attack from Lebanon and Tehran might be appealing to some potential voters but surely would not be allyship. And it’s a simple truth that some within these pro-Palestinian groups would not only like to see the Israeli leadership undermined but Israel itself gone from the map, as least in its current form.
As president, Harris will be free to set her own policy toward the Middle East. But before Americans vote her in as president, the American people on all sides of the Middle East issue deserve a clear statement from the vice president on where she stands.
When is she going to answer reporters’ questions on this and other matters?
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