Why Kamala Harris remains unlikely to break from Joe Biden on Israel and Gaza

Last December, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to a climate conference in Dubai and quickly huddled with the leaders of three Arab nations to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The conflict, by then, was still weeks old, ignited by a terrorist attack in which militants killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds hostage. Harris saw a diplomatic opening for herself: to be the face of the future, and not of the current war. She told the assembled leaders, “The phase of fighting will end and we will begin implementing our plans for the day after.”

Planning for the phase after the war might have seemed rhetorically out of step with President Joe Biden, who was managing growing domestic opposition to the conflict with his embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the visit publicly established Harris as a more compassionate voice for the administration, and she has publicly and privately been more empathetic than Biden about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

Still, according to U.S. officials and campaign advisers, the empathy she has expressed as vice president should not be confused with willingness to break from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.

The war is now over a year old, and the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, has created what both Harris and Biden are calling an “opportunity” to end the fighting. Even if Harris were not aligned with Biden’s current approach — and her advisers stress that she is — she would not bow to political pressure and upend U.S. foreign policy at a precarious moment in the conflict, just days before an election.

Instead, she is returning to the message she embraced last winter, emphasizing that Gaza residents may someday soon be able to rebuild — if the Israelis are assured of their safety and their hostages returned.

If that happens, Harris said Thursday at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during a campaign visit, “The suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination. It is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”

The message is rhetorically empathetic but without any substantive difference from current policy, or ideas about the path forward. That work will be left to others, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whom Biden said he would dispatch to Israel to try to help broker an end to the conflict.

“I talked with Bibi about that,” Biden told reporters Thursday, referring to Netanyahu. “We’re going to work out what, what is the day after now.”

Harris, her advisers say, will be present for high-level discussions but largely focused on the campaign trail.

Beginning with a stop in Michigan’s Oakland County on Friday evening, Harris is expected to keep calling for an end to the conflict, without urging Israel to pull back unilaterally — a demand some of the administration’s critics want her to make.

Biden and Harris’ promotion of a “day after” for Gaza has not swayed sceptics of their handling of the war like James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington. His organization has conducted numerous polls showing Arab Americans moving away from the Democratic Party — in its latest survey, they were evenly divided between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Zogby said that while Harris’ language had diverged from that of Biden, it was still based on a false premise that trying to eliminate Hamas was worth killing 40,000 Palestinians and displacing millions of others.

“What does ‘day after’ mean? It’s the most insensitive term,” Zogby said. “What is a day after genocide? What is it? There’s a generation after. A generation in which people will still be recovering from the psychic and physical wounds.”

Zogby’s frustration reflects a feeling — and an acknowledgment among some Harris campaign operatives — that the damage with a small but potentially crucial subset of voters has been done, especially in Michigan. The battleground state has one of the largest Arab and Muslim populations in the country, and those voters signalled long ago that they were angry with the Biden administration over the war.

The path to victory in a state like Michigan, Harris campaign officials are betting, is through suburban counties that are home to many college-educated and white voters. That includes a slice of the more than 296,000 voters who supported Nikki Haley in the state’s Republican presidential primary race. Harris’ visits to suburban areas of Michigan and Wisconsin this week underscored where she and her advisers believe she can win.

The anger about Gaza, as well as the appeal of Jill Stein, a third-party candidate who is campaigning heavily against the conflict, has raised alarms within the Democratic Party that the war could cost Harris the election.

Biden won Michigan by just 154,000 votes in 2020, and the state has 200,000 registered Arab American and Muslim voters. In 2016, Trump won there by just under 11,000 votes.

Harris’ strategy has opened an opportunity for Trump, who has set out to court disaffected Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan. Surrogates, including his daughter’s Lebanese American father-in-law, have been crisscrossing Michigan to sell the former president as the leader who could broker peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump also won the endorsement of the mayor of a small Michigan city, Hamtramck, that is run by an all-Muslim City Council.

During a campaign stop last week in Detroit, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, also made an appeal to Arab American and Muslim voters, vowing to meet with them in the coming weeks.

“Obviously, Arab Americans often have different views than Jewish Americans on what’s going on in Israel, what’s going on in Palestine,” Vance said. “But I think most Jewish Americans and Arab Americans recognise that what’s in the best interest of Israel and Palestine is peace, and Donald J. Trump is the president of peace.”

The former president has said little about the Gaza war, except to say Israel needed to “finish up” its offensive because it was tarnishing its global image. During an interview on the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Trump surmised that Gaza could be rebuilt “better than Monaco,” because it had “the best water, the best everything.”

On Friday, Trump told reporters in Detroit that Netanyahu was “doing a good job” and that “Biden is trying to hold him back.” Of the killing of Sinwar, the former president said: “He was not a good person. That’s my reaction. That’s sometimes what happens.”

Trump, who as president was an ally of Netanyahu and pleased right-wing Israelis by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, has professed that he has done more for Israel than any other president. On the campaign trail, Trump has said that he would be Israel’s “protector” and told Jewish voters that they would be partly to blame if he lost the election. He has also claimed that Israel would “cease to exist.”

“It’s total annihilation — that’s what you’re talking about,” Trump said at the Israeli-American Council summit in September. “You have a big protector in me. You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

Some of Trump’s former advisers have warned that is not true.

John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, who has become among his sharpest critics, said this year that “Trump’s support for Israel in the first term is not guaranteed in the second term, because Trump’s positions are made on the basis of what’s good for Donald Trump, not on some coherent theory of national security.”

Harris’ office and campaign declined to give specifics of what a Harris administration’s policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza would look like, in large part because the conflict is too volatile to predict how it might be managed days from now, let alone months from now.

But one senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail Harris’ thinking, said that if she won the election and the war were still going on, her policy was not expected to change.

Halie Soifer, who is now CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and served as Harris’ national security adviser when she was in the Senate, said the vice president had maintained a pragmatic approach to the conflict that is rooted in her long-standing commitment to Israel’s security.

Soifer, who accompanied Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, on a 2017 trip to Israel, said that “at every opportunity, Vice President Harris has provided assurances that she stands with Israel.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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