What could Israel expect from a Harris administration?

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(September 13, 2024 / JNS) — The path to the Oval Office has seemingly been strewn with roses for Vice President Kamala Harris since she emerged as the chief beneficiary of the Democratic Party establishment’s coup d’état against President Joe Biden. This week’s debate with former President Donald Trump, which she was generally perceived as having won, hasn’t changed that.

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Nevertheless, the election is far from decided. Though Harris has taken the lead in most national polls, her path to an Electoral College majority is still relatively narrow. The crucial swing states that will decide the outcome remain too close to call. Yet even though there are still several weeks left in a remarkable campaign in which unexpected occurrences have become commonplace, Harris must now be considered, at the very least, a slight favourite to win in November.

And that means it’s time to seriously consider what exactly a Harris presidency will mean. And there is no subject on which the answer to that question is more consequential than the future of U.S.-Israel relations. With the war on Hamas in Gaza still raging and the possibility of more hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon and/or both terrorist groups’ Iranian sponsors, Israelis and those who care about the Jewish state are well aware that the identity of the next president will have life-and-death consequences.

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A pro-Israel administration?

As one would expect, the respective campaigns have very different answers about the future of the alliance should Harris win. Jewish Democrats are predictably claiming that Israel need not worry about her. Part of that involves citing her various promises of support. While as she made clear in the debate, Harris is seeking to disassociate herself from the unpopular Biden, this also involves making the case that the administration in which she served has been pro-Israel.

As Republicans and other administration critics point out, that is undermined by Washington’s actions, which have consistently sought to hamstring Israel’s war effort and push for a ceasefire that would essentially allow Hamas to reconstitute itself and threaten more October 7-type massacres of Israelis in the future. But, as they have during the last year, Democrats claim that the supply of arms to Israel (never mind that the flow of supplies is being slow-walked) and military efforts to fend off Iranian attacks prove that the alliance is still rock-solid.

During the debate, Harris walked the same fine line about Israel and the war she has been articulating during the last year.

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She expressed horror over the October 7 atrocities in southern Israel and declared her support for Israel’s right to defend itself while adding the caveat that “it matters how” that defense is conducted. That is always followed by language intended to assuage the anti-Israel wing of her party: expressions of sympathy for innocent Palestinians and claims that too many people have died during Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas and that the war “must end immediately,” regardless of whether that allows the murderers and rapists of October 7 to win by remaining in control of Gaza. She then expressed her belief in a “two-state solution,” ignoring the fact that her pious hopes for security and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians are inconsistent with the desire of the latter to keep fighting until the Jewish state is eradicated.

Much like her signalling that she views pro-Hamas mobs as having a position that must be “heard,” Harris is leaving open the possibility that her definition of “pro-Israel” will be one that will be hard to distinguish from its fiercest and most vicious critics. At least for now, that is balanced by the fact that she clearly understands that open hostility to Israel is a political loser and that she can’t afford to proclaim herself as someone who isn’t dedicated to protecting the Jewish state’s security. That is true even if that means supporting defense against terror but not efforts to defeat the terrorists.

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By contrast, Republicans, and especially Trump, paint a dark picture of a Harris presidency in which the increasingly dominant woke anti-Israel left-wing of the Democrats will have the whip hand over the remnants of pro-Israel Democrats.

In the Sept. 10 debate, Trump was characteristically blunt and hyperbolic, claiming that Harris “hates” Israel and that the Jewish state would “not exist two years from now.” Republicans believe that the ongoing commitment of the Biden administration to appeasing Iran is at the core of the problems of the Middle East and is a dangerous policy Harris will continue.

Which of these perspectives is correct?

Let’s start by stating upfront that Trump’s prediction of Israel’s imminent demise should Harris prevail over him is both irresponsible and almost certainly not true.

The Iranian factor

It is possible that in speaking this way, he was alluding to the possibility of Tehran finally getting nuclear weapons and then using them to essentially wipe Israel off the map in a genocidal war that would also devastate Iran and likely mean the end of the Islamist regime.

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Given the existential threats that are routinely made against Israel by the Iranians, this possibility cannot be entirely discounted. And Trump has reason to feel aggrieved about Biden’s return to the policy charted by President Barack Obama in which the United States sought to realign the Middle East with a rapprochement with Iran and distancing itself from traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Had it remained in place, Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy might have forced Iran to give up its nuclear ambition. Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal had guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon, and Trump’s rejection of the pact and imposition of tough sanctions had a chance of correcting that grievous mistake.

