Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris at Tuesday night’s debate. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Columnist Dan Perry September 11, 2024

For those interested in insights into Israel policy under the next U.S. administration, Tuesday night’s presidential debate was frustratingly vague – yet also strangely clarifying. The public was offered formulaic boilerplate from Vice President Kamala Harris and blustering nonsense from former President Donald Trump, but also a pretty clear reflection of a choice that could hardly be more stark. 

Essentially, Harris will continue the Democratic Party’s tradition of balancing constituencies in its diverse coalition and nudging all combatants, in the Middle East and elsewhere, toward a negotiated peace. Trump will be pro-Israel, which in his world means supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Neither is planning to radically reshape the U.S.-Israel relationship, but only one of the two has ideas about how to productively move it forward: Harris.

Trump, instead, would provide carnival antics. When asked how he’d deal with Netanyahu, he responded with a rambling claim that if he had stayed in office, Russian President Vladimir Putin would have never invaded Ukraine. Then, seeming to remember the question, and which war he was supposed to be talking about, Trump declared thrice, without evidence, that Harris “hates Israel” — which she denied as “absolutely not true.”

Undeterred, Trump went on to predict that “if she’s president I believe that Israel will not exist within two years from now. The whole place is going to get blown up. Arabs, Jewish people. Israel will be gone.” 

Who is going to blow it up? Why? Trump’s vague implication may have been Iran — it was genuinely hard to tell. Israel is indeed causing itself great damage through its costly war against Hamas, but this prediction is so preposterous that it demeans anyone who entertains it enough to attempt a counter-argument.

Harris stuck to a more familiar and coherent vision, if not necessarily a more likely one, which reflected the classic Democratic approach from the presidency of President Bill Clinton on: “We must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians can have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve,” she said.

No, she didn’t have many words on how to practically turn that vision into a reality, offering many of the same seeming contradictions that have typified the Biden administration’s response to the Gaza war. She promised that Israel would always retain the right and the means to defend itself against Iran and proxies like Hamas — and appeared to also favor a surrender to Hamas’ demands for an end to the war that would leave the group in charge in Gaza. 

“It is also true that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, children, mothers,” she said. “What we know is that this war must end, it must end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out. So we will continue to work around the clock on that.”

It’s true that the ceasefire deal on the table — which a particularly difficult Israeli leadership and the genocidal and nihilistic Hamas terrorists have been apparently fruitlessly negotiating over for months — seems to be the only way to save the remaining 100-odd hostages, many of whom are already feared dead. Israel has not succeeded in compelling Hamas to agree to give up power, and in 11 months of war, has failed to eliminate Hamas and blocked all efforts to introduce an alternative government into Gaza. 

Any outcome that leaves Hamas in power would offer — despite the horrific devastation in Gaza –— a victory narrative for Hamas in the twisted calculus of Islamic Jihadism. Netanyahu has been resisting such a scenario mightily, and despite Harris’ vehemence, it’s unclear what new tactics she would deploy to force him to fall in line.

Of course, Trump also avoided getting into specifics on the negotiations. But his comportment in general, and his obvious indifference to humanitarian concerns, suggest that he’d offer Israel a much freer hand to do whatever it wanted.

Indeed, one gets the impression that his natural impatience might lead the U.S. itself to take much sterner action against global miscreants like the Houthis — who have taken over much of Yemen, and badly impeded global maritime trade by attacking ships headed to the Suez Canal. “Look at what’s happening with the Houthis in Yemen. Look at what’s going on in the Middle East,” Trump said. “I will get that settled and fast.”

But those claims are bluster. And while Harris’ responses felt premeditated and carefully calibrated — likely stemming from her desire to maintain flexibility while appealing to both pro-Israel voters and progressives — she, at least, showed an understanding that the current situation is untenable, and a commitment to working the available channels to resolve it.

Will her measured approach succeed? Trump has been trying to woo American Jews, about three-quarters of whom generally vote Democrat, on the issue of Israel; so far, it isn’t working. But his approach isn’t all for show. He has long held unabashedly pro-Israel positions — as president he relocated the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the annexation of the Golan Heights, and did Netanyahu’s bidding by pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran. The complication for him — which he does not seem to realize — is that this record risks looking like a pro-Netanyahu position built on support for the Israeli right. That does not actually align with the more liberal positions of most U.S. Jews.

So there really is a clear choice to be made.

If Harris becomes the next president, U.S. policy will likely continue trying to achieve a delicate balance in the situation, marked by attempts to mediate between Israel’s security needs and international pressure to urgently address humanitarian issues in Gaza and end the deadly violence. 

Trump’s vision is marked by the absence of any such balancing act. For him, there are no compromises. Israel, under his watch, would continue to act as it sees fit, with unconditional U.S. backing.

There is a broader lesson here. The candidates’ differing approaches to Israel are actually the most acute illustration of the fundamental choice facing Americans. Down one road leads more of the same post World War II order with America somewhat at the helm — but on occasion looking impotent as well. Down the other lies a parallel universe in which nuance is for wimps, diplomacy is disdained, and Trump’s whims call the shots.

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