Okayamala Harris isn’t an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to should say this. In spite of everything, she is married to an precise Jew, and I’m sure he would fortunately vouch for her. However within the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot because the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there was a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.
Go away it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet half out loud—he all the time does. Talking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday, he mentioned that Harris “is completely towards the Jewish folks.” I’m afraid we’re about to reside by means of a political second that’s already reminding me of Barack Obama’s entry onto the nationwide stage, when a complete information cycle may revolve round a photograph of him in a Somali turban that supposedly uncovered his closeted fundamentalist-Muslim identification.
Earlier than we get to why Harris has been smeared like this and what the political risks are for her, we will clear up this fundamental level: Harris has no drawback with Jews. She has talked of strolling across the Bay Space as a younger woman with these blue Jewish Nationwide Fund packing containers, elevating cash to plant timber in Israel; she does a killer (and affectionate) imitation of her Brooklyn-born Jewish mother-in-law; she is aware of how you can use the phrase shofar appropriately in a sentence; she even helped her husband, Doug Emhoff, clip a kippah to his head on the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I may go on.
These are simply her kishkes. However she additionally has a constant report of each calling out anti-Semitism and expressing the type of unambiguous assist for Israel that will get a politician invites to AIPAC conferences yearly—she has spoken at two. Harris has condemned once more and once more hate crimes towards Jews and assaults on synagogues. “When Israel is singled out due to anti-Jewish hatred, that’s anti-Semitism,” she mentioned in 2021, as incidents by which Jewish Individuals had been the topics of hate crimes rose steeply. Emhoff made combatting anti-Semitism his signature subject earlier than the warfare in Gaza, and he has saved at it, clearly together with her assist, even now that being a proud Jew within the American public eye is a newly fraught proposition—as not too long ago as yesterday, he was fantasizing about placing a mezuzah on the White Home.
I’ve actually discovered nothing in Harris’s report as a senator or because the vice chairman to make me doubt her Zionist bona fides, whether or not she chooses to embrace that label or not. For these on the unconventional left, akin to the author and activist Jeremy Scahill, there is no such thing as a ambiguity both: Harris is a “hardline” supporter of Israel, he writes, in an article titled “Can Kamala Harris Wipe the Blood off Her Palms?” In 2017, she co-sponsored a Senate decision that criticized the previous Obama administration for being too harsh on Israel on the United Nations. Requested in 2016 about her views on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions motion, Harris mentioned she was deeply against an effort that was “based mostly on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely in charge for the Israeli-Palestinian battle.”
Since October 7, Harris has supported the final word navy objective of the Israeli authorities, saying in March, “Hamas can not management Gaza, and the risk Hamas poses to the folks of Israel should be eradicated.” Simply final month, Harris held a White Home screening of a documentary in regards to the sexual violence that happened towards Israelis on October 7—violence that many pro-Palestinian activists deny even occurred. “We can not look away and we won’t be silent,” Harris mentioned. Once more, I may go on.
But none of this will matter for her partisan critics. And the reason being quite simple and unhappy: Harris has expressed empathy for the struggling of Palestinian civilians, and in ways in which really feel and sound extra real than President Biden’s statements. That is the sliver of daylight between the 2 of them, if one desires to name it that. It’s been sufficient to make some supporters of Israel anxious about the place her coronary heart is, and people on the U.S. proper who’re longing for a wedge subject salivate on the prospect of depicting her as somebody about to interrupt right into a chant of “from the river to the ocean.”
The primary piece of proof for her supposedly left-leaning views on Israel is an interview Harris not too long ago gave to The Nation. Because the begin of the warfare in Gaza, she has been involved, she mentioned, about civilians there, about their entry to scrub water and hygiene merchandise—“I used to be asking early on, what are girls in Gaza doing about sanitary hygiene. Have they got pads? And these are the problems that made folks really feel uncomfortable, particularly sanitary pads.” A press release like that is how she has contributed to the administration’s place, by transferring from the abstraction of “humanitarian assist” to fascinated with the unimaginable state of affairs of individuals caught in the midst of a warfare zone—and with the added specificity of contemplating the considerations of ladies in a socially conservative society.
