Harris' National Security Adviser Sounds Like The Status Quo on Israel/Palestine

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF!

WITH KAMALA HARRIS POISED to take the Democratic presidential nomination, among the biggest questions on the left is whether the vice president's reported discomfort with the unqualified material and diplomatic support President Biden has given Israel since Oct. 7 will translate into any substantive shift in policy, should she beat Donald Trump in November. 

As FOREVER WARS noted at the time, in March Harris provided the administration's earliest and most strident call for an "immediate ceasefire," but accepted central pillars of the Israeli position. Harris called for Israel to ease its blockade of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza, but not for Israel to end such unambiguous collective punishment, for instance. 

With Harris unexpectedly running for president in 2024, it’s worth parsing her statements on Gaza for differences from Biden, but with the understanding that such parsing risks missing the forest for the trees. Beyond her speech in March, and anonymous quotes about her empathy for Palestinians, evidence of Harris dissenting from the administration's support for Israel post-Oct. 7 is thin. At the same time, so is any evidence Harris shaped its policy—Harris is not, say, Brett McGurk. Between those two poles are to be found many, many people's hopes and fears for departures from and continuities with the policy Biden set.  

Jeremy Scahill at Drop Site News did a deep dive into Harris' history on the issue. While he finds daylight between it and Biden's uncomplicated Zionism, Harris, Scahill writes, has "her own record of hardline support for Israel, both as a senator and as vice president." You can read a similar assessment from Adam Lucente at al-Monitor, who surveys her vice-presidential record on the Mideast more broadly. Jacob Magid of the Times of Israel has a piece full of senior Biden officials saying that the reported differences between Biden and Harris on Israel are overblown: "There has been no division of labor or dispute on policy," is a representative quote. 

Another factor pointing toward continuity is the perspective of her national security adviser, Phil Gordon, Harris' senior-most foreign-policy aide. On May 22, Gordon, a Democratic foreign-policy hand with National Security Council experience on the Middle East in the Obama administration, gave a foreign-policy tour d'horizon to the Council on Foreign Relations. Gordon sounded closer to Biden's Israel policy than Harris did in her March quasi-dissent. And today Michael Gordon and Lara Seligman of the Wall Street Journal report that Phil Gordon is "likely to play a central role" in a Harris administration's foreign policy, which they nevertheless suggest could diverge from Biden's on Israel/Palestine. 

IN HIS SPEECH, PHIL GORDON credited the administration with having "mostly succeeded" in preventing regional escalation, while caveating that with the persistent exchange of fires between Israel and Hezbollah. This is a widely-held view in Washington that doesn't withstand scrutiny. Since October, the Middle East has been a battlefield, all because of Israel's assault on Gaza, and just because it hasn't yet become apocalyptic can't mask the fact that while Gordon spoke, the Houthis in Yemen persisted in holding Red Sea shipping at risk despite the most intense U.S. naval campaign since the Second World War. Yet Gordon hailed the administration for "deploy[ing] U.S. carrier groups to the region" as if the Houthis hadn't pulled the U.S.' card on any restoration of deterrence. 

Fast-forwarding a couple weeks, the Houthis have now struck Tel Aviv, the Israelis retaliated against the crucial and beleaguered Port of Hodeidah, and Iran-backed militias last week once again hit al-Asad Airbase in Iraq, where U.S. troops are stationed. The only way to actually stop escalation is to actively deescalate, and deescalation unambiguously requires forcing Israel to withdraw from Gaza, and that remains a step the administration is unprepared to take. Is President Harris prepared to take it? 

Addressing "the path and the vision" for a way out of the war, Gordon called "the normalization arrangement" Biden has been pursuing with Saudi Arabia "the big prize" for Israel that "could consummate this vision of an Israel that is secure and integrated in the region." Longtime readers will know I'm very skeptical of this proposal, and if it happens at all, it may turn out to be a U.S.-Saudi deal that gives the Saudis a path to a nuclear weapon. Also significant: While both the Americans and the Saudis have attempted, post-Oct. 7, to retcon the proposal to have always included some nebulous path to Palestinian statehood, Gordon said merely that "there needs to be a Palestinian component to that vision." 

