Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris’s Views of Israel and the Middle East

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic party’s candidate for president. She’s been in the public eye for much less time than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and much less is known about her views on many subjects—including on the U.S.-Israel relationship or America’s posture in the Middle East.

For instance, as Israel’s war in Gaza ramped up earlier this year, Harris became an outspoken critic of it, and a champion of a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Hamas on the grounds of humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. But it’s possible that these attitudes were a product of her role in the Biden administration, that she was assigned the role of bad cop to the president’s good cop.

So what does Harris really think about the subject? What role might her Jewish family members play in her views? How does she understand the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship? To answer those questions, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with Noah Rothman, a senior writer at National Review and the author of a recent essay there called “The Left Thinks It’s Getting an Anti-Israel Radical in Kamala Harris.” Together, the two also survey the wide coalition of the Democratic party—its elected officials, its voting base, its NGOs and operatives—and try to understand the pressures, the points of leverage, the incentives, and the political vulnerabilities to avoid on questions related to Israel.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On July 21st, 2024, President Biden released an announcement that he will not seek re-election
0:13.5	and plans to stand down and focus on serving out his term as the President of the United
0:18.5	States. Later that day, he endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, and she is now the presumptive nominee of the United States. Later that day, he endorsed his vice president,
0:21.9	Kamala Harris, and she is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, with, if the latest
0:27.1	polls are to be relied on, about a 50-50 chance of being elected the next president. Before serving
0:32.7	as vice president, Kamala Harris was a U.S. senator representing the state of California. She mounted a
0:38.6	brief presidential primary campaign in 2020, but withdrew from that race before the first party
0:44.2	contests in Iowa. As a result of that brief time, as a candidate for national office, we don't
0:50.4	know all that much about her own independent views on the U.S.-Israel relationship
0:54.7	or America's posture in the Middle East.
0:57.5	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
1:00.8	Over the past many months, Vice President Harris has been an outspoken critic of Israel's operations in Gaza
1:07.0	and a champion of a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Hamas on the grounds of
1:11.9	humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. But in today's conversation, we try to understand
1:17.7	those statements in the context of her role in the Biden administration, where she was
1:22.7	scripted to be a bad cop to the president's good cop. We look out on the way she sees the wide coalition
1:29.5	of the Democratic Party, its elected officials, its voting base, its NGOs, and its political
1:35.2	operatives. We try to understand the pressures, as she feels them, now as an independent
1:40.4	candidate, the points of leverage, the incentives, the gains to be had, and the
1:45.0	political vulnerabilities to avoid on questions related to Israel.
1:49.6	What does Kamala Harris think? What role might her Jewish family members play in the articulation
1:55.0	of those views? How does she understand the politics of the U.S. Israel relationship
	...

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