Kamala Harris is not an anti-Semite. It feels absurd to have to say this. After all, she is married to an actual Jew, and I’m certain he would happily vouch for her. But in the days since she took over Joe Biden’s spot as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, there has been a surge of innuendo that Harris bears a secret antipathy for Jews.
Leave it to Donald Trump to utter the quiet part out loud—he always does. Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, yesterday, he said that Harris “is totally against the Jewish people.” I’m afraid we are about to live through a political moment that is already reminding me of Barack Obama’s entry onto the national stage, when an entire news cycle could revolve around a photo of him in a Somali turban that supposedly exposed his closeted fundamentalist-Muslim identity.
Before we get to why Harris has been smeared like this and what the political dangers are for her, we can clear up this basic point: Harris has no problem with Jews. She has talked of walking around the Bay Area as a young girl with those blue Jewish National Fund boxes, raising money to plant trees in Israel; she does a killer (and affectionate) imitation of her Brooklyn-born Jewish mother-in-law; she knows how to use the word shofar correctly in a sentence; she even helped her husband, Doug Emhoff, clip a kippah to his head at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I could go on.
These are just her kishkes. But she also has a consistent record of both calling out anti-Semitism and expressing the kind of unambiguous support for Israel that gets a politician invitations to AIPAC conferences every year—she has spoken at two. Harris has condemned again and again hate crimes against Jews and attacks on synagogues. “When Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish hatred, that is anti-Semitism,” she said in 2021, as incidents in which Jewish Americans were the subjects of hate crimes rose steeply. Emhoff made combatting anti-Semitism his signature issue before the war in Gaza, and he has kept at it, clearly with her support, even now that being a proud Jew in the American public eye is a newly fraught proposition—as recently as yesterday, he was fantasizing about putting a mezuzah on the White House.
I have really found nothing in Harris’s record as a senator or as the vice president to make me doubt her Zionist bona fides, whether she chooses to embrace that label or not. For those on the radical left, such as the writer and activist Jeremy Scahill, there is no ambiguity either: Harris is a “hardline” supporter of Israel, he writes, in an article titled “Can Kamala Harris Wipe the Blood off Her Hands?” In 2017, she co-sponsored a Senate resolution that criticized the former Obama administration for being too harsh on Israel at the United Nations. Asked in 2016 about her views on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Harris said she was deeply opposed to an effort that was “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Since October 7, Harris has supported the ultimate military goal of the Israeli government, saying in March, “Hamas cannot control Gaza, and the threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel must be eliminated.” Just last month, Harris held a White House screening of a documentary about the sexual violence that took place against Israelis on October 7—violence that many pro-Palestinian activists deny even happened. “We cannot look away and we will not be silent,” Harris said. Again, I could go on.
But none of this will matter for her partisan critics. And the reason is very simple and sad: Harris has expressed empathy for the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and in ways that feel and sound more genuine than President Biden’s statements. This is the sliver of daylight between the two of them, if one wants to call it that. It’s been enough to make some supporters of Israel anxious about where her heart is, and those on the U.S. right who are eager for a wedge issue salivate at the prospect of depicting her as someone about to break into a chant of “from the river to the sea.”
The main piece of evidence for her supposedly left-leaning views on Israel is an interview Harris recently gave to The Nation. Since the start of the war in Gaza, she has been concerned, she said, about civilians there, about their access to clean water and hygiene products—“I was asking early on, what are women in Gaza doing about sanitary hygiene. Do they have pads? And these are the issues that made people feel uncomfortable, especially sanitary pads.” A statement like this is how she has contributed to the administration’s position, by moving from the abstraction of “humanitarian aid” to thinking about the impossible situation of people caught in the middle of a war zone—and with the added specificity of considering the concerns of women in a socially conservative society.
It’s what came next that could create greater risk for her. Asked about the young people on campuses who have been protesting the war, she said:
They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.
That these protesters have often channeled this emotion into extremely ideological expression—in ways that, yes, have in many instances turned into open anti-Semitism—does not make the emotion itself any less worth acknowledging. Without taking anything away from her consistent, resolute defense of Israel, Harris confronted a reality that almost no politician who has taken a position on the protests has allowed: The students feel something. That feeling does not search for much context or reason before chanting loudly, but it is real, a response to images of mass death, which can’t help but inspire compassion.
Harris’s acknowledgment might be the first step toward actually engaging with those young people and enabling them to see that a concern for the humanity of one people might be causing them to negate the humanity of another. Her ability to express this empathy should not be seen as a liability. It should be seen as a strength—if, that is, we have any hope of draining the bile that currently courses through every conversation about Israel and Palestine. To be able to say, Yes, I hear what is motivating your protest, and you’re not evil for responding to the sight of dead children is not weakness or giving in to Hamas; it’s attacking the problem at its source. The young people of America did not wake up and decide to be anti-Semites. They are responding, as young people will, to human misery, and want to do something about it, even if the form their activism has taken has created its own callousness and prejudice.
But politics being the reductive business it is, especially in an ultra-partisan election year, I’m sure not much room exists for the nuance of this perspective. Instead, Harris will be questioned for every hint of deviation, any signal that on the ledger of Palestinian and Israeli victimhood, she has been too receptive to one side or another. Already, one of the data points for those looking to smear Harris as anti-Israel is the Instagram account of her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff. Next to Ella’s avid love of knitting, she has apparently twice posted links to raise money for humanitarian efforts in Gaza, including encouraging her followers to donate to UNRWA, the United Nations relief organization that has been accused of complicity with Hamas, but which remains the primary conduit for humanitarian relief.
In his comments at the North Carolina rally last night, Trump tried to create a second data point by calling out Harris for not attending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress. Harris, on the campaign trail, had an already scheduled event—as did Trump’s Republican running mate, J. D. Vance, who was also absent, though this did not ignite Trump’s ire. In fact, Harris is slated to hold a personal meeting with Netanyahu this week.
The challenge for Harris now will be to manage these optics and associations, because much will be made of them, fairly or not. Even as she should insist that it is neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel to show concern for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, she has to keep her distance from those on the left whose activism and concern are more about anti-Zionism than being pro-Palestinian. And she seems primed to do this, issuing a statement that strongly condemned yesterday’s protests in Washington, D.C., against Netanyahu’s visit, denouncing activists who engaged in Hamas cosplay as “despicable” and “abhorrent.”
In addition to defusing the tensions over student activism, Harris’s facility with expressing empathy gives her a chance to win over those 100,000-plus voters in Michigan who voted “uncommitted” in February’s Democratic primary as a protest against Biden’s Israel policies. But if Harris does so by moving too far toward those whose sympathies are not as evenhanded and generous as hers seem to be—such as Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who talk of a “genocide”—that will be both a mistake and a political problem: Trump’s refrain about her being an enemy of the Jews will be in regular rotation.
What’s important to understand in this moment when Harris can still define herself, rather than be pinned down by others on the left and right, is where she starts from. I see her as a typical Liberal Zionist (an endangered species, it should be said). She believes in the need for a Jewish state; she defends Israel’s right to do everything it needs to do to protect itself, especially after October 7; she envisions a two-state solution to the conflict; and she has significant worries and deep human concerns about how Netanyahu’s government has waged this war and what it has meant for Palestinian lives. By her words and deeds, this is who Kamala Harris is. Everything else that has been and will be projected onto her when it comes to Israel and the Jews is the result of a political environment that does not know what to do with someone who sees the conflict in this humane way.
