Mitchell Plitnick
Middle East Eye / July 29, 2024
The vice president and Democratic presidential hopeful will likely be terrible on Palestine and do little to change things on the ground, but Trump not only can but will be worse.
It is clear now that US Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee.
This is significant, and while it is meaningful for the issues of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza, those who are hoping that Harris will depart significantly from President Joe Biden’s lock-step support for Israel are probably going to be disappointed.
First, though, advocates for Palestine must recognize the critical victory that Biden’s decision to step aside represents.
Gaza was far from the only reason Biden quit, and it’s not the most discussed one. But it played a much larger role than Washington policy wonks want to admit.
Biden was already an unpopular candidate. Polls showed that most Democrats didn’t want him to run again in 2024, long before the 7 October attack and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza.
But Gaza set key constituencies against Biden in huge numbers. Polls might have only shown a drop of a few percentage points, but any political observer worth their salt understood that Biden had little chance of winning.
The disastrous debate performance was the final straw.
As the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour put it: “Joe Biden became a political liability for the Democratic Party on Gaza…they knew that they could not win states like Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, and they had lost big chunks of important constituencies like young people, Arab and Muslim voters, and many progressives.”
So now we have Harris going against Donald Trump.
There are some very clear differences between those two candidates that will determine, for many people, how to choose between them. But on Palestine, and particularly on the genocide in Gaza, there is a lot of speculation about what Harris might do, for better or worse.
Two questions need to be addressed: One, is Harris any better than Biden on Palestine? And two, is it possible for Trump to be worse?
A policy shift ?
Rumours of Harris departing significantly from Biden have been greatly exaggerated. Harris called for a temporary ceasefire before Biden did (though certainly with Biden’s consent), and Harris is reported to have been a voice within the White House calling for more aid to Palestinians and more demands that Israel permit that aid to get through.
Those things make her better than Biden only because the bar for being better than a man who has been a full partner in genocide is incredibly low. There is no indication at all that Harris has ever advocated any real, impactful measures on Israel if it continues to slaughter Palestinian civilians.
Harris’s statement after her meeting with Netanyahu on Thursday was a perfect example.
She didn’t try to say that Hamas, rather than Netanyahu, was the party holding up the ceasefire deal Biden put forth, and she spoke with more conviction and emotion about suffering in Gaza than Biden has.
But she did not acknowledge any American responsibility for that suffering and said little that was directly critical of Israel either. Her tone was markedly different from Biden’s, but the policy approach was not.
Harris is best described as a mainstream Democrat on Palestine.
As one observer once put it: “She is more AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) than J Street”, referring to the two biggest pro-Israel lobbying groups in the US.
Between them, AIPAC and J Street define the scope of pro-Israel groups in Washington. J Street supports a Palestinian state but places Israel’s “security concerns” above all else. AIPAC simply isn’t interested in the basic rights of Palestinians at all.
Harris opposed former President Barack Obama’s abstention in December 2016 on a UN resolution that condemned Israel’s illegal settlement construction without even calling for any action to be taken against them. She opposes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, though she opposed legislation that targeted it, saying it was a violation of free speech.
Her record on Palestine and Israel looks like most mainstream, pro-Israel Democrats.
Such Democrats have quietly supported the US in curbing the worst of Israeli excesses over the years in the name of regional stability.
An example is when Obama told Israel in 2014 that it could launch missiles at Gaza but that he would not want to see a ground invasion. Israel did a lot of damage to Gaza, with Obama’s permission, but his warning was heeded.
This was typical of both parties’ behaviour towards Israel over the years.
Biden, by contrast, has always been radical on this issue despite his rhetorical support for a mythical “two-state solution”.
Even former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was once shocked by Biden’s bloodthirstiness when it came to Palestinians.
In a private meeting with Begin in June 1982, Biden defended Israel’s aggression in Lebanon, saying “he would go even further than Israel,” Begin recalled, “adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.”
Even Begin, a man who was once a wanted, notorious terrorist, was disgusted.
Harris, a more mainstream Democrat, is better than that. But what does that really mean?
She might have tried to restrain Israel more at the beginning when Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel would cut off all food, water, electricity, and medicine to Gaza. But that time has passed. It takes political will and effort to stop Israel, and there is no reason to believe Harris would go to such lengths.
Better than Trump ?
It is hard for decent people to imagine how things could possibly be worse for Palestinians than they have been under Biden. But even if it is beyond our imagination, there are always ways to be worse, and few are as capable of finding them as Trump.
Some believe that Trump, a transactional man who uses rather than believes in ideological standards and hasn’t said much about Gaza, might be open to considering a different path if it can be shown to benefit him.
But we have heard something about Gaza from him.
Trump has complained that Israel needs to “finish the job” and that it must have a “victory“. He has expressed concern about Israel losing the battle for public opinion because the war has gone on so long.
But “finishing the job” faster can only mean even more large-scale devastation in Gaza.
Israel would become even more emboldened to escalate its attacks on Gaza and possibly in Lebanon and elsewhere. And this time, they would hit a Gaza that is already nearly destroyed, where people are contracting diseases from contaminated water, if they can find any water at all, and where even a bandage is a precious commodity.
And, lest we forget, this is also the man who wanted to order the police to fire on peaceful protesters during his time in office. How, then, should we expect him to act towards campus protesters who were already confronted with great police violence and left unprotected in the face of white nationalist and pro-Israel rioters attacking them?
Under Trump, we can expect an Israel that is let even more entirely off the leash than under Biden. At the same time, those of us in the US who are demonstrating and advocating against the genocide will have even less influence over our government than we do now and will face far greater violence, as well as legal and other attacks.
Kamala Harris will likely be terrible on Palestine. The minor ways in which she would be an improvement over Biden will be mostly cosmetic and will not change things on the ground.
But yes, Trump not only can but will be worse. Moreover, if Trump wins, the gains the Palestine solidarity movement made by playing a decisive role in forcing Biden to step aside will be lost.
The constituencies that made a political difference with Biden are completely irrelevant to Trump, and many people who don’t know any better will blame Palestine solidarity for Trump’s return.
In every way, his victory is the worst of an array of bad possible outcomes. And, awful though it is, Harris’s victory is significantly preferable.
Mitchell Plitnick, a political analyst, and writer is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy and runs the Cutting Through newsletter and video channel on Substack; he is the author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
