Marjorie Cohn
Truthout / November 7, 2024
After refusing to call for an arms embargo, Harris lost to Trump, to the delight of Israel’s right-wing leaders.
Israel’s right-wing regime is gleeful about Donald Trump’s impending return to power in the United States. Various Israeli officials have hailed Trump’s victory since Tuesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “history’s greatest comeback.” His new defense minister, Israel Katz, stated, “Together, we’ll strengthen the U.S.-Israeli alliance.” “God bless Trump,” national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said. Trump “has the most pro-Israel record of any president,” according to Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “The hope is here that there’ll be more of the same.” A majority of Israelis support Trump.
When Trump was president, he repeatedly capitulated to Israel’s Zionist regime. He unlawfully recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, falsely declared that Israel was sovereign over the occupied Golan Heights in Syria and said that Israeli settlements on Palestinian land were legal despite their violation of international law and prior U.S. policy to the contrary. Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, a series of agreements with some Arab states to establish diplomatic and economic ties with Israel.
With all the latitude Trump offered Israel, its violence toward Palestinians has only escalated since he left office. Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, which continues unabated, has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza. But although most Americans, and overwhelming numbers of Democrats, favour restricting or limiting the weapons that the U.S. provides to Israel, the Biden administration has continued to arm it to the teeth.
Unfortunately, during her campaign for president, Kamala Harris refused to say that, if elected, she would quit sending arms to Israel until the genocide stopped.
Two days before the election, while campaigning in the swing state of Michigan, Harris stated, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza.” But she provided no specifics. It was too little, too late. We may never know what role Harris’s refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide and call for an arms embargo played in her election loss.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who campaigned on the issue of ending the genocide, won 22 percent of the vote in Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a majority Arab American population. Harris won 28 percent and Trump won 47 percent. Hussein Dabajeh, a Lebanese American political consultant in the Detroit area, said that Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat and Palestinian American, significantly outperformed Harris in Dearborn. She received 9,600 more votes than Harris.
During the Democratic primaries, nearly 1 million voters — including many Arab, Muslim, and young and progressive voters in several states — voted “uncommitted” in protest against the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s genocide.
On July 24, Harris did refrain from presiding over the joint session of Congress as Netanyahu delivered a strident address thanking the Biden administration for its support as Israel slaughtered Palestinians.
The next day, Harris met with Netanyahu and called for a long-term ceasefire. “It’s time for this war to end and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity and self-determination,” she said in public remarks after their meeting.
Harris also stated, “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.” She had “serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians,” and “images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety.” She added, “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”
But Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel’s genocide. In October, Sunny Hostin, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” asked Harris, “What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Instead of distinguishing herself from the Biden administration, Harris responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”
At an August campaign rally in Detroit, Harris curtly shut down pro-Palestinian protesters, stating, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement, a group behind the push to get voters to lodge a Democratic primary protest vote, spoke with Harris briefly at the Detroit rally. “Michigan voters want to support you, but we need a policy that will save lives in Gaza right now. I meet with community members every day in Michigan who are losing tens and hundreds of family members in Gaza. Right now, we need an arms embargo,” Layla Elabed, co-founder of Uncommitted, told Harris.
Elabed also represented the Uncommitted movement at the Democratic National Convention later in August to demand a Palestinian speaker be allowed to give an address on the main stage. Although the parents of an American Israeli hostage held by Hamas addressed the convention, a Palestinian American woman was not allowed to deliver remarks.
If Trump had been president during the past four years instead of Biden, he likely also would have supported the genocide. His unbridled backing of Israel was evident when he said the Israelis should “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast.” Trump apparently favours the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza.
But Israel is conducting genocide on Biden’s watch. It is little solace for those who seek to end it to know that Trump would also have sent billions of dollars in weapons to the Israeli regime.
Harris’s refusal to say she would stop arming Israel during the genocide cost her votes. Reem Abuelhaj is a Pennsylvania organizer with No Ceasefire No Vote PA, a group that sought an arms embargo pledge from Harris. Abuelhaj was concerned that a vote for Harris would set a precedent whereby the Democratic Party ignores its constituents who oppose human rights violations. Abuelhaj held out until Election Day, hoping in vain that Harris would make a last-minute change in policy.
“I entered the voting booth and found myself unable to stop crying,” Abuelhaj told The Intercept. “All I could see was the face of a child in Jabaliya,” a city in northern Gaza, “holding the body of their younger sibling who was killed over the weekend. I voted down the ballot but left the top of the ticket blank.” We will never know how many voters had similar reactions. What we do know is that Trump is now the president-elect, and that he will take office for a second term on January 20, 2025.
It is incumbent on those who seek to end Israel’s genocide and illegal occupation of Palestinian territory to redouble their efforts in opposition to it. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is a valuable tool to challenge the occupation.
In 2005, 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. They described BDS as “non-violent punitive measures” to last until Israel fully complies with international law by (1) ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling its barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
BDS has been so effective that several anti-boycott laws have been enacted at the federal and state levels to prevent the American people from exercising their First Amendment right to boycott. The IGO Anti-Boycott Act, which has passed the House and is pending in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, would expand an existing anti-boycott law to include some boycotts imposed by international governmental organizations.
But we must persist. “Meaningful change towards justice will come only through the power of global people-led movements,” the BDS movement wrote in a statement following Trump’s win.
“Strategic and principled grassroots and civil society action — from city councils, trade unions, and institutions worldwide — has never been as essential as it is today not just to end the genocide, but also to save the world from an imminent ‘might makes right’ era.”
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild
