Harris is tying herself too closely to Biden on Gaza

The Gaza war is a political problem for Kamala Harris. In recent days, she has made it worse.

On the surface, Harris might seem to be doing just fine. At a rally in Detroit, an adoring crowd chanted “Kamala! Kamala!” to drown out protesters shouting, “We won’t vote for genocide.”

“You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” Harris retorted. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.” News accounts portrayed the disrupters as rude and the vice president as admirably firm.

But winning PR points with one-liners is different than winning over voters who are disinclined to vote for the Democratic ticket because of Biden administration support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Those voters don’t “want Donald Trump to win.” They want the Democratic nominee to break with the 10-month U.S. policy of shipping billions of dollars in extra weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military while it continues to kill Palestinian civilians, mostly children and women.

The day after her vocal clash with protesters at the Detroit rally, Harris followed up by having a top aide make it explicit that her policy position on arming Israel is indistinguishable from Biden’s. “She does not support an arms embargo on Israel,” Harris’s national security adviser Phil Gordon declared. He added the kind of boilerplate platitude that has been routine from the White House since last fall: “She will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law.”

But in the real world, the Biden administration can point to very little it has achieved to protect civilians in Gaza, much less to restrain Israel from its ongoing and flagrant violations of international humanitarian law. On the contrary, Harris has remained in full public support for massive American shipments of weaponry to Israel that enables it to massacre and starve civilians while violating international law.

The nonstop flow of armaments from the U.S. to Israel has turned off a significant number of Democratic voters — especially young people, progressives, Arab Americans and Muslims. They had some reason to hope for a change last month after Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington and then expressed compassion for people in Gaza, saying, “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Mayor Abdullah Hammoud of Dearborn, Mich. — a city of 110,000 with a higher concentration of Muslims than any other in the U.S. — told PBS NewsHour that with Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee, “we believe the door is cracked open.” He added: “There’s now opportunity to have dialogue, for us to understand how Vice President Harris will differentiate herself from President Biden on the path for Gaza. We believe that there has to be a course-correction.”

But instead of a course-correction, Harris seems to think that merely providing more compassionate words will suffice, while repeating calls for a ceasefire that are not backed up with action. When she said that “far too many” civilians have died in Gaza, the BBC noted that she was “echoing comments made by the White House.” Harris remains careful to stay in line with the administration’s crucial policy of continuing to supply the Israeli military no matter what.

The current Harris approach is a bad electoral move. The problem extends far beyond Michigan, a key swing state where 101,436 people voted for “uncommitted” rather than Biden in the Democratic primary to protest his Gaza policy. A total of close to 700,000 primary voters chose “uncommitted” or similar designations on ballots in states that included battlegrounds Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Polling shows that Americans favor a cutoff of military aid to Israel while the war in Gaza continues. In one nationwide survey, completed in early March, 52 percent of respondents agreed that “the U.S. should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza,” while only 27 percent disagreed.

That poll was no fluke. In June, a CBS News-YouGov poll found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61 to 39 percent.

But Harris is choosing to be out of step with most voters. She’s sticking with outdated conventional wisdom, while assuming that the specter of a second Trump presidency will be enough to get the usual Democratic base to the polls. But the moral outrage widely felt among the young and people of color about the U.S.-assisted carnage in Gaza is not conventional.

Harris can’t afford to reinforce the alienation that so many young people and others feel about Biden’s Gaza policy. She needs to distinguish herself from that policy, not chain herself to it.

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org. His latest book is “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” being published in paperback next month with a new afterword about the Gaza war. Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”