Patrick Lawrence: Harris Comes Out of the Closet on Israel

Well, Kamala Harris has had her fun with all those “progressive” voters, in and at the edge of the Democratic Party, who were much taken—or taken in, better put—as the vice president played the empathy card in her many statements of concern for the fate of the Palestinians of Gaza. Let us be clear, to borrow one of Harris’s favorite locutions: If she wins on Nov. 5 and a Harris administration comes to be next Jan. 20, there will be no deviation whatsoever from the Biden regime’s limitless, unconditional support for Zionist Israel’s expanding campaigns of terror in West Asia. 

We know this now, after months of Harris’s “strategic vagueness”—how artful this New York Times phrase, an apologia for political deviousness in two words—because The Times has just published a remarkable piece of “news analysis” making it clear indeed that Harris’s campaign-trail talk “should not be confused with any willingness to break from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.” 

Wow. My mind tumbled instantly back to the leaked transcript of that six-figure speech Hillary Clinton gave to a roomful of Wall Streeters during her 2016 campaign. I say one thing to the great broad masses out on the hustings, she told the assembled financiers, but pay no attention. I’m telling you here that we’re in this together. 

Ah yes, politics in the land where all is artifice and nothing need be sincere. 

If this news meant merely more of the same it would be grim enough, given the spectacle of Israeli savagery that confronts us daily. But in my read the Harris people have put us on notice that the U.S., should she emerge the victor in a few weeks, will back Israel as unequivocally, as it does now, while the Zionist regime continues to ignore international law and escalate across the region. 

Cases in point: Just in the past couple of weeks the U.S. has bombed targets in Yemen from which Houthis have been firing missiles into Israel, while, on President Biden’s orders,  sending Israel a highly sophisticated missile-defense system and 100 troops to operate it. There is only one conclusion to draw at this point: Support of this kind cannot continue without the U.S. taking on another war. 

One can hope only that all those dreamers who dreamed Kamala Harris would bring something new to this U.S.–financed spree of bombing and murder—who don’t understand the dynamics of the American imperium’s policy in West Asia, this is to say—have awakened, none too gently, from their slumber.

Assiduously and cynically, Harris has cultivated delusory expectations at the left-hand end of the Democrats’ garden ever since party elites and donors imposed her as the 2024 candidate last spring. Here she is July 25, as reported by NPR, after a meeting in Washington with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister:

What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating … We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.

And here are Katie Rogers and Erica Green reporting in The New York Times just prior to a Harris campaign stop in Michigan last Friday, Oct. 18:

Ms. Harris’s office and campaign declined to give specifics of what a Harris administration’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza would look like, in large part because the conflict is too volatile to predict how it might be managed days from now, let alone months from now.

But one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Ms. Harris’s thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. Rogers and Green report that the strategically vague Kamala Harris cannot say what her Israel policy will be because things in Gaza and beyond are too dynamic, changing by the day, and then quote an unnamed U.S. official who can assure us her Israel policy will not change no matter what happens one day to the next? You have to love the logic in this reporting. Keep this up, Ms. Rogers and Ms. Green, and you could be on for a Pulitzer next spring. 

Here’s another good ’ern, as an old farmer I knew used to say, from Rogers and Green:

Even if Ms. Harris were not aligned with Mr. Biden’s current approach—and her advisers stress that she is—she would not bow to political pressure and upend U.S. foreign policy at a precarious moment in the conflict, just days before an election. 

Say whaaa? What does “not bow to political pressure” mean? This is The Times’s cotton-wool English at its best, or worst, and as so often it requires translation. In this case: A Harris administration will pay no more attention to popular opinion than the Biden regime has paid to date because American foreign policy must not be subject to the will of the electorate. It does not matter, therefore, how many Americans want the U.S. to stop supporting terrorist Israel’s genocide. The horror show shall go on. 

To keep the scorecard up to date, a CBS poll in June, the most recent I can find, indicated that 61% of those surveyed favored an arms embargo against Israel. This compares with 52% three months earlier, according to a poll commissioned in March by the honorable people at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—not when the direction of the wind is of no account.  

Katie Rogers and Erica Green give us a study in authorized propaganda, pointedly insistent as it is, in four separate passages, that Harris is fully committed to keeping the bombs and money flowing to apartheid Israel. We are left to wonder why a piece of this kind appears out of the blue, a coup de foudre when read in the context of The Times’s coverage of Harris. And why now, given the Harris campaign’s vulnerability to constituencies opposed to the Zionist state’s savagery, chief among them Arab–Americans in Michigan? 

