Juan Cole
Informed Comment / July 26, 2024
Ann Arbor – Vice President Kamala Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, having had a convenient campaign event out of town that allowed her to be absent from his disgraceful address to Congress, which more than half of congressional Democrats also boycotted.
In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant, Catholic, Jew , about the ways in which the U.S. is not actually a melting pot, but has distinct religiously-based communities. Some of the effect of his study was blunted by the Baby Boomers, who in the 1960s began intermarrying across those religious boundaries in great numbers and some of whom began abandoning the churches and synagogues. Today’s Gen Z have gone even further, with a third of them reporting themselves to have no religion. Nevertheless, the communities Herberg wrote about still under-gird U.S. political alignments. The Democratic Party is a coalition of such urban religious ethnicities. Protestant Blacks, liberal white and Asian Protestants, liberal Catholics, whether white or Hispanic or Asian, and liberal Jews (the vast majority) form the core of the party.
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Back in the day, the Democrats made a bargain with one another among these religious ethnicities. The Christians would support Israel. The Protestants would avoid bashing the “Papists.” The Catholics would refrain from imposing their beliefs on the others. That is how you get an Irish Catholic president such as Joe Biden who says he is a Zionist and who supports abortion rights in the teeth of his own church. He is the old urban Democratic coalition of religious ethnic groups in the flesh. Also back in the day, Israel was a socialist democracy, which made it easy for U.S. Democrats to support.
For a long time, the Republican Party was a coalition of rural and suburban Protestants with the Protestant urban economic elite. Over time, about half of Catholics joined the GOP, mainly on a culture war basis or because they were in business and liked the program of tax cuts and deregulation. The paucity of Jews in the party allowed Republican presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush to take a hard line with Israel. Eisenhower was furious at David Ben Gurion over the 1956 war of aggression on Egypt and made him give back the Sinai on the threat that the US would call in its loans and bankrupt Tel Aviv.
The Evangelical take-over of the Republican Party in the 1980s and after changed the dynamics. A reactionary Evangelical-Catholic alliance was determined to repeal abortion rights, roll back the sexual revolution, put women back in their place as homemakers and child-rearers, and keep alternative sexualities illegal. About 20 percent of Jews also aligned themselves with the party, more on the program of deep tax cuts and deregulation of businesses than on the culture warrior front. In this century Israel swung increasingly to the right, ending up about where Victor Urban of Hungary is, which suited the Evangelicals, hard line Catholics, and wealthy conservative Jews.
The character of the cities was changed enormously by the 1965 Immigration Act, as a result of which about a million people a year legally immigrated to the United States. The foreign-born population has risen to nearly 14 percent, a figure not seen since the late nineteenth century. Many of the newcomers were urban people and ended up in the Democratic Party. There were a few who became Republicans, either through business interests or conversion to Evangelicalism, or through dislike of the Communism of their homelands (Cubans, some Vietnamese, some Eastern Europeans).
The new Democrats included Arabs and Muslims, Buddhists, some Hindus (Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal) and Hispanics. Many came from formerly colonized countries that had thrown off their European overlord after WW II.
Joe Biden never really came to terms with these New Democrats, though he attempted outreach to the Muslims and others, reversing Trump’s Muslim Ban. Biden’s mindset was stuck in the 1970s when he went into politics, and the old Catholic-Jewish-Black-and-liberal white Protestant coalition was central. He could not imagine offering Israel anything but full impunity for anything it did and billions in aid, because that was the old Democratic bargain with the Zionist Jews in the party.
Not only are the 14 percent of Americans, nearly 1 in six, who are foreign born mostly more critical of Israel than was common in Biden’s youth, but Israel itself changed. The immigration of a million Jews from the old Soviet bloc to Israel, and the gradual enfranchisement of the Mizrahim, the Jews from places like Morocco and Iraq, resulted in a decline of influence for the socialist-oriented central European Jews. Right wing parties began regularly winning elections, instituting neo-liberal policies and destroying the socialist legacy, favoring tech start-ups and billionaires. The right wing allied with the squatter-settlers determined to steal vast swathes of Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
To the New Democrats from an immigrant background, this Israel looked like a classic settler colonial state and the Palestinians looked like a colonized people seeking self-determination. That narrative also increasingly appealed to young Democrats from liberal households and to African-Americans of the BLM movement, who took a dim view of the militarism and racist rhetoric of figures such as Netanyahu. The Gaza War has been a watershed for attitudes toward Israel among American youths across the board. Biden’s name was mud among the under-30 crowd, in part because of his callousness on the Gaza carnage.
