Kamala Harris was in a bind on Thursday.
First, she had to skip Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress to attend a sorority convention—no, really, that’s why she skipped—even though the Constitution demands that, as the president of the Senate, the vice president should preside over joint sessions together with the Speaker of the House.
But she hadn’t quite dodged the bullet. She couldn’t get out of a private meeting with Netanyahu. So she gave a speech to appease the Hamas Democrats.
She said that she supports Israel’s right to defend itself. The problem with Democrats is that they can never stop there with Israel; there’s always a “but” coming after. There was a big one with Harris.
She said that she “expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.”
First of all, John Spencer is the foremost expert in urban warfare at West Point. He says that there has never been an urban fight in history with a lower ratio of civilian to militant casualties than in Gaza. In fact, the Israeli Defense Forces believe that not a single civilian died during the Rafah operation. The downside is that Israel had to change their strategy, and many more Israelis died as a result. So she’s wrong on that.
Second of all, some reporter needs to ask her what number of dead innocent civilians would be acceptable. Because that’s a stupid thing to say that too many civilians have died. Even one is too many. That’s why international law places the blame on the aggressor—Hamas, in this case—and also faults militants for hiding among civilians—again, what Hamas does.
Harris has never done anything to educate Americans on this. She has the biggest megaphone in the world now as the Democratic nominee. Yesterday, instead of telling Americans how Hamas bears the blame, she faulted Israel.
She also brought up the two-state solution. Democrats say that their problem is with Netanyahu, but they really like the Israeli center. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, is not even a centrist; he’s a lefty from the Labor Party. Here’s what he said about the talks of the two-state solution:
“What I want to urge is against just saying ‘two-state solution’. Why? Because there is an emotional chapter here that must be dealt with. My nation is bereaving. My nation is in trauma.”
In other words, Harris and her party have a fantasy plan: a Palestinian state that would be peaceful and not a threat to Israel. And their problem isn’t with Netanyahu and Israeli right-wingers; it’s with all of Israel that believes that plan, especially after October 7, to be delusional. And even their ideal Israeli politician, their left-winger president, thinks that it’s rude to talk about it. Yet Harris brought it up with Netanyahu and again right after meeting with him.
There were two things that Harris did not say:
The word Zionist. Republicans call themselves Zionists easily; fewer and fewer Democrats do. At best, they say that they support Israel. But their base thinks that Zionism—Jews’ right to live in their ancestral homeland—is a dirty word, so they refuse to use it.
Iran. Harris mentioned that she and Biden have a plan for a ceasefire that would leave Israel safe and give Palestinians a state, but she never said how she would prevent that Palestinian state from becoming a vassal of Iran to destroy Israel. That’s because there’s no way to prevent that, and she knows it. She is lying when she says that her plan would leave Israel safe.
But the worst part of the speech was saying that the war is not “a binary:”
“And I will close with this, then. It is important for the American people to remember the war in Gaza is not a binary issue. However, too often the conversation is binary, when the reality is anything but.
So, I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, the nuance, and the history of the region.”
For the #MeToo crowd that said context doesn’t matter, it’s quite audacious to claim that we should acknowledge the complexity of the region while remembering that Hamas raped hundreds of women on October 7 and has held more as sex slaves.
Harris is right. Most things in life aren’t black and white. But October 7, with the murder, rape, and orgy of violence that happened that day, is among the very few things that are binary. There is one good side and one purely evil one. Hint for Democrats: The 10/7 rapists, kidnappers, and murderers are the baddies.
There have been Republicans who have talked this way about Ukraine, saying that it’s complex and not black and white. Democrats have attacked them nonstop. Harris is one of them. Why is the world’s only Jewish state different when it’s attacked?
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
