Advice to Israel: Get it done in Gaza fast and get to it with Hezbollah soon, because it’s a 50-50 proposition that Kamala Harris is going to be president in January.
And she is coming after you.
In her first major statement as the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris began by saying Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism.
Some commenters said she was therefore speaking supportive words. That is absurd on its face.
It actually goes without saying that every nation, in every circumstance, has the right to defend itself against terrorism, since terrorism is the act of deploying political violence against non-combatants. That includes bad nations, and mean nations, even tyrannical nations.
Saying Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism is a sentence with no meaning, and it is only uttered by those who wish to follow its utterance with a “but.”
And here was Harris’s but: “How it does so matters.”
In other words, its right to defend itself should be conditioned on the results of its self-defense. And she made it clear that how Israel has done so matters to her — and she’s angry about it.
Why? She is horrified by “the images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time. 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.”
She is right in every particular but one — the odd omission from her words of the total and complete responsibility of Hamas for every single one of those images, and every single second of desperation and hunger suffered by the people of Gaza.
What has numbed people to the suffering is the misdirection of the blame away from those who started the war and hide among the civilians and steal the food aid and hide in the tunnels.
Israel was at a very cold peace with Hamas and Gaza on October 6. It did not know that Hamas was systematically planning a very hot war — and that part of the strategy of the war Hamas began the following morning would be an attempt to blacken Israel’s name by forcing it to fight in an urban battlefield in which its fighters and leaders had woven themselves both aboveground and below-ground.
Well, mission accomplished.
Kamala Harris has clearly bought into the idea that Israel has caused too much death, too much killing, too much “food insecurity” — notwithstanding the fact that across its border Israel has allowed the delivery of food aid amounting to 3,000 calories per day per person in Gaza. (As any dieter knows from the lectures we get, more than 2,200 calories a day ingested puts you in danger not of starving but of getting fatter.)
Her words make it clear she believes the onus here is on Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu to bring the war to an end.
And she explicitly made it clear she is on the side of those who do not want Israel to secure victory: “So to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire, and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”
She wants it done, she wants it over, she wants the hostages, she wants a Palestinian state, she wants Arab votes in Michigan . . . oh, wait, she didn’t say that part out loud.
But she’s as transparent as the anti-Israel bias she has now made explicit, and the challenge that bias now poses to all sensible people of good will who know this war was visited upon Israel — as are the hundreds of missiles being fired from Lebanon by Hezbollah — and will never actually end if Kamala Harris has her parlous way.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary.