Kamala Harris is choking on Gaza. Despite her repeated calls for a ceasefire and to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Strip, made directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the enthusiastic connection that the US vice president and Democratic candidate for the November 5 elections maintains with her voters has been called into question this week in rallies interrupted by slogans in favor of Palestine. They were neither majoritarian nor disruptive, but Harris’s usual open smile was strained when she was questioned by attendees wearing kufiyas. This same week her campaign team announced that the Democratic candidate opposes an arms embargo on Israel, despite calls in part of the Democratic ranks to adopt such a measure.
On July 25, Harris assured Netanyahu during a meeting in Washington that she would not “stay silent” on the humanitarian cost of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But this week she silenced pro-Palestinians who interrupted her at at least three rallies, the first of which was on Wednesday in Detroit, Michigan. “Now I’m speaking,” she responded to the shouts of a small group of attendees, who insisted on their slogans. “You know what?” she said, in a more tense tone. “If you want me to speak, I’ll be there.” [el candidato republicano a las elecciones] Donald Trump wins, say it. If not, I’m talking.” The group was escorted out.
The scene was repeated on Friday in Glendale, Arizona. At another mass rally—14,000 people, according to the organization—a group began chanting “Free Palestine,” but was silenced by the rest with cries of “America, America.” Harris, whose candidacy has received the explicit support of several lobbies Jews, including the progressive JStreet, opted for a less direct confrontation, as an aside to the rally. “Hold on,” he said. “I have been clear: now is the time to get a ceasefire agreement and the hostage agreement. Now is the time. And the president [Joe Biden] and I are working day and night to get that ceasefire agreement and bring the hostages home. So I respect their voices, but now we are here to talk about this race in 2024.”
Before her rally in Detroit, the vice president briefly met with a group of pro-Palestinian activists. Democrats are interested in every last vote of Arab-Americans – many of them with family ties to Palestine – in the swing state of Michigan, who until now voted Democratic, but who in the primaries gave Biden a serious warning by supporting Israel, with 100,000 protest votes. The main demand of the activists is an immediate ceasefire, but also an arms embargo on Israel.
Arab Democratic voters, who only a month ago saw their aspirations come to a standstill with Biden, are looking expectantly at Harris’s replacement, especially after ruling out Josh Shapiro, a Jew and defender of Israel, as their number twoBut judging by her responses at rallies, the candidate’s political calculations appear to put Trump’s defeat in November before meeting the demands of that small but important group of voters. As writer Masha Gessen warned in an opinion piece in the newspaper on Saturday, The New York Times“for a campaign that has begun to position itself as supportive, humanistic and kind, the failure to recognize this pain and fear [de los votantes de origen árabe] “It is particularly shocking.”
Behind closed doors, and until Biden’s withdrawal from the electoral race, Harris had managed to overcome the divisions of her party with a position equidistant between support for Israel’s right to defend itself and the denunciation of Palestinian suffering in the Strip (after the attack on a school this Saturday, the death toll is close to 40,000 according to the Gaza Ministry of Health). But her public exposure as a candidate will not allow her to avoid for long a particularly hot issue, also for the most progressive faction of her party. This same week, a second representative of the Squad, the most leftist group, lost the primaries to a more moderate coreligionist and, above all, supported with eight million dollars by AIPAC, the main lobby US pro-Israel group Cori Bush’s defeat in Missouri follows that of New Yorker Jamaal Bowman, one of the most critical voices of Israel in the House of Representatives, who was defeated in June by pro-Israel centrist George Latimer, financed with 15 million by another Jewish lobby group.
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On Thursday, with a response from Iran or one of its regional proxies to the assassination of a Hezbollah official in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in Tehran expected to be imminent, Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, took to social media to make the presidential hopeful’s first programmatic statement on the war.[Harris] She will always ensure that Israel can defend itself against Iran and Iranian-backed terrorist groups (…). She does not support an arms embargo on Israel. She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and uphold international humanitarian law.” A proclamation likely to be disappointing for the two Michigan delegates (out of a national total of 36) who will bring to the Democratic National Convention the message of punishment that Biden heard in February.
Harris will, if elected, broadly follow Biden’s policy, which has been bogged down since the start of the war — and even more so in recent months — in its attempts to force a ceasefire over Israel’s slights. On Friday, White House National Security Adviser John Kirby openly accused Israel’s ultranationalist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — and by extension his chief of staff — of being willing to sacrifice the lives of hostages for political gain. “Biden will not allow extremists to derail things, including extremists in Israel who make these ridiculous accusations against the agreement” of a ceasefire, Kirby said. Smotrich, who called the agreement a surrender, also declared that it would be moral and fair to let the two million Gazans die of hunger in order to free the hostages, “although the world will not allow us to do so.” His words were immediately rejected as “atrocious” by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Germany.
As the school year begins, campuses remain on alert for a possible repeat of this spring’s student protests in solidarity with Gaza. Some universities, such as Columbia, are considering controversial measures, such as empowering their security service — some 300 private guards, not police or law enforcement — to arrest students, while three deans have been suspended since June for allegedly anti-Semitic comments. As the November election approaches — and the first anniversary of the Gaza war, on October 7 — Harris, whose Jewish husband has led the White House’s anti-Semitism effort, will find it more difficult to remain equidistant: both from Israel and from her coreligionists and pro-Palestinian voters.
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