https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/false-hopes
Tim Barker
27 September 2024Politics

Two news items last week marked the end of election year contention within the Democratic Party over Israel. The first was a statement by the Uncommitted movement – so named because it had organized voters to choose that option instead of Biden in the officially uncontested Democratic primary elections – in which the group declined to endorse Kamala Harris, after she rejected their increasingly minimal demands. Harris’s campaign had failed even to respond to a request that the candidate meet with Palestinian-Americans in Michigan, the country’s most Arab American state. The statement did not mention, but might have, that Harris and Biden also failed to meet with the family of Aysenur Eygi, a 26-year-old American citizen killed by the IDF in the West Bank earlier this month.

The second item was a leak from the administration that ‘senior U.S. officials are now privately acknowledging they don’t expect Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement before the end of President Biden’s term’. This shouldn’t be news, but it represents an official abandonment of a fiction which had been the Party’s only response to anti-war voters. A month ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s speech to the Democratic National Convention mentioned Gaza only in the course of praising Biden and Harris for ‘working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire’. That soundbite was instantly clipped by the campaign and posted to Tik-Tok. It also provoked an unusually withering response from AOC’s ostensible squad-mate, Ilhan Omar: ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire is not really a thing’. Who now can disagree?

The leak may represent an admission of another obvious truth, namely that Benjamin Netanyahu has no incentive not to hold out for Trump. But it also reinforces the message that the administration is prepared to ignore the anti-war constituency precisely during the period when voters actually have leverage. Presumably, the campaign is confident it can prevail in enough other close states that Michigan won’t matter, or that dissenters will turn out anyway. The Uncommitted statement, while declining to endorse Harris, also ‘opposes a Trump presidency’ as well as third party voting. The latter is the bigger danger for Harris: polls have shown the Green Party’s Jill Stein leading among Muslim-American voters in three swing states. But there is presently no sign in the overall polling that this will be the key margin.

It was not altogether irrational to imagine that the new candidate might have been pushed. Viewed over the long term, US foreign policy displays plenty of continuity. But compared to domestic policy, the executive enjoys considerable freedom of manoeuvre in dealing with the rest of the world. Biden’s commitment to Zionism is excessive, even by the standard of US politics. ‘If there were not an Israel’, he once said, ‘we’d have to invent one’. This zeal is not, as it is sometimes assumed, a function of the old man’s memories of a kinder, gentler Israel which no longer exists. He has consistently defended the state at its very worst moments. In 1982, the brutality of the war in Lebanon offended Ronald Reagan, a man who once threatened to pave Vietnam and paint it over with parking stripes. ‘Menachem’, the Gipper told his Israeli counterpart, ‘this is a holocaust’. But when then-Senator Biden rang up Begin, it was to reassure him that it wouldn’t matter ‘if all the civilians get killed’.

Over the last year, journalists and ‘peace process’ veterans have emphasized the President’s personal influence on US policy in the Middle East. As an unnamed official told the Huffington Post, ‘The problem is no one can rein in Biden, and if Biden has a policy, he’s the commander-in-chief – we have to carry it out. That’s what it comes down to, very, very, very unfortunately.’ Countless similar testimonies could be cited. The embarrassing crisis over the president’s senility, which has generally been discussed as if it had no relevance to foreign policy, offered a public demonstration of Biden’s personalist rule. The same man who isolated himself with a handful of loyalists, taking counsel from his criminal offspring, plainly relied on imagined diplomatic prowess as a prop for his grandiose self-conception. Biden repeatedly boasted to donors that Henry Kissinger – supposedly calling from his deathbed – had compared him to Napoleon. As the curtains descended, he lashed out on a Zoom call with Democratic legislators:

I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son – and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put AUKUS together! . . . Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it.

If there was legitimate reason to believe things might change, it had more to do with Biden than with anything specific about Kamala Harris. Not that optimistic imaginations didn’t run wild, imagining that she would instinctively sympathize with the suffering because of her relative youth or anti-colonial lineage. Gender too: Harris once raised the question of whether Gaza had enough sanitary pads, a purely hypothetical act of concern which led to no increase in aid, but was nonetheless said to exemplify ‘how she has contributed to the administration’s position’ on the war. This was thin stuff, symptomatic of the media’s common sense that US policy had to change, but that it would be impolite to discuss what that would mean, much less how it would happen.

