The Harris/Walz’s (and Biden/Harris’s) abysmal record on Israel, Jews, and the war – Why Evolution Is True

The Elder of Ziyon is an anonymous supporter of Israel who has a website worth reading if you care about the Middle East conflicts. In the article below (click to read), an anonymous guest poster on that site recounts in detail the anti-Israel actions and statements of the Biden/Harris campaign. The poster avers that these statements and actions will simply be intensified in a Harris/Walz administration. I know about many of these accusations and agree with nearly all of them. It’s true that Biden and Harris say they support Israel, but when you look at what they’ve really done, their “support” is not only guarded, but they’ve also supported Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

I strongly disagree with the poster’s conclusion that, given all this, one should vote for Trump.  The poster’s support for the Orange Man comes from his being a one-issue voter. But many of us are not.  There are a variety of issues that Americans are weighing in the election, and our treatment of Israel doesn’t rank high.  What does rank high are these issues (chart from Statista), and you don’t see Israel at the top of the list of “the most important problems facing America today”.  (In fact, Israel is at the bottom, with only 1% agreement.)

I consider Trump mentally ill and cannot vote for him. But I also consider Israel as an important issue and so will reproduce the problems with Biden/Harris/Walz that the post singles out. (The post is anonymous because, as he/she says, “in my place of work there is intense hostility to Israel. If I openly argued what I am about to argue, that anyone who cares about Israel cannot support the Democratic candidates for President and must seriously consider supporting the other candidate. . . my professional status would be seriously compromised.”)

It’s sad that it’s come to this: we can’t raise heterodox arguments without damaging our careers, but so be it. I’ll simply give the poster’s argument.

My brief here is to call out my party’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidate (and the acting President) in areas of Israel policy where they could have done better. (And it’s arguable that Trump, though insane, might have done better on Israel than Harris will.) But I won’t abide people telling me that I have to vote for Harris (as opposed to not voting for President at all in a state that will certainly go for Harris). Please do not tell me that I have to vote for Harris, for that’s now what this post is about. You can argue about whether the poster is wrong in his/her criticisms, but this is about the poster’s claims and his conclusion that he will vote for Trump. I certainly won’t.  The poster doesn’t say, either, that voters in general should vote for Trump. As you see above, in general don’t care much about Israel or the war.

This was published September 22, and also appeared on Andrew Pessin’s Substack site. Click to read:

The article is long and gives over twenty reasons why the author won’t vote for Harris/Walz. I’ll reproduce the author’s main claims in indented bold text below, and other words from the piece in indented plain text.  Any text that is flush left is by me.

Here we go:

Harris-Walz will be a disaster for Israel and for American Jewry.

There have been some positive moments. Biden-Harris said the right things immediately after October 7, and allowed the U.S. Navy to be present in the region at a couple of important times, for which an Israel-advocate rightly feels gratitude. But aside from these and their occasional banal remark about believing in Israel’s right to defend itself—doesn’t every country have the right to defend itself?—heaps and mounds of evidence point unambiguously toward that dire conclusion. As I write, in September of 2024, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal is praising Biden-Harris for helping Hamas to remain in power, for always waiting patiently for and listening to Hamas’s demands in negotiations and for pressuring Israel to submit, and for recognizing Hamas as a legitimate diplomatic partner. What Meshal is gushing over is not the behavior of an ally of Israel, but of an administration that has largely taken the side of Israel’s enemies.

Since Harris has so far given no indication that her relevant policies will differ from Biden’s, and also repeatedly expressed her support for Biden’s, we may treat the Biden-Harris record as an indication of her own tendencies. If anything, in fact, the evidence suggests that Harris’s policies and actions will be worse. In September of 2024 here is Harris gloating about withholding weapons from Israel in order to put leverage on Israel to “accept the deal”: the deal, that is, that does not return all the hostages, that leaves Hamas in power, and forces Israel to withdraw in defeat. That is not the behavior of an ally, again, but of a friend of the enemy.

The numbered claims (I’ve omitted the numbers as things get complex with numbers within numbers):

Biden-Harris supported the disastrous JCPOA treaty with Iran, have continued to make efforts to reestablish it, and Harris states that she will rejoin it if elected. That treaty enriched the Islamic Republic with hundreds of billions of dollars, enabling it to fund its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and to fund its “Ring of Fire” surrounding Israel. . . 

Biden-Harris continued to waive the sanctions on Iran even after October 7, and even afterIran directly fired upwards of 300 missiles at Israeli homes.  . . . That treaty and the Biden-Harris administration have also failed to adequately monitor and prevent the regime’s uranium enrichment. Iran is now perilously close to the nuclear weapon they have repeatedly proclaimed they will use to destroy the Jewish state and murder its seven million Jews.

Harris has close ties with many members of and has received a top 100% rating from the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the pro-Khamenei lobby that advances the Islamic Republic’s interests in Washington D.C. 

Biden-Harris reinstated funding to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), which supports its “pay-to-slay” program, thus incentivizing Palestinians to murder Jews. Numerous terrorist attacks, including and after October 7, and including those against American citizens, are thus rewarded with the American taxpayer money.

The one above particularly galls me: American taxpayer money goes in part to fund the “pay for slay” program to reward those in Israeli prisons who have attacked Jews. That happens to be true, like most of the contentions. More:

Biden-Harris also reinstated funding to UNRWA, thus providing a direct funding line to Hamas—which, the current war has revealed, has entirely infiltrated UNRWA.

