On Tuesday, September 10, 2024 during her first debate with Mr. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate in this year’s U.S. presidential election, Vice-President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris repeated her support for a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine crisis. More importantly, she expressed the wish for the ongoing war to end, while stressing her avowed commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself.
During the acrimonious debate in Philadelphia hosted by ABC News, Harris and Trump had been asked how they would reach a ceasefire deal between Jerusalem and Hamas. While characteristically Trump claimed that the vice president hates Israel and that if she is elected president, Israel wouldn’t exist in two years, Harris said that how Israel defends itself “matters, because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed; children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must end immediately. We must chart a course for a two-state solution, and in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel, and an equal measure for the Palestinians.”
She pointed out that while she would always allow Israel the ability to defend itself, Gaza must be rebuilt “where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”
Kamala Harris’s position has always been known, being something President Joe Biden has hammered on for many months following Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinians. It can only be surmised that her statement during the debate in Philadelphia was made against the backdrop of sheer politics with the view to both kowtow to the state of Israel and win sympathy from Jewish lobby groups within the United States, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), while reassuring the Arab regimes. There was nothing new there. Trump, whose position tends to support the annihilation of Palestine as an entity, would have said the same thing and added a notch higher in terms of his usually extreme measures. It is a rhetoric that successive U.S. administrations have canvassed, emphasising that Israel is the de facto 51st American state – a military colony planted within the Middle East and adjudged as its closest ally in the restive region.
Whatever politics both Harris and Trump chose to play with the Middle East catastrophe as they campaign for the election set to be held on November 5, 2024, nobody should be left in doubt that Palestinian lives must not be contextualised within the two candidates’ election calculations. A genocide like no other is unfolding right before everyone’s eyes and the most important thing is to stop it immediately. The U.S. has the power to do that if it so wishes.
America’s trifling with the negotiation to end the war gives a worrying perspective. The U.S. can make Israel to sign the ceasefire deal it brokered, the terms of which were agreed on even by Hamas on a few occasions before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who prefers to prolong the genocide, shifts the goal posts.
The Biden administration’s failure towards this end has given Israel the excuse to continue its mindless assault on Gaza and, as we saw in over the last two weeks, expand to the occupied West Bank. Its latest assault on the West Bank, with increasing state-sponsored settler violence, has led to the killing and maiming of many innocent Palestinians, including women and children, bulldozing of roads and houses, and cutting the supply of electricity. According to some estimates, the damage in the West Bank alone will take $100 million to fix. Add that to the atrocious killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians, wounding of about 95,000 others, displacement of 90% of the population and destruction of infrastructure in Gaza and you have an apocalyptic brutality the type of which has never been seen in contemporary history.
The Biden administration has clearly failed to stop the horrific conflict and indeed contributed to Netanyahu’s own inability to secure a ceasefire-for-hostages deal and achieve his stated goals of annihilating Hamas. Already, many of the Israeli hostages have died during the war on the besieged strip. America’s flip-flop has given Netanyahu the signal he craved to continue with the tragedy in absolute defiance to several United Nations resolutions and the judgment of the International Court of Justice. World opinion and even the views of tens of thousands of Israelis, as can be seen in the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations in Tel Aviv, appear immaterial to him.
As we argued earlier, the U.S. has the moral obligation to stop the war even against the base desires of Netanyahu’s war-mongering coalition and his Zionist supporters around the world. Vice President Kamala Harris should up the ante of her campaign rhetoric by doubling down on her expressed wish to end this tragedy. Many informed opinions believe that she is well positioned, as the No. 2 person in America today, to make it happen by deploying all the necessary back-channel pressure.
We believe that she could, for example, help make the American government withhold billions of dollars in weapons that the U.S. doles out to Israel since Hamas’ October 7 attack in which 1,200 Israelis and others were killed. Refusing to approve the liberal weapons donations to the Jewish enclave would be constitutional because it aligns with the provisions of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 which bans sending American military aid to countries that use them to commit human rights violations. There is no greater human rights crime than the one Israel is committing in Palestine, with the full complicity of the Biden administration. Harris should not be playing politics with Palestinian lives or waiting until she has won the November poll before she can push the stop button. She can do it right now.
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