Pool/ABACA/Shutterstock
What does Kamala Harris believe?
Amid her many flip-flops and reversals, nowhere are the vice president’s opinions more convoluted and confusing than on Israel.
Harris insists Israel has a right to self-defense — but continually complains that the Jewish state is doing it wrong.
In July, she said she had pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a cease-fire deal.
But in her limited August interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris said she’s “unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself.”
“How it does so matters,” she added.
A new anti-Harris super PAC recently began running ads in Michigan, seeking to present Harris’ pro-Israel comments to a largely anti-Israel Arab-American population.
The Future Coalition PAC’s cheeky ads portray Harris as exactly what she’s said she is: a supporter of Israel who stands up for its right to defend itself.
They also feature her husband Doug Emhoff, noting the historic importance of the first Jewish presidential spouse.
Critics exploded in indignation.
CNN called the ads “antisemitic,” alleging they play “into antisemitic tropes that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel.”
But the spots do nothing of the sort.
They simply highlight Harris’ attempts to have it both ways on Israel’s war against Hamas, and her use of her husband’s identity to appeal to Jewish groups.
As for tropes, Harris’ head of Arab-American outreach has previously accused “Zionists” of “controlling a lot” of American politics.
So her campaign should know a trope when they see one.
The Harris team immediately put up its own ads, microtargeting the very same Michigan Zip codes as Future Coalition PAC, to play up her comments on the suffering in Gaza.
“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” a somber Harris says in one of the spots.
“We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”
Microtargeting of this kind — especially when trying to deliver vastly different messages to different groups — might have worked in the pre-Internet world.
But now any micro message can be easily shared across social media so anyone can see it.
It’s not that a presidential candidate can’t support Israel while also feeling sorry for the Gazans (at least those who aren’t Hamas operatives).
But war is hell, and when a friendly democracy is battling for its very survival after a brutal terror attack, the correct response is to stand with our ally.
Harris claims to do that — while sending a very different message to voters in heavily Arab Zip codes.
Worse, she’s blaming Israel for the deaths of innocents as it fights an enemy that strategically hides behind its own civilians.
The high casualty rate is the point for Hamas, to get tender-hearted Westerners to pressure Israel to back off.
The strategy appears to have succeeded with the Democratic presidential nominee.
The Harris campaign’s disingenuousness proves she’s no friend to Israel.
As with most of Harris’ positions, we can’t quite know where she really stands.
She opposed the border wall, she supports the border wall.
She opposed fracking, she supports fracking.
She wanted to defund the police, now she doesn’t.
And so on.
On top of that, in her rare interviews, she never bothers to explain her ever-shifting beliefs; we find out second- or third-hand.
For instance, we learned from unnamed “campaign officials” in July that Harris no longer supports eliminating private health insurance, or a mandatory gun-buyback program.
It would have been nice to hear about these fundamental policy changes from the candidate herself.
For Israel, these drifts between positions can mean life or death — and the unknowns presented by a President Harris could be catastrophic.
This month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pushed the notion of placing new conditions on US aid to Israel, adding that the Harris “team has expressed openness to a new direction.”
The next day, as The Post reported, the hints grew stronger, as unnamed sources revealed that “in a break from [President] Biden, Harris and her top foreign policy adviser, Philip Gordon, are apparently now both open to imposing conditions on military aid to Israel.”
The trouble with using a whisper network to communicate a presidential candidate’s critical stances is that we don’t know what’s true.
Sources might be right.
Or they might be wrong.
And the ambiguity is deliberate.
Kamala Harris’ political ambition has her talking out of both sides of her mouth.
Voters deserve to know what she really believes — on Israel, and on everything else, too.
Karol Markowicz is co-author of the book “Stolen Youth.”