The International Criminal Court moving toward arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant? "We’ve been very clear from the start that we thought that was a mistake," in Gordon's view. Expanded recognition of Palestinian statehood? "We just don’t think it helps Palestinians, or anyone else, to recognize the state of Palestine." Questioned by Elise Labott, Gordon said unilateral recognition doesn't lead "to the actual outcome we want to see, which is a Palestinian state, but one that lives securely side-by-side with Israel." That of course makes Palestinian freedom contingent on Israel, exactly as it's been since 1948, and last week, the Israeli Knesset decisively rejected a two-state solution. While the Knesset vote happened several weeks after Gordon's speech, no one who has followed this issue needed the vote to clarify Israeli rejectionism. 

Michael Gordon of the Journal asked Phil Gordon "how to take your vision and implement it?" Phil Gordon pointed to how logic and reason simply ought to compel Israel to accept the Saudi normalization deal that doesn't exist yet, calling it "something that they [Israelis] will have to think about, and understand that without the components necessary to make that happen we’re back in the current situation we are now." Leaving aside the dubious merits of the Saudi deal, not only is that non-responsive to the question, it's an answer that calls its own bluff. The big Biden initiative to allegedly realign the Middle East isn't something the U.S. will push on its principal regional client, for whom major benefits are supposed to accrue? "We obviously can’t impose any vision on the Israeli government or people," Gordon began by saying. It's useless to observe that the U.S. has overwhelming leverage over Israel to impose this or any other vision, since his answer tells you everything you need to hear about a lack of U.S. will to impose it. 

IS TRUMP WORSE THAN THIS? UNQUESTIONABLY. Trump's position is Biden's position without any effort to reach a ceasefire. "Let [Israel] finish the job," Trump said at the debate that ended Biden's candidacy, right before calling Biden a "bad Palestinian." As Daniel Larison notes, JD Vance wants to "let them [Israel] prosecute this war the way they see fit." Nor do they give a shit about regional escalation, as evidenced by Trump's 2020 Qassem Soleimani assassination that will reverberate in Iranian foreign policy for a very long time. 

But with Biden and potentially Harris unwilling to pressure Israel into withdrawal, the differences between the Democratic and Republican tickets sickeningly become ones of moral posturing, not material reality. As I write this, some 400,000 Palestinians once again are forced to flee any illusory semblance of shelter, this time while Israel once again attacks Khan Younis. Polio is such a threat in Gaza that Israel is vaccinating its soldiers while continuing to obstruct Palestinian access to medicine. 

Netanyahu is in Washington, where on Wednesday the architect of the genocide in Gaza will address Congress. Harris will be elsewhere campaigning, and Netanyahu will understand that as a rebuke, although Harris reportedly will meet Netanyahu separately. That sets up the major opportunity ahead: not for an overly personalized disagreement between Washington and Tel Aviv, but for the millions of Americans who do not wish their tax dollars to destroy Palestinian life to push Harris into breaking with Biden's policy. There can be no illusion: Gordon's speech is yet another reminder that it will be an uphill struggle. But all these struggles to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from its persistent psychosis are uphill, and there are lives in the balance.

AN EMIRATI OCCUPATION? Ben Caspit of al-Monitor reported last week on a potential endgame in Gaza: 

According to the emerging plan, Gaza will be administered by a multinational force, under the flag and leadership of the UAE. The force will also be comprised of representatives of 15 major Gaza families (clans) and of other countries in the Middle East. Israel will withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, but the United States will provide guarantees for the construction of an underground barrier designed to end the cross-border smuggling that enabled the Hamas buildup of recent years. 

Axios' Barak Ravid reports that this plan is a concoction of the U.S., Israel and the UAE and representatives met in Abu Dhabi on Thursday about it. Ravid reports that the Emiratis are on board with the Israeli rejection of Hamas retaining governmental power but that the Emiratis would need the Palestinian leadership to invite them into Gaza. On an entirely different diplomatic track, the Chinese foreign ministry appears to have brokered a Hamas-Fatah (and more) unity agreement. We'll have to see how durable this is, because such accords have fallen apart before.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.