Harris is often criticized for her reticence, but in the case of Gaza the accusation is unfair. The campaign has made clear that her Gaza policy is Biden’s. One of the few official policy statements released so far clarified that Harris would not support an arms embargo. The entire tenor of the DNC, from its ‘USA’ chants to the pro-Contra speech by Ana Navarro, made clear that the post-2016 project of integrating anti-Trump neocons remains active. The demand from the Uncommitted delegates that a Palestinian-American be allowed to speak was denied. In her speech, Harris reaffirmed that she ‘will never hesitate’ to use military force to defend ‘our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists’. Her pitying, passive-voice asides about ‘what has happened in Gaza’ were no different, and perhaps milder, than things she said after the Flour Massacre in February.

Even as Harris has made her stance clear, people on the centre-left have been reluctant to acknowledge it. Successive articles by Patrick Iber, co-editor of Dissent, offer a neat stop-motion capture of the moving goalposts. On 24 July, describing elements of the crowd at a Harris speech in Wisconsin, Iber wrote: ‘They didn’t understand their presence in the crowd as an endorsement of Biden’s approach toward Israel. But even if no one knows just how different her approach would be as president, they can hope. If Kamala wins, that hope will be an essential resource for her campaign.’ On 26 August, he published a postmortem on the DNC, which he had attended. While acknowledging that ‘Biden seemed to have aimed for FDR and landed on LBJ’, so that ‘the ghost of ’68 seemed to be haunting the 2024 convention’, Iber concludes with relief that ‘the ghost . . . can [now] pass on’.

What exactly had Harris done to dispel the bad vibes? Iber does not claim that she pivoted. Rather, ‘she dropped a few hints for progressives that she is to Biden’s left on some key issues, including Gaza’. The rest of the article fails to specify a single hint of this sort. Instead, there are vague references to things said or thought by people who are not Harris. Thus: ‘Harris advisors [which ones?] keep hinting [to who?] that she is personally sympathetic’ to ‘a comprehensive shift in its policy in the Middle East [meaning what?]’. And: ‘potential staffers at a meeting of progressive foreign policy groups were optimistic that a Harris presidency will be different from a Biden one, even if no one is quite sure how’. Is this supposed to reassure Uncommitted activists like Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a paediatric intensive care physician who (Iber writes) ‘worked in hospitals in Gaza [and] spoke of treating children with fractured bones without anesthesia and having nothing to offer patients as they died in agony’?

If Iber fails to specify a single foreign policy that Harris might change, he does at least indicate one that she won’t: ‘the goal of an arms embargo of Israel is probably unworkable given US concerns about Iran’. The sentence crystallizes the mental adjustments by which people have reconciled themselves to the fact that Harris did not do the things which they said, just weeks earlier, that she should and even might do about the ongoing genocide. ‘Unworkable’, as if the problem is logistical, a technical jargon which is especially inapposite given the article’s silence on ‘wonky’ questions like: which weapons are being used for what? Can any of the transfers be stopped, or made conditional? What sort of conditions? ‘Probably’, as if improbability is not the general status of leftist demands, and indeed of Kamala’s own headline proposals (nationwide rent control, court packing, etc). ‘Because of its concerns about Iran’, as if it were self-evident that this was the only or main obstacle to recasting US foreign policy, and as if Netanyahu hadn’t spent the last year using his US-made military advantage to pursue regional war while the Iranians and the US (apparently?) work to prevent one. Neither can ‘concerns about Iran’ explain the Party’s refusal to concede something infinitely more modest than an arms embargo, namely the demand that a Palestinian-American be permitted to speak at the convention. What might explain this refusal, and what might it tell us about the broader forces which are evidently keeping Harris’s policy within familiar, ‘lethal’ grooves?

Reconciliation under duress has continued since the convention. The Harris campaign continues to leak ‘hints’ that she might be different. But the communications strategy seems to assume that people are stupid. When placed alongside the things that Harris herself has actually said, in public, the effect of the leaks is hardly flattering. Consider the Washington Post’s claim, on 31 August, that ‘the vice president, along with top foreign policy adviser Phil Gordon, has been sceptical of Israel’s strategy in Gaza – and the US response’. The piece opens with the story, attributed to ‘several people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity’ that Gordon was already concerned in October that ‘the only way to accomplish Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas entirely was to destroy Gaza along with it, with all the humanitarian tragedy that would entail’.