I disagree with the one below one a bit, as the U.S. is sending weapons to Israel and not to Hamas. However, the U.S. has gone overboard in its insistence on humanitarian aid, when we do not do so in, for example, Syria or Yemen:

Biden-Harris have shown far more concern for Palestinian civilians than for Israeli civilians, at one point even dictating to Israel (through their Secretary of State) that Israel’s “Job Number One” in fighting Hamas had to be protecting and aiding Palestinian civilians.

Speaking of incompetence, Biden-Harris have bent over backwards to provide massive amounts of “humanitarian aid” to Gaza. That on its own isn’t necessarily objectionable, but the execution has been both laughable and directly harmful.

The relentless insistence that Israel focus on facilitating aid is only one of many ways in which Biden-Harris have consistently hampered Israel’s war effort. For only one particularly heinous example, they demanded that Israel not enter Rafah, causing a months-long delay in that essential operation. Biden threatened Israel with withholding weapons if they went in; Kamala “I’ve studied the maps” Harris condescendingly reproached Israel even for thinking about Rafah, claiming the operation was impossible and warning Israel about crossing her “red line.” She said, “We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake … I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go.”

Biden-Harris both regularly parrot Hamas talking points, including citing Hamas’s alleged numbers of casualties, repeatedly suggesting “far too many innocent civilians have died”—even after numerous analysts have demonstrated that Hamas’s numbers are simply not credible (just one example here), and despite it being notably striking that Hamas does not bother distinguishing civilians from combatants so there is literally no way to know how many “innocent civilians” have died.

Throughout the war Biden-Harris have pressured Israel not only to negotiate with the terrorist group responsible for October 7 but to make massive concessions to them. They have pressured Israel to accept defeat from Hamas, in other words, by withdrawing from Gaza without all the hostages and without removing Hamas from power, which is a sure guarantee that Hamas will rearm and rebuild (not least by stealing international aid) and do October 7 again and again—as they have openly said they plan to do.

Harris snubbed Netanyahu’s speech on (sic) Congress. This came after months of repeated Biden-Harris interference in Israel’s own democracy, including outright efforts to unseat Israel’s democratically elected leader. Whether one is for or against Netanyahu as a politician, he is the elected leader of an alleged ally in the midst of an existential war; the lack of respect, and the lack of support for that alleged ally while it is engaged in an existential war, was a disgrace.

Biden-Harris repeatedly demand that those who committed the October 7 atrocities should be rewarded with a “state” of their own. Harris repeats this demand every single time the question arises, including in the debate with Trump and the handful of interviews she has given since. Not only does this demand reward the barbaric massacre and incentivize jihadi violence both against Israel and the West in general—why wouldn’t they perpetrate mass violence, when they get their demands met by doing so?—but she constantly repeats the demand despite the fact that Hamas leaders repeatedly, openly, proclaim their intention to perpetrate October 7 again and again and again, until all the Jews are murdered.

Biden-Harris repeatedly denounce Israelis in Judea-Samaria for defending themselves from Palestinian violence, and have repeatedly imposed sanctions on numerous Israelis there while literally doing nothing about the far more serious and more frequent violence of Palestinians against Israelis.

Beyond some lip service denouncements, Biden-Harris have done nothing serious or substantial to support or defend Israel from the international lawfare being waged against it from the United Nations (U.N.), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

One of the very first Biden-Harris foreign policy decisions was to remove the Iran-funded Houthis from the list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. They have continued to resist relisting them as recently as this week, despite numerous calls by others to do so, despite the Houthis’ ongoing attacks on Red Sea shipping and their repeatedly attacking Israel. 

Many campus enemies of Israel and of the Jews responded to October 7 by celebrating, endorsing, and calling for more mass genocidal violence against Jews, demanding the destruction of Israel, and then spent eleven months ostracizing, harassing, and in dozens of instances physically assaulting Jewish students on our campuses. Harris has repeatedly expressed support for these people; “They’re showing exactly what the emotions should be” was only her most recent example. One might have thought that the appropriate emotions in response to an attempted genocide would be something other than celebrating it and calling for more. Meanwhile Harris has said essentially not a word in support of the Jewish students who have confronted a year of terror and record-setting antisemitism on their campuses.

The Biden-Harris Justice Department has been entirely missing in action this past year. It has not only ignored the widely reported mass wave of antisemitism occurring on campuses and in many major cities (including vandalism, incitement to mass murder, violence, and more), but has actively ignored requests that they get involved.

There is a lot more, but I’ll just add one thing about “personnel”:

 As one article title puts it, “Harris would fill her administration with anti-Israel radicals”—and supporters of Iran, the greatest enemy of Israel and of Jews on the planet.

Since I’m not a one-issue voter or political supporter, I cannot, however, agree with the author’s conclusion, which is what would get he/she in trouble were their identity revealed. After listing the positive things that Trump did about Israel, the author says this:

 As a lifelong Democrat, with the fate of Israel and American Jewry on the line, then, it is impossible for me to support this candidate (Harris).

. . . . The conclusion is indisputable:

Biden-Harris-Walz are and will be a disaster for Israel and for American Jews.

Trump was the most Pro-Israel President ever.

Nose held and deep breath taken, but:

Orange Man it is.

Not for me, of course! What I want to highlight here, and which worries me quite a bit, is the Biden/Harris record on Israel, which is likely to become more anti-Israel if Harris is elected. To the extent that Harris says she supports Israel, I still believe she’ll lessen America’s support of the Middle East’s only democracy if she’s elected, which is looking increasingly likely. But if you’re a Democrat, do be aware that your (our) party is becoming increasingly anti-Israel, and, in some cases (e.g., the Congressional “squad”) anti-Semitic. That’s what happened to Labour in the UK, too, and it’s a sign of a democracy that is failing.