Jewish Republicans are smearing Kamala Harris as anti-Israel. Here’s why you shouldn’t buy it
Vice President Kamala Harris and first gentleman Doug Emhoff have become the target of a Republican Jewish smear campaign after President Joe Biden endorsed Harris as his successor after dropping out of the presidential race. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman July 22, 2024
Well, that didn’t take long.
Less than a day after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, the Republican Jewish Coalition launched a series of tweets calling Harris “a total disaster for Israel” and “disgraceful,” falsely accusing her of refusing to condemn a Hamas supporter during a speaking engagement at a college.
Piling on, David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel in the Trump administration, wrote on X, “There is now the widest gap in American history between the two candidates’ support for Israel. Donald Trump is the best ever — Kamala Harris would be the worst.”
Their campaign against Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, potentially the next president and first gentleman, will only grow more desperate and far-fetched as the election nears. Your job: Be very, very skeptical. The shock troops of misinformation deserve high marks for speed, but not so much for accuracy.
Watch the exchange that the RJC highlighted for yourself, and it’s clear that Harris certainly didn’t stay silent when a student at Northern Arizona University accused Israel of genocide and justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. In fact, you might end up feeling grateful for Harris — as I did — because of the ease with which she demonstrated how to deescalate a tense interaction over the Middle East.
You might, in fact, think the qualities she displayed in the interaction would make her quite a good president.
“I believe Israelis and Palestinians both deserve peace, deserve self-determination and deserve safety,” Harris said — a stance that happens to have been mainstream, far-from-radical American foreign policy for the past 75 years.
She then blamed the “terrorist organization Hamas” for the atrocities of Oct. 7 and for instigating the ongoing war. “We must differentiate between a terrorist organization, Hamas, and the Palestinian people, and civilians,” she said, “and they should not be conflated.”
Harris added that we all are distressed at the images of human suffering and we must “take it seriously.” The crowd broke out into applause and cheers. Harris had acknowledged the truth of the situation; spoken to a broad variety of concerns; and evaded a dangerous rhetorical trap.
I have to thank the RJC and Friedman, because until their tweets pushed me to rewatch the video, I had not quite appreciated Harris’s skillful way of navigating past bias and semi-informed rage.
When she ended by telling the young Latino man who asked the question, “I appreciate your question and I appreciate your leadership,” she wasn’t, as Friedman suggests, kowtowing to a Hamas supporter. She was, by showing him respect, quietly making a move to prompt him toward greater receptiveness to her centrist, pro-Israel message.
It was not a display of political cowardice. It was a masterclass in how to open and change minds.
Even if the charge that Harris is silent in the face of Hamas propaganda doesn’t stick, I’m certain that over the next four months, those Republican Jews who have been trying for years to turn Israel into a partisan issue will throw more lies against the wall to see what does.
But I think the outcome will always be the same: If we, the informed Jewish public, bother to check the facts, we’ll find that Harris has a strong record of supporting Israel and countering antisemitism.
She’s condemned Hamas on multiple occasions; asserted Israel’s right to defend itself.; supported emergency military aid to Israel; and met with families of American hostages held by Hamas. In June she screened a documentary on Hamas’s use of sexual violence on Oct. 7.
“In the days after October 7, I saw images of bloodied Israeli women abducted,” she told the screening’s audience, adding: “We cannot look away and we will not be silent.”
The only lever she’s given partisan critics is that on multiple occasions she has acknowledged the suffering of Palestinians as a result of Israel’s actions in Gaza, as she did in her response at Northern Arizona University.
That’s not capitulation. That’s empathy. The majority of Americans have concerns about the suffering in Gaza. Freeing the hostages, ending the war, and finding a long-term solution for Israeli and Palestinian security depends on recognizing both sides’ humanity.
It’s going to be a particular stretch for the RJC and others to attack Harris as weak on antisemitism, given that her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, has been at the forefront of the Biden administration’s efforts to counter it.
Smearing the couple as radical leftists will require feats of creative misrepresentation. We are the company we keep, and Harris and Emhoff’s Los Angeles circle is made largely of mainstream, centrist Democrats. It’s pretty, pretty Jewish, as Larry David, whose home is just a short drive from theirs, might say.
I don’t know who dines with Emhoff at his (mostly) Jewish country club, but I know who doesn’t: Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.
Former President Donald Trump had a private dinner with both men in November 2022, giving a photo op to two of the most vile antisemites in America.
I don’t know if Harris will be the Democratic candidate, or if she’ll be president. But I have no doubts why Trump’s supporters are so desperate to smear her and her husband. She is their worst electoral nightmare: a pro-Israel Democrat married to a proud Jew.
Oy.
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