Who would be better for Palestine: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
This past week, US politics reached a new low standard, where idolising convicted felons and war criminals now happens openly and officially in Capitol Hill. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom there exists an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—delivered his highly controversial address to Congress, just days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Thousands and thousands of people gathered in Washington and protested, while Netanyahu called them "Iran's useful idiots," drawing theatrical bipartisan claps and standing ovations reserved for war heroes.
President Joe Biden has been the face to blame for abbetting Israel's genocide of at least 40,000 Gazans, and rightly so, as he's deferred to Netanyahu, providing his extremist government with billions in military aid. Ahead of the 2024 elections, Biden's role in Gaza genocide had birthed a sinister question: Would Donald Trump have been better for Palestinians? Now that Vice President Harris is poised to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket, the question, though slightly altered, still remains: Will Donald Trump be better for Palestinians than Kamala Harris?
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. An undeniable fact must be laid out on the table: the US political establishment, in its current state, is not going to pivot from favouring the apartheid regime of Israel over Palestinian lives. Kamala Harris, as a presidential candidate in the US, cannot ever win by running an "anti-Israeli" campaign, but the conundrum she faces is that young voters will not tolerate further US-backed brutality in Gaza. Her first foreign policy challenge, in her newly launched presidential campaign was Netanyahu's visit, and her need to clean up Biden's Gaza policy mess—which harmed Democrats much more than Biden's debate performance. A recent Century Foundation poll, conducted before Biden dropped out, showed that nearly 4 in ten voters (38 percent) said they were less likely to vote for Biden due to his handling of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Harris did not attend Netanyahu's address, which she would normally preside over, but she met with Netanyahu privately, after which she, expectedly, harped on the harmful rhetoric, "Israel's right to defend itself." But she also expressed concern, more vocally than Biden, regarding Palestinians in Gaza. "We cannot allow ourselves to be numb to the sufferings and I will not be silent," she said. It's far from enough, but she did carve a microscopic corner for Palestinians in the conversation, which is a shift from President Joe Biden, who has, for the most part, glossed over the large number of civilian casualties of Palestinians in Gaza and even questioned them.
Biden is an old-school Zionist but Harris' personal views remain unclear. Interestingly, Rep. Rashida Tlaib—the only Palestinian-American in the House of Representatives—attended Netanyahu's address with a Palestinian-American man, Hani Almadhoun, who lost some 150 family members in Gaza. He told Zeteo News, "The only official who reached out while my family was being genocided was Vice President Kamala Harris," after he had posted online that his brother had been killed. Harris has never disclosed such acts publicly. Contrastingly, she has long maintained close ties with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the rightwing pro-Israel lobby primarily funded by Republican donors. Harris' mixed actions could be one of those, "in politics, you sometimes have to do what you don't want to," or it could also be that she doesn't actually care. Bernie Sanders, and Rashida Tlaib were one of the very few US politicians to publicly show empathy and address the root of the conflict and propose conditioning military aid to Israel. Tlaib was censured for it, and Sanders has been condemned by many, including liberal Democrats for his comments. So, regardless of her views, expecting Kamala Harris to act like Bernie Sanders and win the nomination and election, is utopian.
Since Trump is the leader of choice of far-right Israelis like Ben Gvir who want to ultimately "purge" Palestinians not only out of Gaza, but also the West Bank, the answer to the question of who will "better," should be a no-brainer.
But she has given slight hints that her foreign policy doctrine might differ from Biden's; internally she has advocated for more pressure on Netanyahu. In an interview earlier this year, during the historic US student protests against the genocide in Gaza, Harris seemed to show restrained sympathy for the students, stating that, "They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza." Kamala Harris has irritated Israeli ministers, notably the President Isaac Herzog who said in a recent interview, that "she has made quite a few problematic statements in the context of the war in Gaza," which he added, "might have been influenced by the more progressive camp in the Democratic Party."
As for Donald Trump, he shares a close relationship with Netanyahu, and if Netanyahu could vote, he would unquestionably vote for Trump over Harris any day. When addressing Congress, Netanyahu made it a point to thank former President Trump for the historic "Abraham Accords," which sought to normalise diplomatic relations between Israel and other nations in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords only emboldened Netanyahu's plans to annex the West Bank, and greenlit illegal settlements on Occupied Palestinian Territories—and Biden tepidly tried to take action against this, by sanctioning three settlers in the West Bank during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Trump's actions in Netanyahu's Israel reflected coordination and cooperation between two corrupt, authoritarian politicians. In the Israeli Prime Minister's recent trip, Trump warmly welcomed him and told reporters, "No President has ever done more for Israel than I have." He then went on to lambaste Harris for voicing her concerns for Palestinian civilians, saying, "I think her remarks were disrespectful."
Right after the October 7 Hamas attacks, Trump criticised Israel's intelligence failure, only to serve his election agenda, because ten days later, he went on to say that he would expand a freeze on refugees that he enacted during his presidency to cover people from the Palestinian territory of Gaza. Trump had singled third world countries, particularly where Islam is commonly practiced, in his immigration crackdown. He has now vowed to set new restrictions on immigration crackdowns, saying, "If you want to abolish the state of Israel, you're disqualified."
In an interview with Aljazeera, Palestinians expressed their belief that Trump would exacerbate their suffering, and he's also said in the debate with Biden, that the Israelis need to "finish the job." Fathmi Nimr, a Palestinian political analyst, told Aljazeera that a "major shift" in US policy under Harris is unlikely however. The only change, some believed, would be that she could be tougher on Netanyahu, whom many accuse of prolonging the war to remain in power in a country where the majority of the people want him gone.
The fact that the "will Trump be better" question is even being asked stems from a concept that's been going around for quite some time, from January, when Senator J.D.Vance—now Trump's running mate—had claimed that Trump's legacy was that he "started no wars." And it's been working, as the anti-war left and just anti-war people all over the world, who've been live-streaming mass murder, have said the same on social media. But Trump's chaotic presidency and xenophobic foreign policy seems to have been memory-holed. Under Trump, the civilian deaths in Afghanistan skyrocketed. He widely supported the Saudi-led war against Yemen, he started the trade war with China among other inflammatory circumstances he had created. During the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of George Floyd, as police fired tear gas onto the protesters, Trump deployed National Guard troops on the streets of Washington DC. If he had reacted with military force in the BLM movement, then would he not have done the same—if not worse—during the pro-Palestine student encampments that shook the nation this year?
It's true that Trump has never hidden behind the facade of "human rights" like Democrats, and maybe he deserves credit for being straightforwardly horrible. Israeli Ministers like the extremist Ben Gvir have expressed they prefer Trump, saying, "Instead of giving his full backing, Biden is busy with humanitarian aid. If Trump was in power, it would be different." Since Trump is the leader of choice of far-right Israelis who want to ultimately "purge" Palestinians not only out of Gaza, but also the West Bank, the answer to the question of who will "better," should be a no-brainer.
Progressives in the US, who advocate for an end to the genocide against Palestinians, need to unfortunately settle for the more stable candidate who will not repress citizens' demands with military force—the one who has more chances of positively reacting to it or taking it into consideration. There is a sentiment that "none of them will be better," but what's missing there, is the possibility that one may be worse. Though one cannot say it with full guarantee, Harris can deviate from the unilateralist and militarist US foreign policy, where the US weapons industry proliferates at the cost of the violence unleashed onto everyone around the world. There could at least be a starting point with Kamala Harris, whereas with Donald Trump, there definitely won't be.
Views expressed in this article are the authors' own.
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