It is nice to know Gordon was looking at the same reality as the rest of us. But it hardly took a clairvoyant to suspect that a government promising to conduct a ‘Gaza Nakba’ might not be interested in containing the war. The story is even more damning, unintentionally, in its implication that Gordon acquiesced to a policy whose eliminationist logic he fully understood. But the worst was yet to come. Less than 24 hours after the Post story was published, Harris released a statement that Hamas – ‘an evil terrorist organization’ with ‘American blood on its hands’ – ‘must be eliminated’. In other words, the same PR team that expects people to take comfort in Gordon’s insight – that destroying Hamas means destroying Gaza – wrote a press release on the exact same day in which Harris renewed her vow to destroy Hamas.

Neither Iber nor the Post offer an explanation of why Biden’s (now Harris’s) policy has been so terrible. But it’s interesting to note how frankly one influence – campaign finance – can be discussed, as long as the discussion takes place in a publication beyond suspicion of anti-Israel bias. The elite-gossip newsletter Semafor calls Wall Street ‘a key domestic political constituency’, one which ‘funnelled more donations to Biden than any other industry group’ in 2020, only to feel burnt by the administration’s approach to antitrust and financial regulation. Fortuitously, ‘support for Israel is a cause they agree on, and a political opportunity for Biden to keep them’. As the ‘Wall Street money machine whir[red] back to life for Harris’, the same publication repeated the point: ‘the party’s perceived leftward cultural lurch, embodied by the campus protests over Gaza, further alienated this crowd’.

The same sort of stories can be easily found with a West Coast twist. As Biden’s campaign co-chair, it fell to film executive Jeffrey Katzenberg to inform the president that his donors were pulling the plug. Within the week, Biden withdrew. Katzenberg, now co-chair of Harris’s campaign, is old friends with her husband, Doug Emhoff, himself a former entertainment lawyer. According to the press, Emhoff ‘relied heavily on his longstanding ties in Los Angeles . . . to help the campaign and the party accumulate a total of $615 million’ in the first six weeks of Harris’s candidacy. According to the entertainment trade press, opinions about Israel are no longer as uniform as they once were. But the issue reportedly splits, as it does nationwide, along generational lines, and wealth is not distributed equally across age cohorts. According to one anonymous Democratic strategist, ‘most Hollywood donors’ have been ‘blown away by how steadfast’ Biden has been in his support for Israel, contrasting the president favourably with ‘these idiots protesting in the streets’.

According to the New York Times, one of Harris’s ‘most essential confidantes’, not to mention funders, is Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple executive. Among Powell Jobs’s billions of dollars of assets is The Atlantic, a magazine whose current editor-in-chief volunteered as a prison guard during the First Intifada. Exemplifying, and to some extent leading, a broader shift in liberal opinion, The Atlantic has largely abandoned topics such as reparations and racial reckonings in favour of articles like ‘Charge Palestine With Genocide Too’ and ‘The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense’ and statements like ‘It is possible to kill children legally’. No doubt Powell Jobs’s concerns are mostly domestic. Per the Times, she hopes that Harris will abandon Biden’s ‘hostile rhetoric . . . about rich people and Silicon Valley’. But there’s no reason to own a magazine if it doesn’t correspond in some way to your own views, and on Israel the Atlantic line is clear.

Campaign finance is rarely an exhaustive explanation of any phenomenon, let alone one as sedimented as the US-Israeli special relationship. But in terms of accounting for Harris’s approach to Gaza during the campaign itself, it may be sufficient. With all of the fundraising incentives aligned against accommodating anti-war voters, Harris would need a very good justification to act otherwise. Naturally, there are reasons people tend to avoid such apparently ‘crude’ analysis, but assuming complexity carries an opposite risk, which Bruce Cumings once called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism.