Joe Biden could never grasp this sea change, and so lost the youths and was heading for defeat in November as a result. The youths had made the difference for Obama in 2008 and for Biden in 2020. If they sat this one out, Trump could have won.
Kamala Harris is herself a New Democrat, with a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both leftists and anti-colonialist activists. She understands the youths. She now has the tricky task of mollifying these Democratic youths who view Israel as committing a genocide while not losing the 70 to 80 percent of Jews who typically vote Democratic (though to be sure many of them are upset with Netanyahu and his Gaza carnage, as well).
Harris’s tightrope walk was apparent in the remarks she made Thursday after meeting with Netanyahu. Note that she carefully kept the actual meeting off-camera, so that her report of it could shape its reception. She began by reaffirming what we might call the Herberg bargain — support for Israel, affirmation of its right to defend itself, “including from Iran and Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah,” “unwavering commitment to the existence of the State of Israel, to its security, and to the people of Israel.” She rightly emphasized the need to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
This sentence, though, is very carefully crafted: “I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.”
How it does so matters. That is a caveat that Biden was never willing to add, nor are most Republicans.
So then, Harris went off script compared to anything we ever heard from Biden or from his Blob factotums such as Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken.
She said, “I also expressed with the Prime Minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there. With over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes doing so for the second, third, or fourth time, cannot be ignored. 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.”
I was impressed that she or her speechwriter knew that 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza were assessed this spring to be enduring Integrated Phase Classification 5 for food security, defined as “Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.” I think, though, that more recent assessments suggest that the entire Gaza Strip may be in phase 5.
Biden used to doubt that all those Palestinians were actually being killed and said things like “people die in war.” His hardheartedness toward the Palestinian people is as disturbing as it is baffling, since of all people an Irish-American should be able to sympathize with indigenous people being starved by a settler colonial state. But I guess seeing things this way would have been a violation of the Herberg Bargain.
Harris continued, “Thanks to the leadership of our president, Joe Biden, there is a deal on the table for a ceasefire and a hostage deal, and it is important that we recall what the deal involves. The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza. In the second phase, the Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza entirely, leading to a permanent end to the hostilities. It is time for this war to end and to 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.”
So she is supporting a definitive end to the war as part of Phase II, something Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.
I have a sense that when she says, “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a ceasefire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people,” she is sending a firm message to Netanyahu that she wants this war to end so it can stop being a fly in the ointment of the Democratic presidential campaign.
Unfortunately, she went on to reiterate the standard bullshit U.S. boilerplate about a two-state solution, which is practically speaking now impossible and which the Israeli parliament definitively rejected just this week. To be fair, she did endorse freedom and self-determination for the Palestinians, though in this fairy tale scenario.
Finally, she said, “I will close with this: It is important for the American people to remember that the war in Gaza is not a binary. However, too often the conversation is binary when the reality is anything but. I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and the history of the region. Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians and let us condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate of any kind. Let us work to unite our country.”
That’s her Mideast platform. It is designed to hold together in the Democratic Party both Jews and Muslims, to fulfill the aspirations of both and to protect the interests of both. It also hopes to galvanize the youth vote, as Obama did in 2008. It is a harbinger of a new American political paradigm, Protestant-Catholic-Jew-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-None, with which the Democratic Party must contend. To pull it off, she will need to put forward more than well crafted phrases. And implementing rights for Palestinians while making Zionist Jews happy is no mean feat.
But I have to say, her rhetoric, at least, is a breath of fresh air after ten months of weasel words and genocide denial. As always, the proof will be in the pudding.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
