Kamala Harris Has a Chance to Do the Right Thing on Gaza

In the week since the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Democrats have loudly denounced politically motivated violence. “Politics must never be a literal battlefield and, God forbid, a killing field,” Biden told the nation after the shooting. But on Wednesday, Congress is welcoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity related to his policy of large-scale slaughter in Gaza.

In 2016, Trump was widely condemned for saying, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Yet for nearly a year, Democrats have been running a presidential campaign as though they can arm, finance, and provide diplomatic cover for the murder of tens of thousands of people and not lose voters either. Or perhaps they calculate that voters can see what they’ve seen in Gaza and simply tuck it away when it comes time to cast a ballot, as if the images of mangled corpses haven’t been permanently etched into our memories. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, who inherits Biden’s bloody legacy along with his role as presumptive party nominee, now has a unique opportunity to set a new path for her party and the country. After months of unspeakable horrors, Democrats have a chance to show voters that they’re, once again, capable of doing what’s right by putting an end to Israel’s war on Gaza and securing a permanent and immediate cease-fire. Harris should use Netanyahu’s visit to publicly denounce Israel’s genocidal campaign and rally members of Congress to her cause. Privately, Harris needs to impress upon Biden that he alone is capable of ending the war by cutting off Israel’s main supply of weapons and intelligence. 

Harris has previously expressed concern over the treatment of Palestinians. She said pro-Palestine protesters were “showing exactly what the human emotion should be” on Gaza, while cautioning that she didn’t agree with everything they had to say. In March 2024, Harris became the face of the administration’s escalating calls for a cease-fire—albeit one that was temporary and insufficient. So far, however, she has deviated from Biden in tone more than substance. Her record (thin on foreign policy experience) and past remarks on Israel suggest that she might be inclined to follow the administration’s current trajectory.  

But we are living in unprecedented times. If Harris can’t be convinced to throw her full weight behind ending the war because it’s the right thing to do, then she should do it because there is no way she’s winning this election otherwise. 

In four months of uncompetitive primary elections, 650,000 voters cast “uncommitted” ballots in the wake of a concerted campaign to use the protest ballot to urge the administration to rethink its support for Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza. The Biden campaign tried to brush concerns about the uncommitted vote aside, despite the fact that the campaign was launched in the crucial swing state of Michigan—a state Trump won by 0.3 percent of the vote in 2016 and Biden won by 2.8 percent in 2020. 

The Biden-Harris administration is currently conducting itself as if Biden hadn’t narrowly avoided an electoral tie against Donald Trump in 2020 by a mere 43,000 votes across three states. Prior to Biden’s disastrous debate performance, polling on the Arab American vote, Muslim vote, youth vote, and even Black vote showed Biden’s campaign crashing and burning so long as his policies on Gaza remained unchanged. 

The Biden-Harris administration’s political and material support for Israel has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It seems only fitting for Harris to launch the first stretch of her presidential campaign by working with her mentor to end the conflict. 

Harris has already secured the delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination, as well as the support of most of her party. She should use her newfound independence as the party’s acting presidential candidate to declare her own political identity and articulate a positive vision for the future. Leading the charge to end the war would project confidence on a world stage and likely win praise and recognition from international leaders on arguably the weakest aspect of her candidacy: foreign policy. It might also win some young voters back to the Democratic side: A number of polls show Gaza weighing prominently on the minds of young voters, whose vote made the difference in key battleground states in 2020, even if the issue isn’t at the top of their electoral lists.  

As it stands, Harris is currently scheduled to be traveling during Netanyahu’s address to Congress but is slated to meet with him privately while he’s in Washington. Insiders have suggested that Harris is more likely than Biden to engage in political criticism of Netanyahu’s policies, but this criticism will be meaningless until and unless it translates into an end to the war. Biden’s limited criticism of Israel shows that words alone will not effect change.

If the White House doesn’t stop the war before the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, Democrats’ honeymoon with their new nominee will be over before it really begins. The party will quickly realize that swapping the name and face of a campaign isn’t enough to win voters back. Should the war still be raging when students return to campus in the fall, the protest movement that seized so many headlines this spring will likely reemerge, and Democrats will be fighting a losing war on multiple fronts. 

A majority of voters now disapprove of Biden’s handling of foreign policy issues. Seven in 10 likely voters support a permanent cease-fire and de-escalation of the conflict in Gaza, which risks metastasizing into a regional conflict. By throwing her support behind a cease-fire and a pause on weapons shipments, Harris can show voters she’s willing to meet them where they are: that she has seen the pictures and reports we have seen and continue to see on an ongoing basis. Without putting an end to the war, Democrats will have a hard time making the case that a greater evil exists in Trump and his party.