Michael F. Brown
The Electronic Intifada / August 3, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris, who has voiced strong support for arming Israel in the midst of the Gaza genocide, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 25 July.
Israel’s US-funded Gaza genocide has now raged for nearly 10 months.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has indicated he wants a quicker genocide.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic presidential candidate, would enter office with an obliterated Gaza – and possibly a regional war decimating still more – should she be victorious in November.
Trump’s anti-Palestinian racism is well known. Democrats, for their part, are obscuring the vice president’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, seeking to make her inspiring, “brat” and chartreuse cool for young people through a viral social media effort embraced by the Harris campaign.
The chartreuse revolution pushed by musician Charli XCX, young Harris supporters and the Harris campaign itself is a mirage. Harris has spent the last few days signaling business as usual – a chartreuse genocide – when it comes to Gaza and arms to Israel.
Harris has been President Joe Biden’s genocide deputy for nearly 10 months. For those who held out hope that Harris would make a quick and immediate break with Biden over Gaza, there has been no such development.
Instead, Harris rounded on Washington protesters rather than on those in the US Congress applauding genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.
CNN, which misleadingly labeled the anti-genocide Washington protests “anti-Semitic,” reports that “aides and allies who have talked with Harris – from her Senate days up through her being on the line for nearly every conversation Biden has had with Netanyahu – insist that substantively there is little daylight between her and the president.”
Democrats abandoning Biden over Gaza are supposed to make do with new wording from Harris. “The difference is rhetorical,” the CNN article notes, “but that difference, they say, is very important.”
It’s more spoken empathy, but the arming of Israel for bombing Palestinians would be the same. After 300 days of Biden administration words amounting to nothing, concerned potential voters sickened by the genocide want substantive action and a change of policy.
Pro-Israel bona fides
Speaking after her recent meeting with Netanyahu, Harris moved quickly to establish her pro-Israel bona fides, citing her childhood fundraising for trees to be planted in Israel (and possibly the occupied West Bank). Notably, however, she omitted reference to the racist Jewish National Fund on whose behalf she volunteered.
It’s one thing to have done such work as an impressionable child unaware of the racist and colonialist implications; it’s vastly different as an adult politician to brag of such efforts in the midst of Israel’s simultaneous campaigns of genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.
This sends a very clear signal to Muslim American and Arab American voters in the key electoral college state of Michigan and elsewhere, as well as to young people, that Harris will not differ significantly from Biden.
She also drove home her support for Israeli apartheid by talking up her backing for Israel as a “Jewish state” in those remarks following her meeting with Netanyahu.
It’s like an American politician talking up a white Christian state. It shouldn’t sit well with Democratic voters.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are approximately 20 percent of the population and before the Gaza genocide and flight of tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, the Palestinian and Jewish populations between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea were roughly equal, even as Palestinians were subjected to inferior rights by the apartheid state.
Phil Gordon, her national security adviser, on 28 July spoke of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights as part of northern Israel.
Harris and her team have simply accepted the colonial land theft and lawbreaking of Trump which ratcheted up regional tension despite claims to the contrary by Trump and his allies. Republicans and Democrats alike cannot be trusted not to follow similar precedent with the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
As Israel undermined the limited ceasefire efforts of the Biden-Harris administration with the assassination of Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official, Harris still talked up Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
From there, Netanyahu moved just hours later to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, presumably hoping to kill off any short-term prospect of a ceasefire and any hopes Harris and Biden retained of securing one prior to the November election. From Netanyahu’s perspective, heading off a ceasefire also helps keep him in office longer as even Biden has indicated.
Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham are both dragging the US closer to war with Iran. The former with reckless escalations and the latter by seeking a war powers resolution related to Iran’s nuclear program that even the staunchly pro-Israel Democratic Senator Ben Cardin is cautious about, though doesn’t entirely reject.
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris team dithers – and fails to take the steps needed to ward off a wider war – as Netanyahu acts to aggravate the situation.
Biden and Harris may be getting dragged by Netanyahu and Graham, but also give the impression they’re willing participants.
Backing a torture coalition
Harris has not spoken in outrage at the Abu Ghraib-like conditions at the Sde Teiman prison facility in southern Israel though this has been well known for months there and at other torture facilities. There is no public talk from her of shutting down military aid to Israel as a consequence of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners or slaughtering Palestinian children in Gaza.
Israel’s governing coalition, supported with US arms and veto protection at the United Nations, bears responsibility for the horrors at Sde Teiman and other facilities.
Biden spoke to Netanyahu on 1 August. The readout declared: “The president reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis. The president discussed efforts to support Israel’s defense against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments. Together with this commitment to Israel’s defense, the president stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region.”
Absent was any alarm about civilian deaths caused by the Israeli military with American weapons in Gaza, the defense of torture by members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, the theft of West Bank territory or the urgent need for a ceasefire. The “no daylight” policy puts no meaningful pressure on Netanyahu.
Notably, the document further added, “Vice President Harris also joined the call.”
Harris has a fast-closing window in which to distinguish herself dramatically from Biden as the situation in the region continues to deteriorate, in part as a consequence of Biden’s policy choices.
Yet she is abysmally failing to push Biden on this and clearly set forth her own policy. Harris simply seems unwilling to denounce Israeli war crimes and genocide with American weapons. Mild protestations about Palestinian civilian casualties are insufficient.
One of her vice presidential candidates, Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, volunteered in Israel’s apartheid army and wrote in a racist 1993 op-ed while in college that Palestinians “do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
In a less-covered passage, Shapiro appeared to think of all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea as Israel, writing “the United Nations made peace boundaries for the two nations to exist together in what is today Israel.
Silence, failed diplomacy and the active support of Harris in the arming of Israel equals a chartreuse genocide. This is not what most Democrats want, yet many are rallying to Harris without sufficient awareness of how closely she is cleaving to Biden’s disastrous policy.
In the midst of the Gaza genocide, Democrats have put forth no candidate forcefully speaking out against it and expressing a willingness to tell Israel to stop and, if not, to cut the weapons flow off.
Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist
