As Netanyahu arrives in Washington, Kamala Harris treads a careful path on Israel and Gaza
One of the key intrigues hanging over Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious visit to Washington this week is what kind of reception he will receive from the White House, and how he will be received by Joe Biden and his vice-president – and the likely Democratic party nominee – Kamala Harris.
For much of Monday, no meetings between Netanyahu and either Biden or Harris had been confirmed, even though the Israeli PM had already departed for the US and was scheduled on Wednesday to address a joint session of Congress at the request of the House leader, Mike Johnson, a Republican.
Harris appears likely to skip that session, where she would have sat directly behind Netanyahu as the president of the Senate. She will be out of Washington for a public event at a college sorority in Indiana.
Late on Monday, an aide to Harris said that both she and Biden would sit down with Netanyahu in separate meetings at the White House and denied that her travel to Indianapolis indicated any change in her position towards Israel.
Nonetheless, the disjointed reception could deal a blow to Netanyahu, who has wanted to leverage his political contacts in the US to bolster his credentials as a statesman at home, and also to maintain his relationship with Democrats in case they defeat Donald Trump in November.
Harris backers and insiders say that she is more likely to engage in public criticism of Netanyahu than Biden and to focus attention on the civilian toll among Palestinians from the war in Gaza – even if she would maintain US military aid and other support for Israel that has been a mainstay of Biden’s foreign policy.
“The generational difference between Biden and Harris is a meaningful difference in how one looks at these issues,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel lobbying group that has endorsed Harris’s presidential bid.
“It isn’t necessarily as much a matter of policy as, I think it is of framing … there is a frame for people in the generation of Kamala Harris and younger that is much more recognising of the Palestinian side of the equation, and much more recognising of the need for both people’s fears and needs and rights to be part of this conversation.”
Harris has issued forceful calls for a ceasefire and criticised Israel’s prosecution of the war. At the same time, she has burnished her pro-Israel credentials, even as an aide confirmed that she would be absent when Netanyahu in Congress speaks on Wednesday. “Throughout her career, [Harris] has had an unwavering commitment to the security of Israel. That remains true today,” the aide said.
In March in a speech in Selma, Alabama, the site of a historic demonstration in the American civil rights movement, she said: “As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.
“And just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.”
Ivo Daalder, the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the former US permanent representative to Nato, said: “There’s very little doubt… that she is a voice inside [the administration] that pushes hard for prioritising the impact on civilian populations in Gaza and making sure that that’s an issue that remains uppermost in people’s mind, including the president.”
But once decisions have been made within the administration, added Daalder, Harris has not broken with them publicly. Democrats critical of the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war have said that Harris will not represent enough of a break from the norm.
Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab-majority city, pointedly did not endorse Harris. “To nominate a candidate who can usher historic policy domestically AND abandon the genocidal course charted in Gaza and beyond,” he wrote. “America needs a candidate who can inspire voters to come out to the ballot box this November.”
Broadly, foreign policy experts said they thought Harris would maintain similar policies to Biden on Israel, while speaking out more vocally on the plight of Palestinians from the war or against Israeli settlements.
“She’ll be under the same constraints that Biden was under, both the political, and constraints we don’t leverage our allies. We don’t pressure our allies,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow focusing on US foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“It’ll be a sharper tone rhetorically. There’ll be more sympathy and empathy for Palestinian rights. There may be a tougher policy on settlements, but a tougher rhetorical approach. It’ll follow the Obama model, which was tough on the rhetoric, not so much on the deeds.”
Two European diplomats said they believed that Harris’s policies would be strongly influenced by the team around her. Chief among those would be Phil Gordon, a veteran of the state department and national security council, who serves as Harris’s national security adviser.
Ultimately, much of the next week will be focused on optics. “Netanyahu’s coming here to tend to his politics and to ours,” said Miller. “And I think he’s determined to demonstrate to the Israeli public, despite his sagging political fortunes, that he’s the only Israeli prime minister that could get a meeting at the White House and address Congress now for the fourth time … All of this strikes me as partly vanity, partly smart politics.”