The problem is to specify the circumstances under which direct pressure from the donor class succeeds in achieving its aims. In this case, one might conjecture that crude interest-group pressure is amplified by high-level confusion about the nature of the American interest in the Middle East, and in Israel/Palestine in particular. The manifest goals of Biden’s foreign policy relate mostly to the long awaited ‘return of great power competition’ with Russia and China. Europe matters because of NATO and because the EU’s huge common market and its critical supply-chain chokepoints are essential to any successful economic war with China. This is a big agenda, and the Middle East a distraction. The administration’s regional strategy, such as it was before October, was to reconcile with the Saudis in hope that this would further the cause of Saudi–Israeli normalization. Regarding the question of Palestine, the strategy essentially called for doing nothing and hoping for the best. Even after the Unity Intifada of 2021, which eventually required Biden’s attention, an unnamed official admitted that the administration had expended ‘not a fucking second of effort’ towards their official goal of a two-state solution. This they call ‘going small on peripheral problems’.

So things stood on 2 October 2023, when Foreign Affairs sent Jake Sullivan’s 7,000 word essay on US grand strategy off to the printers. The print version of the essay (Sullivan was granted an online rewrite) said that the Middle East, though ‘beset with perennial challenges’, was ‘quieter than it has been for decades’. If it’s a cheap shot to keep bringing up that line, consider that Sullivan’s lack of interest in the region can be found in other essays where it is less bedevilled by dramatic irony. In another Foreign Affairs piece, ‘The World After Trump: How the System Can Endure’, from 2018, Sullivan wrote that ‘Middle Eastern instability has been a feature, not a bug, of the system since the fall of the Ottoman Empire’. What does it mean when someone who compares himself to Dean Acheson writes a sentence like that? Is it a Freudian slip? Was he reaching for a different cliché (perhaps Middle Eastern instability has been the rule, not the exception)? In any case, the sentence and the potted history in which it is set suggest Sullivan has not quite figured things out. Is the National Security Advisor himself unsure just how Israel fits into his project for a new American century?

Given the uncertain outlook, it seems likely that the rhetoric of the US-Israeli relationship will change at some point. The question, in the words of former State Department official Aaron David Miller, is whether the changes will amount to ‘something that normal people would regard as a different approach to Israel’. By normal, Miller presumably means to exclude the kind of people who already think Joe Biden is hostile to Israel, and would therefore regard any further deviation as catastrophic. There’s no evidence that this sort of change is on the cards. For think-tanker Brian Katulis, any apparent openness to the left is ‘this thing called illusion of inclusion, and it’s sort of like, “Yeah, we’re gonna listen to you. We’re gonna listen to your position”, and then these outside groups can say, “We had a seat at the table”. It’s all about political positioning rather than taking clear policy positions, the usual kabuki theatre a few months before an election.’ Katulis, it should be noted, is not speaking as a frustrated activist. While not an advisor to the campaign, he is close to them. In 2017, he and current Harris aide Ilan Goldenberg organized an AIPAC-funded trip to the UAE for top Democrats.

Based on everything we know, it makes sense to take the word of the anonymous Harris staffer who said ‘I don’t think that there’s going to be any sort of significant change from where this administration is’. Whatever cosmetic shifts occur should be interpreted in light of comments by Tom Nides, vice chair of Blackstone and former ambassador to Israel, reportedly now under consideration ‘for a senior national security role’. According to Nides, Harris is ‘the only hope we have . . . of turning the kids that are under 30 years old back in support of the state of Israel’. The people closest to Harris have a range of ideas about what supporting Israel means, but the boundaries of the debate are limited by a basic consensus.

This consensus is visible in the recent appointment of a new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs, Mira Resnick. Resnick has longstanding ties to AIPAC and is ‘well known and respected in the Israeli national security and foreign policy establishment’. Most recently, she has distinguished herself by working behind the scenes to overcome congressional concerns about arms transfer to Israel. Resnick’s hawkish profile is especially stark when you consider that her predecessor, Andrew Miller, resigned over the administration’s approach to Gaza. Annelle Sheline, another State Department official who quit in protest, said that Miller ‘did his best to try to push back on the administration’s determination to facilitate genocide. Whereas DAS Resnick will eagerly support it’. The appointment was warmly welcomed by the AIPAC-aligned Democratic Majority for Israel, but also by Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the ostensibly liberal Zionist group J Street. A disturbing equilibrium, which no force currently visible within US domestic politics seems capable of disturbing.