Many Arab American Democrats voted against Vice President Kamala Harris for president—either not voting at all or voting for Republican Donald Trump—due to anger toward her for not taking a more Palestinian position about the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza against Hamas. I believe Ms. Harris had made an important mistake when asked if she disagreed with anything President Joe Biden had done during his presidency. She paused before answering, as if she had not thought about that question. She then answered that she did not have any disagreements with Biden.
Harris was between a rock and a hard place in answering that question, and maybe even more so because she is a woman and Joe Biden is a man and her boss. How can she, as current vice president, state differences, showing that she in insubordinate to her boss? But it would have been better for her campaign if she had just gone ahead and expressed differences if she had them, especially regarding two things: immigration and the Gaza war. In my opinion, Biden really messed up about both of those.
When Catholic Joe Biden became president, he sounded like Pope Francis who had expressed opposition to preventing illegal immigration into the U.S. The pope held a mass on the Mexico side of the Mexico-U.S. border, attended by 200,000 people, as a protest to President Donald Trump’s effort to build a wall on the entire 2,000-mile border. Right after that mass, while the pope was flying home to Rome, a journalist asked him about Trump’s wall effort. Pope Francis said, “Those who build walls are not Christians.” I think that was not only wrong but stupid. The Vatican has walls dating to medieval times that kept out barbarians. Moreover, the last chapter in the Bible says holy New Jerusalem (which is not a cube but a mountain), which will come down out of heaven to earth, will have a wall that surrounds its entire circumference of 1,500 miles that will be 144 feet high (Revelation 21.10-21).
And concerning the Gaza war, I think Biden was way, way too pro-Israel in his reaction to the Gaza war. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. But is Israel justified in having so far killed over 44,000 Palestinians when Hamas only killed less than 1,200 Jews? Biden previously having gone to Israel and hugging Prime Minister Netanyahu has not been a good optic for him. And as far as I am aware, Biden never said anything about the cause of Palestinian opposition to Israel, which is its now 57 years of occupation and efforts to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. It took far too long for him to say there needed to be a two-state solution.
During Harris’s campaign, she needed to separate herself from Biden’s extreme pro-Israel, and seemingly anti-Palestinian, stance. She did express clearly that she favored a two-state solution. But she should have said that and perhaps more when asked about if she had any policy differences with the Biden administration. Then too, she is married to a Jewish man, and that optic didn’t help her about this issue.
Nevertheless, Kamala Harris would have been more favorable to Palestinians in their conflict with Israel than Donald Trump ever will be. So many people think Trump was good for Israel, and he bragged that he did more for Israel than any U.S. president has. I think that’s a bunch of baloney. It did not help Israel for President Trump to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Jerusalem at the legitimate capital of Israel. Yet that’s what most Americans seemed to think, believing Trump’s bluster about it. No, that was terrible for Israel. First of all, it didn’t help Israel. But most of all, it hurt the peace process even though there wasn’t any. What it did was cause an extremist terrorist organization like Hamas to have more support from Palestinians in launching their attack on October 7th last year. And it forced Saudi Arabia to withdraw its efforts to make deals with Israel including reinstating diplomatic relations between them. It had always been the position of the UN and the Roman Catholic Church that the status of Jerusalem should be included in a comprehensive peace agreement resulting in two states. I fully supported that position in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia.
Now, Trump announced Tuesday he will select Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, as his ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a Zionist Christian who has said “there are no Palestinians” and that the West Bank belongs to Israel. That will never solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and will further alienate Arab nations from Israel. Moreover, I think Huckabee believes he is being biblical by opposing the formation of a Palestinian state, to which I strongly disagree. Even though God chose Israel to be his witness to Gentile nations, the Bible often says God is no respecter of persons. Christian Zionists like Huckabee misunderstand God’s covenant with Israel, which is conditional on Israel keeping Torah.
I don’t think Kamala Harris is a racial or financial respecter of persons either. She became Vice President after having had a long career as a prosecuting attorney in San Francisco and then California’s attorney general. And during her campaign for the presidency, she constantly expressed herself as a person who was sympathetic to people who suffer injustices and a person who applied the law. And she repeatedly expressed grief at the high number of Palestinians being killed in the war. On the other hand, Donald Trump said for Netanyahu to “do what you have to do.”
Thus, I believe Palestinian-Americans and other Arab-Americans who refused to vote for Kamala Harris due to the Gaza war were doing both Palestinians and the United States of America a disservice. Still, if they would have done otherwise, Trump still would have won since there were more important issues to most voters which garnered more votes for Trump than for Harris.
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