Last Chance for Harris to Advance Middle East Peace and Salvage the Election
As we watch the war in Gaza expand into Lebanon and threaten to draw Iran more directly into the fray, I wish to return to an issue I addressed in my post of June 11th. There I made mention of the fact that what we are witnessing in the Levant today is the clashing of two powerful historical forces: European settler colonialism versus aspirations for national self-determination by the peoples colonized by Europe.[1]
But however late in world history it may have emerged settler colonialism in Israel is not going to go away. Just like it isn’t going away in the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, etc. In June I concluded that we need an international effort to impose the two-state solution with international peacekeeping forces on the ground to ensure that extremist on both sides can’t upend the process.[2] To that I would add that more explicitly, that it must be the United States that takes the lead in forging a settlement that can underwrite Israeli security and Palestinian statehood at the same time.
Now it is October. The Lebanese Shi’ite party-state Hezbollah had been shelling Northern Israel since the beginning of the war to demonstrate solidarity with the people of Gaza. After trading cosmetic shots across the bow with Hezbollah for eleven months, Israel staged massive cyberattacks on Hezbollah communications pagers in September and followed that up with heavy bombing and now a ground offensive into Southern Lebanon.
Iran, the benefactor of Hamas and Hezbollah, has also exchanged blows with Israel, with the Israelis getting the better of those exchanges. That includes the aerial assault on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria in April that killed a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Then there was the bombing that killed the Hamas military commander in late July in Teheran.[3]
As I write we’ve learned that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was killed on Wednesday. The Israeli government, most of Israeli civil society, the Biden administration and the mainstream Western press are all heralding Sinwar’s death as a victory for justice.
Biden and Kamala Harris have both made statements suggesting that it’s been Hamas who’s been the primary obstacle to a ceasefire in Gaza. But in May Biden declared that the administration’s goal was a ceasefire that would lead to negotiations creating a Palestinian state. Since then, the bickering has been over whether a ceasefire would be permanent (the Hamas position), or temporary (the Israeli position). But for months people in diplomatic circles in Washington and keen long-time Israel-Palestine watchers have been saying that it’s Israel that’s forestalling the ceasefire. Israeli has thrown added demands on the table to stall talks. This is because Netanyahu and the religious fanatics in his cabinet don’t wish to see talks leading to a Palestinian state.[4]
Biden and Harris know this. This could still be the moment when Harris differentiates herself from Biden publicly, by aggressively calling for the permanent ceasefire and two-state solution negotiations and averring that she would cut off weapons transfers to Israel if they don’t accept the US position. She would add that if the US were to cut off weapons to Israel, we would be prepared to place a large force on the ground in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank to assure that nobody can overrun Israel.
Of course, there are many more details to be sorted out here. See the intelligent overview offered by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on Friday for a summary of recent US, Israeli, Arab negotiations.[5]
But the takeaway measure here is that if Harris doesn’t clearly layout a pathway to peace involving a Palestinian state, she’s likely to lose in Michigan with its 100,000 uncommitted voters, most of whom are Muslim. There are 60,000 uncommitted in Pennsylvania and another 47,000 in Wisconsin: all states won by Trump in 2016 but regained by Biden in 2020, in both instances by razor-thin margins. Remember that the uncommitted delegates movement arose during the Democratic primaries last spring as a protest against Biden’s biased pro-Israeli stance. The uncommitted also include many young and POC voters who see Israel as a racist apartheid regime.
Harris could lose all three of those states, and if she does she’ll lose the election.[6] Biden suffers from the Israel right or wrong hangover from the Cold War. That was a time when there was great sympathy for Jews and tremendous guilt in the West for failing to stop the Holocaust. Democrats also were concerned about the Jewish vote. Muslim voters did not matter to the major political parties then and both parties were indifferent to the fate of Muslims in the Middle East. Post-1965 immigration policies that admitted larger numbers of people from the Islamic World to the US began to change the political landscape at home. And the Camp David Accords of 1978 forging Israeli-Egyptian peace and pointing toward Palestinian statehood created more sympathy for the Palestinian cause among average Americans.
Harris, with no foreign policy chops of her own is being dragged into the abyss of the outdated Biden Doctrine. If Harris wants to win and prove she’s next Gen in the realm of foreign policy she needs to adopt the permanent ceasefire/Palestinian statehood agenda immediately. Most American Jews want a ceasefire and they want to see the Jewish hostages released. They are split over Palestinian statehood, but that’s mostly because they don’t see a viable partner in Hamas or the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. The plan outlined by Tom Friedman’s article addresses that issue.
As gut-wrenching as things are over there today, I don’t think this issue is make or break for most voters. Most Jewish voters will vote for Harris rather than the fascist Trump in November. And more young Jews, other young POC and Muslims will vote for her if she takes the advice offered here. Wake up Kamala! Time is running out!
[1] Vernon Damani Johnson, “Jewish and Arab Nationalism and Settler Colonialism.” http://damanipolitics.blogspot.com/2024/06/jewish-and-arab-nationalism.html
[2] ibid
[3] Hamas https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/hamas-political-leader-haniyeh-killed-iran-07-31-24/index.html
[4] Tia Goldberg, “Could mass protests in Israel over the hostages persuade Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire deal?” AP. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hostages-netanyahu-gaza-war-d041f4fc2519597a15be95ad837e0df8
[5] Thomas Friedman, “A Way to Build Peace from Sinwar’s Death, “New York Times, October 18, 2024, p. A21.
[6] See Interview with Congresswoman Ihan Omar by Mehdi Hasan, The Efforts Are Not Enough.’ Rep. Ilhan Omar on Kamala Harris’s Failing Outreach to Muslim Voters,” on Zeteo by subscription only. https://zeteo.com/p/the-efforts-are-not-enough-rep-ilhan
