Kamala’s push for Palestinian statehood

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During her 27-minute interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday night, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris prefaced several of her answers with the expression, “Let me be clear.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris meet at the White House on July 25, 2024. Credit: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO

She then provided anything but lucidity regarding how she would lead the country if elected in November.

This was worse than pathetic, particularly when one considers the circumstances of her first actual encounter with a journalist since being catapulted into the Democrat candidacy. The conversation was conducted by a friendly member of the media of her own choosing; her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, was at her side for support; and the exchange was pre-taped to enable the deletion of bloopers.

That it wasn’t cut in the end makes sense, because if the embarrassing bits of word salad tossed by Harris and Walz had been removed, there wouldn’t have been enough material to fill a full minute of TV time. Whether this will have an effect on floating voters is doubtful, however.

“Mamala Kamala” isn’t new on the scene. Her poor public performances are not only a matter of record; they were among the reasons for her lack of popularity before her disdain-filled party apparatus gave her a massive P.R. makeover.

Bash aided in the above endeavor by not pressing Harris too hard on domestic issues, such as fracking and inflation, on which she’s clueless or has changed her position. In fairness, it’s not easy to pull off a defense of the incumbent administration, in which she’s a prominent figure, while criticizing it for its failures.

The sole way around the problem was to pretend that Donald Trump’s been in the White House for the past decade, rather than for four of the eight years between the terms of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bash basically let Harris get away with it. Hopefully, the public wasn’t lulled by boredom into ignoring reality.

Perhaps a number of concerned viewers woke up when they heard Bash transition to “talk[ing] about some foreign-policy issues that would be on [Harris’s] plate if [she were to] become commander-in-chief.”

Did these include queries about Russia? Ukraine? China? Iran? Of course not. The only question the seasoned interviewer posed in this realm related—you guessed it—to the Jewish state.

“President Biden has tried unsuccessfully to end the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; he’s been doing it for months and months, along with you,” Bash began. “Would you do anything differently? For example, would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”

Harris replied, “Let me be very clear. I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself. And that’s not gonna change. But let’s take a step back. Oct. 7, 1,200 people are massacred, many young people who are simply attending a musical festival. Women were horribly raped. As I said then, I say today, ‘Israel had a right, has a right, to defend itself.’ We would.”

Presumably here she meant that the United States would also defend itself in such a situation. But it’s hard to know what’s going on in her head at any given moment—except for when she asserts, as she proceeded to do here again, that “how [Israel] does so matters,” since “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

The news of the six bodies of murdered hostages found by Israeli troops on Saturday night in the tunnels of Rafah makes such remarks especially repugnant. In the first place, one of the captives held by Hamas terrorists with the help of “innocent” Gazan collaborators—and killed in cold blood in recent days—was American citizen Hersh Golberg-Polin.

The only appropriate response on the part of the Biden-Harris crew to this travesty would be to hang their heads in shame for enabling Iranian proxies, in this case a group of rapist thugs with machetes and mortars, to dance rings around what is supposed to be the world’s greatest super-power. Instead, Secretary of State Antony Blinken eulogized Goldberg-Polin on X by calling him a “hero” and resuming his efforts to secure a “ceasefire”—a euphemism for a Hamas victory over Israel.

Secondly, if the incompetents in D.C. hadn’t been trying to court Hamas-supporting constituents—on the grounds, as Biden said at the Democratic National Convention, that “they have a point”—they might have behaved like the allies of Israel that they’ve been professing to be since Oct. 7. Yes, had they not kept trying to block it from entering Rafah, or withholding weapons shipments as leverage, Goldberg-Polin and many others might well have been rescued by now.

This brings us back to Harris, who made sure, in her inarticulate fashion, to stress that she’ll toe the party line on Gaza: nodding slightly to the Jewish community by purporting to back Israel’s right to be upset about the atrocities of Oct. 7, while attempting to appeal to progressive antisemites.

“We have got to get a deal done,” she told Bash. “We were in Doha [the capital of Qatar, where some of the ceasefire negotiations were held]. We have to get a deal done. This war must end. And we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”

Bash interjected, “But no change in policy in terms of arms so forth?”

Harris said a perfunctory “no,” repeating, “I—we—have to get a deal done. Dana, we have to get a deal done. When you look at the significance of this to the families, to the people who are living in that region, a deal is not only the right thing to do to end this war, but will unlock so much of what must happen next.”

Not a mention of Hamas’s refusal to accept any deal that doesn’t guarantee its continued reign, nor of the inconvenient fact that it never agreed to release all the hostages.

“I remain committed, since I’ve been on Oct. 8, to what we must do to work toward a two-state solution,” Harris declared. “Where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

There you have it.

Harris was admitting that, from the day after Palestinian terrorists committed the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust—before Israeli boots even touched the ground in Gaza, but while rockets continued to be launched from the Strip into the south, and Hezbollah in Lebanon fired missile barrages on the north—Team Biden was promoting a narrative of moral equivalence between perpetrator and victim.

We all must keep this in mind as Israel lays more hostages to rest and buries additional brave soldiers who fell in the battle to bring them home and beat their monstrous captors.