How Kamala Harris Can Show She’s Not Like Biden on Israel
With her choice of vice president, the vice president can indicate a sharp change in future policy regarding Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, left, and Vice President Kamala Harris shake hands during a meeting in the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office in Washington, DC, on July 25, 2024.
(Kenny Holston / The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)Benjamin Netanyahu was on the run. As darkness fell on the evening of July 20, angry mobs descended on his house as he raced to the airport to flee the country for Washington, DC, his safe haven. Furious over the Israeli prime minister’s failure to free the hostages held in Gaza, large crowds of demonstrators headed for his multimillion-dollar beachfront house in Caesarea. And ahead lay a potential arrest warrant that could be issued at any time by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity—among them extermination, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.
The warrant would require Netanyahu’s immediate arrest should his plane touch down for refueling in Europe—or any of 124 countries around the world. The answer was to jettison a number of passengers before takeoff to save on fuel and fly nonstop.
Soon after his $245 million getaway plane, the lavish “Wing of Zion,” touched down in Washington, Netanyahu headed to the Capitol, where he became the first foreign leader to address a joint session of Congress four times—a total that topped Sir Winston Churchill’s record. By the time it was over, Netanyahu’s 58 standing ovations, about one a minute, may have also set a world record, outdoing even the applause given to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by his robotic party officials. But among the very obvious no-shows was Vice President Kamala Harris, who would normally take her place atop the dais in the House Chamber during an important address. “It’s outrageous to me and inexcusable that Kamala Harris is boycotting this joint session,” snarled Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
But by then, Harris was not only the vice president but also the presumed Democratic nominee for president in search of her own vice president. And among the most critical issues she and her prospective veep face as candidates is the ongoing war in Gaza and the actions—and nonactions—of the Biden/Harris administration. Netanyahu did meet briefly with Harris, who barely shook her finger at him. “It is time for this war to end,” she said in a televised statement after the meeting. “We cannot allow ourselves to be numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”
It was a bizarre statement, as if she were a powerless protester standing on a street corner holding a sign, rather than the second-most-powerful person in the most powerful country in the world that was also supplying many of the weapons killing the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. “Every time we’ve talked in the past six months about the genocide and who’s responsible and who’s complicit and who has blood on their hands, we say ‘Genocide Joe’ and ‘Killer Kamala,’” Hatem Abudayyeh, chair of the US Palestinian Community Network and spokesperson for March on the DNC, told Politico.
Ending the genocide in Gaza and ensuring that it will never happen again is the moral challenge of this era, just as ending the Vietnam War was the moral challenge of another era. Like now, the horror of that war was understood by millions of protesters on campuses and in small towns and big cities around the country. And as the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” voters in battleground states like the Michigan primary demonstrated, ending this war could be key to winning the presidency. In fact, polls have shown that nearly 80 percent of Michigan Democrats support a ceasefire. And just two days after Biden announced that he would not run for reelection and instead endorsed Harris, seven major labor unions sent a joint letter to him demanding that he “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”
“If she wants to avoid his fate, she has to come up with a different policy, especially when it comes to the issue of Gaza,” Nihad Awad, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Politico. “Young people, voters in the swing states who voted against Joe Biden, expect a different policy, not in tone, but in a concrete shift towards a humanitarian approach recognizing the dignity of the Palestinian people.” Thus, one way for Harris to quickly and concretely indicate a sharp change in future policy regarding Gaza is with her choice of vice president.
With two US-supported and -funded foreign wars going on—in Gaza and Ukraine—and growing tensions with Russia and China, Harris doesn’t need as her vice president a governor with great knowledge of highway-construction funding and statehouse politics and very-limited-to-nonexistent foreign policy experience. She needs someone with a passion for conflict resolution and an understanding of how and why the US seems to bounce from one disastrous war to another. And rather than having her first decision be based on tired, old-style politics—picking someone simply because of the state they’re from—she has the opportunity to pick someone based on their unique qualifications for the job.
Although they have not appeared on any of the political pundit or media shortlists, among those she should consider are Democratic Senators Chris Van Hollen from Maryland and Jeff Merkley from Oregon, both important leaders in the Democratic foreign-policy establishment. While some key members of Congress travel regularly to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on pro-Israel-funded junkets, where they are wined, dined, and thoroughly propagandized by top Israeli officials, Van Hollen and Merkley chose a different destination. Last January they traveled to the dangerous Rafah border crossing, where hundreds of aid trucks, forbidden by Israel from entering, had been lined up for weeks. The two senators were there to personally investigate the holdup in humanitarian shipments to the desperate and dying Palestinians in Gaza.