It’s what got here subsequent that might create better threat for her. Requested in regards to the younger folks on campuses who’ve been protesting the warfare, she mentioned:
They’re exhibiting precisely what the human emotion ought to be, as a response to Gaza. There are issues a number of the protesters are saying that I completely reject, so I don’t imply to wholesale endorse their factors. However we now have to navigate it. I perceive the emotion behind it.
That these protesters have usually channeled this emotion into extraordinarily ideological expression—in ways in which, sure, have in lots of situations become open anti-Semitism—doesn’t make the emotion itself any much less price acknowledging. With out taking something away from her constant, resolute protection of Israel, Harris confronted a actuality that just about no politician who has taken a place on the protests has allowed: The scholars really feel one thing. That feeling doesn’t seek for a lot context or purpose earlier than chanting loudly, however it’s actual, a response to pictures of mass loss of life, which might’t assist however encourage compassion.
Harris’s acknowledgment is likely to be step one towards truly partaking with these younger folks and enabling them to see {that a} concern for the humanity of 1 folks is likely to be inflicting them to negate the humanity of one other. Her skill to precise this empathy shouldn’t be seen as a legal responsibility. It ought to be seen as a energy—if, that’s, we now have any hope of draining the bile that at present programs by means of each dialog about Israel and Palestine. To have the ability to say, Sure, I hear what’s motivating your protest, and also you’re not evil for responding to the sight of useless kids isn’t weak spot or giving in to Hamas; it’s attacking the issue at its supply. The younger folks of America didn’t get up and resolve to be anti-Semites. They’re responding, as younger folks will, to human distress, and need to do one thing about it, even when the shape their activism has taken has created its personal callousness and prejudice.
However politics being the reductive enterprise it’s, particularly in an ultra-partisan election yr, I’m certain not a lot room exists for the nuance of this attitude. As a substitute, Harris will likely be questioned for each trace of deviation, any sign that on the ledger of Palestinian and Israeli victimhood, she has been too receptive to 1 facet or one other. Already, one of many information factors for these trying to smear Harris as anti-Israel is the Instagram account of her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff. Subsequent to Ella’s avid love of knitting, she has apparently twice posted hyperlinks to boost cash for humanitarian efforts in Gaza, together with encouraging her followers to donate to UNRWA, the United Nations reduction group that has been accused of complicity with Hamas, however which stays the first conduit for humanitarian reduction.
In his feedback on the North Carolina rally final evening, Trump tried to create a second information level by calling out Harris for not attending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tackle to Congress. Harris, on the marketing campaign path, had an already scheduled occasion—as did Trump’s Republican working mate, J. D. Vance, who was additionally absent, although this didn’t ignite Trump’s ire. In truth, Harris is slated to carry a private assembly with Netanyahu this week.
The problem for Harris now will likely be to handle these optics and associations, as a result of a lot will likely be fabricated from them, pretty or not. Whilst she ought to insist that it’s neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel to indicate concern for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, she has to maintain her distance from these on the left whose activism and concern are extra about anti-Zionism than being pro-Palestinian. And he or she appears primed to do that, issuing a assertion that strongly condemned yesterday’s protests in Washington, D.C., towards Netanyahu’s go to, denouncing activists who engaged in Hamas cosplay as “despicable” and “abhorrent.”
Along with defusing the tensions over scholar activism, Harris’s facility with expressing empathy offers her an opportunity to win over these 100,000-plus voters in Michigan who voted “uncommitted” in February’s Democratic major as a protest towards Biden’s Israel insurance policies. But when Harris does so by transferring too far towards these whose sympathies will not be as evenhanded and beneficiant as hers appear to be—akin to Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who speak of a “genocide”—that will likely be each a mistake and a political drawback: Trump’s chorus about her being an enemy of the Jews will likely be in common rotation.
What’s vital to grasp on this second when Harris can nonetheless outline herself, moderately than be pinned down by others on the left and proper, is the place she begins from. I see her as a typical Liberal Zionist (an endangered species, it ought to be mentioned). She believes within the want for a Jewish state; she defends Israel’s proper to do the whole lot it must do to guard itself, particularly after October 7; she envisions a two-state resolution to the battle; and he or she has important worries and deep human considerations about how Netanyahu’s authorities has waged this warfare and what it has meant for Palestinian lives. By her phrases and deeds, that is who Kamala Harris is. Every thing else that has been and will likely be projected onto her in the case of Israel and the Jews is the results of a political setting that doesn’t know what to do with somebody who sees the battle on this humane means.
