Will Kamala be able to balance the Israel question?

Kamala Harris wants to be president, and she will say whatever it takes to get there. Her go-to solution for the swing states is to adopt poll-tested positions, even if contrary to her values and beliefs. When the best position in one state jeopardizes her standing in another, or jeopardizes support from her large donors, she adjusts her tactics.

The Middle East quagmire is such a situation. Harris personally tilts strongly in favor of Palestinians and Iran’s proxies, but Iran’s direct attacks on Israel, and President Joe Biden’s use of the U.S. military to defend Israel, complicates Harris’ linguistic legerdemain, further confusing her already irreconcilable position that Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East, has her “unwavering” support . . . except when it doesn’t.

Since its formation in 1948, both political parties and most Americans have strongly supported Israel because of its commitment to democracy and shared values, collaboration with the United States on intelligence and international goals, and, more recently, its leadership in science, technology, and finance. President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognize Israel, 11 minutes after its founding. Until he succumbed to pressure from his progressive base after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Biden was deeply committed to its security.

With the rise of progressive ideology, support for Israel on the left has fractured. Those, like Harris, who subscribe to these ideas see the world as a realm of oppressors and the oppressed. The United States, Israel, whites, and Jews lead the oppressors, while American blacks and Palestinians are their victims.

Progressives deride Israel for purportedly displacing Palestinians and consigning them to ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank. They accuse Israel of being an apartheid nation (never mind the equal rights enjoyed by its Arab citizens). Progressives found their voice first with Barack Obama and then with the Biden–Harris administration. Both sought distance from Israel and closer relations with Iran (a terrorist nation dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the United States). They delivered or freed up billions of dollars for Iran and its proxies to use against Israel, and declined to support Israel consistently at the U.N.

As Democratic support for Israel waned, evangelical Christians, who steadfastly support Israel because they share its democratic, ethical, and moral values, and see it as the cradle of Western civilization, led the Republican Party to deepen its support for the Jewish state.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, since 1948, on average, about 68% of Jewish votes were cast for the Democrat presidential nominee and 25% for the Republican nominee. Showing the impact of the parties’ evolving views, in 2020, Trump received about 30% of Jewish votes.

Evangelicals number more than 75 million, and Donald Trump will dominate their votes. About 7.5 million Jews are concentrated in New York, California, and Florida, but they also live elsewhere and vote at a high rate. More than 300,000 Jews are expected to vote in Pennsylvania, nearly four times the 80,000-vote winning margin there in 2020. Polls show that Trump likely will obtain more than a third of the Jewish vote nationally, and more than 40% in Pennsylvania. If he wins Pennsylvania, he likely wins the presidency.

Harris thus confronts a risk that no Democratic candidate has faced. She has no love for Israel, but she can’t tell the truth about her Middle East views without splitting with Biden and putting Pennsylvania, and perhaps even New York, in play. Conversely, she can’t stay in Biden’s shadow if she hopes to win Michigan and Minnesota, in which Muslim voters, many of whom support Palestinian goals, could determine the outcome.

Trying to thread this needle, Harris has remained largely silent about the outbreak of anti-Semitism. She selected far-left advisors who oppose Israel’s Gaza operations, and she boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Instead, she met with Netanyahu privately, emerging to declare that she would not be “silent” about Palestinian suffering. “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” she said. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating.”

Since then, Harris has repeatedly implied that Israel is responsible for “too many” Palestinian deaths. She supports Biden’s withholding delivery to Israel of 2,000-pound bombs, has criticized Israel’s highly successful Rafah operation, and advocates a two-state solution. Always pursuing ambiguity, however, she endorsed Biden’s defense of Israel against Iran’s ballistic missile attack but added little more to her anodyne statement.

Harris is the child of a Stanford University economics professor and a Berkeley biologist, raised in affluent, left-wing neighborhoods of Montreal, Berkeley, and Palo Alto, schooled at far-left Howard University, and politically baptized in radical San Francisco. She is a lifelong far-left progressive, and as she turns 60, that won’t change. Iran and its proxies know this. Her equivocations give them license to continue their attacks.

Harris appears unconcerned about how Israel would survive a nuclear Iran and a ring of Iranian proxies. But for the risk of damaging her evangelical and Jewish support, Harris would simply adopt the progressive policy prescription: to hell with Israel.

Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and nonfiction books and a frequent speaker and contributor to media, including The American Mind, National Review, the National Association of Scholars, television, radio, and podcasts.

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