Has Harris’s rhetoric, hollow as it has been, nonetheless prompted a case of nerves among donors who support the Zionist cause? Has the Israel lobby put its foot down? Did the Netanyahu government signal enough already with the sympathy for Gazans, as it makes us look bad? It is impossible to say. My best read is that the American public is being prepared for the U.S. to stay with “the Jewish state” as the mess it makes grows more dangerous and yet more brutal. 

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If Harris is set to embrace her inheritance in West Asia from the Biden regime, just as her people now say, what is it Harris will face should the vice president become president? This is answerable in two words: very unfortunately. The man who leaves U.S. foreign policy in ruins across both oceans, and the world in greater disorder and peril than it has been since 1945, will bequeath his successor, if Harris so proves, another war. 

We should have seen this coming, actually. The savagery in Gaza will go on until there is nothing left of it or its people: This is clear now that the Israelis have assassinated Yahyah Sinwar, the Hamas leader, and continue—no, escalate—their assault on the Strip’s remaining population. The Pentagon positioned the Navy and a modest contingent of troops off the Lebanese coast shortly before the Israelis began their attacks on Lebanon. Secretary of State Blinken now talks openly of “regime change” in Beirut —a coup, in plain English. There is nothing in this to suggest we can expect even a murmur of objection from a Harris White House as Israel proceeds with Netanyahu’s “seven-front war.” 

Last Thursday, Oct. 17, the U.S. sent B–2 bombers to strike underground bunkers in Yemen, from which the Houthis have for months attacked Red Sea shipping lanes in solidarity with Palestinians. Let’s call it official: The U.S. is now directly waging war alongside the Zionist regime on one of its seven fronts. 

More to the point, in my view, is how Lloyd Austin explained this move. “This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach,” the defense secretary said, “no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened or fortified.” If you do not read this as an aggressive warning to Iran you cannot read. 

The yet-bigger news came a week earlier, when the Pentagon confirmed that President Biden had ordered it to send Israel one copy of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, along with 100 uniformed technicians to operate it. THAAD, as this technology is commonly known, is a highly advanced missile-defense shield. Alert readers may recall that the Chinese freaked out some years ago, when the South Koreans agreed, not without coercion, to accept THAAD systems on their soil. 

The Israelis, The Times of Israel reported at the weekend, have already asked for a second such system. Just planning ahead. 

Trita Parsi, who directs the Quincy Institute in Washington, read the significance of this bit of American military largesse as well as did anyone in an email note dated Oct. 15:  

By deploying the THAAD system to Israel, along with roughly 100 U.S. service members, Biden has taken a massive step toward pulling the U.S. into a larger regional war. Rather than deterring Iran, Biden is reducing the risk and cost of widening the war to Israel while increasing the risk and cost to the U.S. Had Biden refrained from adding additional defensive capabilities to Israel after it needlessly intensified the conflict, the cost of escalation would have been higher for Israel—perhaps even prohibitive. Israel would have thought twice. But because Israel knows that Biden will come to its defense every time it ups the ante, Netanyahu has few reasons not to escalate. And with Biden’s latest step, regional war may now have become inevitable.

“Inevitable” is just another word for a very great deal to lose as the unfunny farce of U.S.–Israeli relations proceeds no matter who comes out the winner next month. Sending U.S. troops to Israel to run THAAD systems is to step straight into the trap Netanyahu has set, drawing the U.S. that much closer to direct involvement in the biggest of the Israeli leader’s fronts.  

Friends I greatly respect, several of them, say we have to look past Harris’s shortcomings (to keep things courteous). It all depends on who she names as her top advisers, this line of reasoning runs. This is precisely what Harris will depend upon and this is why the prospect of a Harris presidency is so worrisome. History warns in no uncertain terms these will be the same Deep State ideologues—many of whom are committed to the Zionist cause—who have run foreign policy the whole of the post–Cold War era, if not longer. The electorate’s preferences and aspirations will have no more to do with the formation of policy than they do now.  

In 1935, 89 years ago, W.E.B. du Bois published a book called Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois was concerned with African–American contributions to the post–Civil War United States, but he took on much more than this before he was finished. In this noted work he parsed three renderings of the modernizing U.S. In one, America would finally achieve the democracy expressed in its founding ideals. In another, he pictured an advanced industrial nation whose distinctions were its wealth and potency. And in the third these two versions of America’s destiny were imagined in combination. This would be something new under the sun, an amalgam that would make America history’s truly great exception. 

Empire abroad, democracy at home: It has never been more than an impossible dream. Du Bois considered it “the cant of exceptionalism,” in his biographer’s phrase. And this is the story of American politics as we have it in 2024. It is what Kamala Harris — and hardly is she alone, in fairness — has on offer as she commits to a rogue client while pursuing the White House. It is what those among her supporters who think she can make any difference in West Asia — or anywhere else, for that matter — dream about.