Cracking Kamala Harris' Doublespeak About Israel

Democratic Party presidential nominee and current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' Israel policy sounds reasonable — but it is carefully worded code for far-leftist and Islamist ears.

Democratic Party presidential nominee and current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris (photo: Kamala Harris/X)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

The Democratic Party’s braintrust has been busy turning Kamala Harris into a serious candidate with grown-up positions on everything from fracking and immigration to Middle East politics.

She is adopting more centrist positions to become more electable and running on a platform of continuing current U.S. President Joe Biden’s Israel policies.

In one sense, that is reassuring. There were fears she would be less supportive of Israel because she is more from her party’s Left than is Biden. She has now said that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and that, as president, she would keep exporting weapons to Israel to ensure it has the means to do so.

Harris’ comrades in the liberal media are fawning over her stating her support for Israel, saying that she has dispelled fears that she would be less supportive of the Jewish state.

Yet, it has been her own actions and language that created these fears in the first place, such as her snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to U.S. Congress in July, and her vowing not to “stay silent” about Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

What is less reassuring is that we do not know how committed she is to Israel’s security, especially as she changes policies like an octopus changes colors. Also, Biden’s policies, which she has vowed to continue, are confused, contradictory, and misguided. They are less policy and more a wishlist of mutually incompatible ideas, based on flawed premises, which have failed, and will do so again.

Here are just some of her quotes:

“I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7th, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”

“At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

The first paragraph sounds reasonable, but recognizing Hamas’ evil and what Israel experienced on October 7th really should be a minimal requirement for anyone with even a rudimentary moral sextant.

It is the second paragraph that bears particular scrutiny. It has clearly been written to make her position appear “balanced” in a sop to her party’s more Left-wing members and the anti-Israel kooks who inhabit much of the Democratic Party’s voter base.

Thinking of this second paragraph as balanced or nuanced would be a lazy reading. As a media strategist I have written many such dubious statements for people in my time, so I know coded phrasing when I see it.

Harris’ comments are written in a code, a dog whistle for those on the Far-Left and their Islamist buddies who know what she is saying.

Let us break the code.

Code: “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.”

Decoded meaning: This position is nowhere near as supportive of Israel as it sounds. As we have seen repeatedly, it means Israel can only shoot enemy missiles down to defend itself, but that it cannot fight back, or go on the offensive to do so. Israel can defend itself, but not win.

Code: “At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating.”

Decoded meaning: What is happening in Gaza is not something that is happening “at the same time.” It is something that is happening in response to Hamas’ October 7th butchery, which she acknowledges in her first paragraph. Her phrasing hints at some kind of equivalency, when there is none.

Code: “So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.”

Decoded meaning: This is the blood libel that is Hamas and the greater Palestinians’ narrative. It ignores that statistically few lives have been lost relative to the combat conditions and other conflicts. It also ignores that people are fleeing for their because Israel is warning them of pending attacks, so they know when and where to move to safety.

Her reference to them being “hungry” is designed to feed the blood libel and lie that Israel is deliberately starving Gazans, and ignores the amount of food aid being sent into Gaza — and that Hamas has stolen much of it.

Code: “President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

Decoded meaning: This suggests that ending this war, the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, will bring security to Israel and peace to both peoples. An end to this war would not resolve the dispute, so it would not bring peace to the century-old conflict. It is deceitful to say it will.

As for Palestinians “realizing their right to dignity, security, and freedom” — these are matters that she ought to take up with Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, both of which have for decades purposely curtailed Palestinian rights to create a nefarious narrative that Israel is to blame for all their trials and tribulations.

Finally, her claims that they have a right to self-determination is banal. They do, but not at Israel’s expense, which is what many Palestinians want and what Harris has conveniently overlooked.

---

Most concerning is how attached Harris is to the so-called “pro-Palestinian” narrative, which is nothing but lies so big that even Pinocchio would blush.

A distressing case in point is Hamas’ recent murder of six hostages in Rafah. Harris was a leading cheerleader against Israel in March when Israel was planning its Rafah offensive to destroy the four remaining Hamas brigades and free its hostages.

“We have been clear in multiple conversations [with Israel] and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said at the time. “I have studied the maps — there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”

She warned Israel there would be “consequences.”

She was right. There were consequences — six murdered hostages who may have been freed if Israel had not delayed its attack on Rafah in response to pressure from the likes of Harris and the rest of the intellectually and ethically moribund international community.

Harris was not alone in this first-order disgrace. Others are Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who has had a moral bypass operation), Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (who has had a personality bypass procedure), and French President Emmanuel Macron (who appears to have had multiple such bypasses).

These leaders are apologists for terror and complicit in it. Shame on them.

Especially damning for Harris is that one of the murdered hostages was an American. There is nothing like the U.S. government having your back in a crisis and Biden-Harris’ response was nothing like the U.S. government having their hostage citizen’s back in a crisis.

The U.S. abandoned its own people taken hostage. It is worth meditating on what citizenship means, especially for Israeli-American dual citizens.

---

Then there is Harris’ long-standing support for appeasing the vile Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s primary terror sponsor that the international community, led by the United States, has allowed to get to the brink of having nuclear weapons.

Given Iran’s stated aim is to destroy Israel, this appeasement is the most anti-Israel policy of all and must be called out as such.

It began under Appeaser-in-Chief President Barack Obama, who froze like a kangaroo in the headlights in 2012 when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad called his bluff and crossed Obama’s imaginary “red line” and used chemical weapons on his own people.

Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, continued this abject weakness, from which U.S. credibility in the region has yet to recover, by allowing billions of dollars in oil revenues to flow to Iran for minor nuclear concessions.

Kamala Harris fully supported Biden in this madness.

Iran is not only now on the cusp of having nuclear weapons, and the money has helped Iran fund and train its proxy armies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Gaza (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad), Yemen (the Houthis), Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian West Bank, all of which are waging war on Israel. It is a foreign policy debacle for the ages.

Should Harris pursue this appeasement policy in power by resuming nuclear talks with Iran, it would be the greatest foreign policy failure since UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Adolf Hitler in Munich and proclaimed: “Peace in our time.”

If that sounds hyperbolic, respectfully, you have not been paying much attention.

---