“Senator Chris Van Hollen and I felt like we should try to understand the humanitarian issues, and the best way to do that was to go to Gaza,” Merkley told The Nation’s Jon Wiener last February. “At Rafah, you can talk to the people who are coming out of Gaza through the gate. You can talk to the truck drivers waiting to get in,” said Merkley. “You can talk to all the humanitarian aid workers…. We came back with powerful insight into, an understanding of, the many, many barriers that Israel has set up to efficient delivery of aid.” The two also called on the Biden administration to launch Operation Gaza Rescue, “the direct provision of aid to the 14 remaining hospitals, direct provision of food and water at various points along the 40-mile coastline,” Merkley said, “because we are tied into this catastrophic humanitarian collapse in Gaza.”
Upon their return, Van Hollen gave a scorching speech on the Senate floor, blasting the Netanyahu government for deliberately blocking aid to civilians. “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food,” he said. “In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true. That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.” He also noted that he had recently been in contact with officials at humanitarian relief organizations. “Every one of them, every one, has stated that their organizations have never experienced a humanitarian disaster as dire and terrible as the world is witnessing in Gaza,” he said. Van Hollen is also the lead sponsor of a proposed amendment that would tie aid to Israel to humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza. “American taxpayer dollars should be used in line with our values and our interests,” he stated.
For years, both Merkley and Van Hollen have struggled in the Senate to bring aid and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. In 2019, they and four other Democratic senators introduced a resolution to restore US humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The year before, Congress appropriated $257.5 million for assistance to the two areas, but the Trump administration never distributed it. After taking office, Trump slashed hundreds of millions of dollars of aid for Palestinians, and if reelected, he will likely do so again.
There are a great many similarities between the eras of Vietnam and Gaza, and unless the Democrats understand them, they are bound to repeat the mistakes. Facing growing anger by the public over his failed policies in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson informed the nation on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Eventually his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, became the presumptive Democratic nominee heading into the convention, which was scheduled to take place in Chicago in late August—just as it is this year.
In both cases, the replacement candidates were still members of the current administration and therefore could not overtly reject failed policies or propose new ones. In Humphrey’s case, as long as Johnson sought to continue the war in Vietnam, there was little he could do except own it or resign as vice president. “I’ve eaten so much of Johnson’s shit in this job that I’ve grown to like the taste of it,” he once said. On the campaign trail, he was greeted by signs saying, “Dump the Hump,” “Killer of Babies,” and “Humphrey’s Johnson’s War Salesman.”
At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, when Humphrey finally received the presidential nomination, tens of thousands of protesters were swarming the streets to rally against the Vietnam War; riots broke out. About a month later, on September 30, 1968, Humphrey finally broke with Johnson’s policy and delivered a televised speech pledging that if elected, on the day he took office he would order an unconditional cease fire to end the war. But by then it was too late. The delay and disarray helped cost him the presidency.
Like Johnson with Vietnam, Joe Biden will never pull the plug on Israel’s genocide by calling for a total ceasefire, or even follow British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in ordering an embargo on the bombs used to carry it out. A self-described Zionist and, as a senator, the biggest recipient of donations from pro-Israeli groups, taking in $4.2 million, he’ll remain Tel Aviv’s man in the White House as long as he’s president. Harris must therefore change course quickly or suffer a fate similar to Humphrey, from massive protests at the convention, to Democrats in key states rebelling and voting “uncommitted,” choosing a third-party candidate like Jill Stein—or simply staying at home. And the best way to do that is by picking as vice president someone with a long track record in fighting for Palestinian human rights and rejecting Israel’s brutal policies.
Among the people Harris should listen to is one of her former campaign workers, Lily Greenberg Call. In the summer of 2019, she packed up her life into an old Nissan Altima and drove across the country from San Francisco to Waterloo, Iowa, to work on the Harris campaign for president. She wrote in The Guardian, “After four years of a Trump presidency that stripped away the rights of the most marginalized in this country, I was driven by her vision that ‘justice is on the ballot’ and that every individual should have the opportunity to thrive.” Later, she went to work for the Biden administration, “eager to apply the values that so inspired me from the Harris campaign.” But Call became disillusioned by Biden’s blind-eye approach to Israel’s genocidal horrors. “Those very same values drove me to become the first Jewish American political appointee to resign from the Biden administration in May in protest of the president’s unconditional support for Israel’s assault on Gaza,” she wrote.
With Harris poised to be the Democratic nominee for president, the former Harris volunteer hopes the candidate will distance herself from Biden. “She must break with Biden on Israel and Palestine,” Call argued. “Harris must initiate a new era in American policy towards Israel, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is both the popular and the politically savvy popular thing to do.”