In an appearance this week on the daytime talkshow The View, Kamala Harris was asked how her presidency would differ from Joe Biden’s. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said. The comment was seized on by the Trump campaign, who have used it in an attempt to seize upon Biden’s unpopularity and blame Harris for the issues that seem to most enrage and terrify their supporters, among them high consumer prices and immigration. But the comment also rankled some members of Harris’s own base: namely, the young, progressive and non-white voters who have been distraught over the suffering inflicted by Israel in its US-backed war on Gaza.
If Harris can’t think of any way she would differ from Biden, these voters may have some suggestions for her. The Biden approach to Israel, after all, has been disastrous on multiple fronts. It has been a moral catastrophe, with Israel’s wildly disproportionate campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza leading to famine, plague and tens of thousands of deaths. It has been an electoral liability, alienating Muslim and Arab American voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan and depressing turnout among the young voters whom Democrats have long relied on and which were a crucial part of Biden’s 2020 victory.
And it has been a complete strategic failure, with Israel now expanding its war into Lebanon, the region on the brink of a large-scale conflict between American and Iranian proxies, and the whole world watching as American leaders fail to exert any meaningful pressure or discernible consequences on a small country that has used a great number of US weapons while completely ignoring US instruction.
There was a moment, earlier in the war, when things could have gone differently. After the 7 October 2023 attacks killed hundreds of innocent Israelis, the Biden administration reportedly urged caution. But it was only in February, some four months into the war, when much of Gaza had already been leveled and its hundreds of thousands of people displaced into the south, that the Biden White House attempted to stop the Israelis from invading Rafah, the small southern border city where the refugees had fled, by delaying a shipment of 2,000lb bombs.
The move had broad support: Nancy Pelosi, hardly a robust supporter of the Palestinian cause, was by then urging enforceable conditions on aid to Israel. The move would also have had the benefit of bringing the Biden administration’s actions more plausibly into line with American and international law, which compels that states not sell arms to armies, like Israel’s, that have likely committed war crimes.
It was, to say the least, a mild gesture, and not one that had any impact at all on Israel’s military readiness: all told, America has sent more than 10,000 such bombs to Israel over the past year, many of which have been dropped on Gaza. By the time the Biden administration even so much as dawdled in sending military support to Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians had already been massacred. But reportedly, the anger that this small act of non-compliance provoked among Israeli officials and the American pro-Israel lobby was so intense that the Biden administration got spooked.
No meaningful conditions have been imposed on military aid since, and Israel has openly flouted American efforts to de-escalate, continuing its brutal assault on Gaza, launching an invasion into Lebanon that has displaced approximately 1 million people, and attempting to provoke Iran into an outright war – which, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government seems to believe, America will fight on Israel’s behalf. Meanwhile, the whole world watches on, with every foreign leader around the globe seeing anew each day the bleak reality of diminished American power: the United States, the Gaza war has proved, neither keeps its promises nor follows through on its threats.
But for all that the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war has been devastating and embarrassing internationally, it has also been unpopular domestically, creating real electoral dangers for the Harris campaign. The protests that sprang up across American campuses last spring were not merely the venting of a fringe minority; they represented a large-scale mobilization of young people morally outraged by the images coming out of Gaza.
These young voters view the Biden administration as complicit in a genocide; for Democrats to assume that this belief is insincere, or that those who hold them will overcome such a grave moral objection and turn out to vote for Harris anyway, seems both entitled and unwise.
Early in her campaign, Harris seemed to understand this. She refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when he came to Washington this summer, and she had strong words for the Israeli prime minister when they spoke together at a news conference. Harris also made positive rhetorical gestures towards the plight of Palestinians, saying kind words in her convention speech about the injustice of their suffering and their right to self-determination. But for the most part, that’s all these moves were – words. Now, Harris has mostly stopped saying them.
Voters have noticed. Specifically, Arab American voters in Michigan have. In February, when Michigan held its Democratic primary, more than 100,000 primary voters cast “uncommitted” ballots, as part of a protest movement aimed at pressuring Biden to change his stance on Gaza. The uncommitted votes were several times greater in number than Biden’s 2020 margin of victory in the state. That discontent has not gone away. A recent national poll of Arab American voters found Trump leading by more than four points among the group, which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in the last cycle. This may have a particularly potent impact in Michigan, where a new Quinnipiac poll released last week found Harris trailing Trump by three points.
Harris may not want to place much daylight between herself and the incumbent she has served as vice-president. But she has an opportunity to break with Biden on Gaza in these last months of the campaign – to show strength and resolve internationally, to show deference to the interests of a key voter group, and to do the right thing. For all the tendency to cast Israel as a global exception, the truth is that Netanyahu’s style of governance – his bigotry, his corruption, his advancement of a violent and exclusionary nationalism – is part of a broader trend of far-right authoritarianism.
It is the same trend that Harris aims to defeat in her campaign against Donald Trump. She has presented herself as a candidate on a mission to revive the liberal order, to protect democracy, to remake America into a country worthy of its global power, and to embody the principles of courage, justice and equality that make leaders worthy of following. She has a chance to show that she means it.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