But in the four years of the Biden administration, during which it failed to get Tehran to agree to a new and even weaker deal, Iran has essentially already become a threshold nuclear power. Washington has already acknowledged that Iran already has enough fissile material to “break out” to a bomb in less than two weeks. That means that the effort to stop Iran has already failed. Even a reversion to Trump’s get-tough policy now would probably be too late to do anything about that. Still, it is also true that further appeasement of Iran will further embolden Tehran’s adventurism.

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Biden’s weakness is largely to blame for the current escalation of conflict throughout the region and the growing threats to Israel. More of the same under Harris would increase the chances for even more conflict. Still, barring an apocalyptic decision by the mullahs to blow up the region—and themselves—Israel isn’t going to disappear.

Even if we deprecate that prediction, Israel’s government—whether it continues to be led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or he is replaced by one of his opponents—will likely find a Harris administration a difficult and dangerous partner.

Back to the Obama era?

Biden’s foreign-policy team was almost all composed of Obama alumni, which ensured that it would be deeply hostile to Netanyahu, who they resented for his courageous opposition to their nuclear betrayal on Iran.

A Harris team will also likely be heavily influenced by the same mindset. But as fractious as the relationship with Jerusalem has been the past four years, it will probably be even more problematic in the next four years if she wins. That’s because, for all of her cynical political trimming on the issues, both the Democratic Party of 2024 and Harris’ own opinions are very different from the mindset that animated Biden’s presidency.

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It must be acknowledged that we don’t know how much Biden is still influencing policy during a period of obvious cognitive decline. In the first years of his presidency, he was a factor. And that meant that although he despised Netanyahu and feared his party’s anti-Israel left-wingers, policy towards Israel was a familiar mix of support and a desire to “save it from itself.” Top positions on foreign policy were held by those who shared this liberal version of “pro-Israel” in which a commitment to protect the Jewish state was always mixed in with a belief that Americans knew more about what was in its interests than the Israelis.

That might mean the U.S.-Israel relationship will revert to the even colder ties that existed under Obama. Many Jewish Democrats still revere Obama and would be perfectly happy with an administration that strove to undermine the decisions of Israel’s voters in order to revive the disastrous and failed policies of that country’s once-dominant left-wing parties. Still, a forecast of a reversion to Obama-era levels of tension might be a trifle optimistic.

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Unlike during Obama’s presidency, the administration will no longer be held even slightly in check by pro-Israel Democrats or fear of offending its party base. Harris doesn’t have the same pro-Israel bona fides as a previous generation of Democratic leaders, though she knows it is in her interest to mimic this formula. As someone who came out of a California state party that has always trended to the left, she is far more open to the influence of woke intersectional voices who are inherently hostile to Israel. Such figures have already been given influence in the Biden administration, albeit in lower-level positions. But as someone who aspires to represent the next generation of Democrats, the anti-Israel left will almost certainly have even more influence in her administration and likely dominate its political apparatus.

A dangerous prescription

That is a prescription for unrelenting pressure on Israel to stand down in its war on Hamas, make more concessions to Hezbollah in Lebanon and acquiesce to an Iran that is on the verge of joining the nuclear club. Cutoffs of weapons, a green light to the lawfare against Israel in the United Nations, more sanctions against Israelis and fewer against Palestinian terrorists will become a real possibility.

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If Israel survived eight years of Obama’s appeasement of Iran and unrelenting efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in favour of the Palestinians, it will likely survive a Harris presidency, even if the road ahead will be even more dangerous than past confrontations. Yet as October 7 and Iran’s escalations have shown, the Jewish state’s security dilemmas are far more perilous than they were from 2009 to 2017.

Would another Trump presidency be better for Israel? That is what Republicans believe and, given his record, they have reason to think so. But it’s also true that the influence of right-wing Israel-haters like Tucker Carlson on Trump and worries about who will fill the roles that staunch friends of Israel had in his first administration are issues that need to be resolved. These are questions for a separate essay.

Israel has already paid a high price in blood and suffering for Biden’s disastrous foreign policy. But as a Harris presidency looms as a real possibility, supporters of Israel, especially among the Democrats, need to take seriously the question of whether her campaign platitudes and hair-splitting about antisemitic mobs is a harbinger of a true turn against the Jewish state or just a continuation of Biden’s equivocal policies.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

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