Toward the end of the seemingly unending presidential campaign, vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, gave an interview to Arab American News, based in Michigan It was the standard local news interview candidates do hundreds, if not thousands of times, pitched to the interests of the local community and offering the candidate as the means to fulfill them. So there was little surprising in what Harris said. Most of it was formulaic, some of it was reassuring, but overall it was disappointing, if not unexpected.
Here was the most comforting passage in the interview:
Joe and I will uphold that same commitment to immigrants if we win the White House. On day one, we will rescind the un-American Muslim travel and refugee bans and bring an end to the outrageous and immoral family separation policy. We will also raise the annual refugee admissions target to 125,000; protect Dreamers and their families and reverse the public charge rule so we can make sure that permanent resident status isn’t contingent on household income. And we will protect civil rights and root out systemic racism across our society, confronting discriminatory policies that target Arab Americans and cast entire communities under suspicion.
But even as she proclaims the Biden administration goal of rolling back the absolute worst of the Trump era attacks on immigrants in general, and Muslim-Americans in particular, she ends by offering bromide rather than substance. How does she intend to “root out systemic racism across our society” when the Black Lives Matter movement, which Biden has largely ignored or rejected (saying No to defunding police), has shown how deeply embedded racism and racial violence is in our country?
In this passage, specifically addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict, she does offer reassurance that some of the worst excesses of the Trump administration will be reversed, but she ends by repeating the same hoary cliches offered by every president (except Trump) over the past four decades:
Joe and I also believe in the worth and value of every Palestinian and every Israeli and we will work to ensure that Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity and democracy. We are committed to a two-state solution, and we will oppose any unilateral steps that undermine that goal. We will also oppose annexation and settlement expansion. And we will take immediate steps to restore economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people, address the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, reopen the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem and work to reopen the PLO mission in Washington.
Great, they’re going to “work to reopen” the PLO mission (what does that even mean?). They’re going to resume the beggary by which Palestine has to rely on international handouts in order to maintain an economy straitjacketed by Israeli apartheid and Occupation. I suppose its better than Trump’s cut-off of UNWRA and his elimination of support for the PA: but not by much since it doesn’t offer anything new.
But that two-state reference is just so old. And Democrats repeat it like a mantra, when it has lost any value or meaning in the context of Israeli rejectionism and U.S. refusal to put the screws to Israel for refusing to agree to such a solution. Oh and so great that Biden will “oppose annexation and settlement expansion.” Again, these are meaningless bromides repeated for the benefit of some mythical pro-Israel voter who’s as gullible as the Biden team is on the subject.
Israel has essentially ignored U.S. protests over these same issues and proceeded on its merry way toward the very outcome we claim to oppose. Israel may not, under Biden, say it is implementing annexation, but its policies accomplish this de facto. U.S. opposition means nothing to the Israelis largely because we refuse to crack the whip. And what Harris’s bromides prove more than anything is that her boss won’t do so during his presidency.
We shouldn’t be surprised at that. Biden is no visionary when it comes to Israel-Palestine. He doesn’t offer any new thinking on the subject. And it will not be among his priorities (which will be COVID, the economy, and climate change). Why would it? Israel is ruled by Judeo-supremacists, impervious to reason or compromise. Why would he waste precious political capital in the thankless task of dragging Israel to the negotiating table, when it believes there is nothing to negotiate except the liquidation of the Palestinian people?
About the only good thing that can be said for the Biden administration’s approach is that it will resist some of the worst proposals Israel or U.S. Intelligence might entertain. It will reject the idea of annexation. It will reject the idea of attacking Iran. It will probably not assassinate Iranian generals as it did IRG commander Qasem Soleimani. There is something to be said for restraint when others are hell-bent on provoking mayhem.
Though Harris didn’t mention Iran (there are few Iranian-Americans living in the Detroit-area), it is reassuring that Biden has promised a return to the Obama-era JCPOA nuclear agreement. But again, this is merely a return to what was once the status quo. It doesn’t advance things in a progressive direction. It merely returns things to a more or less even keel. As a transition from absolute dysfunction, this is commendable. But the Middle East remains a powder-keg that could be lit by the least overstep from the Sunni Gulf states or the Shia-Iran-Hezbollah axis. Does Biden have a vision for addressing these broader issues? I doubt it.
That’s why it is critical to support the progressive wing of the Party, which has come in for its share of blame for the Democratic debacle in which 8 House members lost their seats to Republicans. The Squad, Bernie Sanders and their allies represent the future of this Party. It they don’t, then the Party has no future except as a slightly more decent version of the GOP.
As Joe Biden famously quipped, back in 2008, “It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man”
But the Herculean task he and Obama faced in 2008-2009, is dwarfed in comparison with what Biden and V.P. Harris have to do, i.e., defeat Covid 19, restore integrity to government, get the economy back on track, heal a horribly divided America, restore our standing with the international community, etc.
Biden and Harris will have to do all this while also dealing with a rabid Republican wing egged on by a wounded President Trump, who, BTW, isn’t going ‘quietly into the night’.
Things will be getting a lot worse for America, before Biden can decisively begin steering the ship of State.
Regardless of who the future Secretary of State is (Rice?), the Israelis and the Palestinians are going to both have to take a ticket and patiently wait for their turn.
@ Wunsch: Actually not. The 2008 Great Recession was the greatest economic crisis to strike America since the Great Depression. It took enormous effort and legislative cooperation to end it.
So the crises Biden faces are akin to that, though he does face more crises in total than Obama did in 2008.
Israelis and Palestinians won’t even get a ticket. They’re out in the cold. Biden will make a motion and appear as if he’s engaged in the issue. But he won’t be.
The Palestinians of course would love to see movement. But the Israelis want nothing at all to happen. And Biden doesn’t have the moxie to oppose Israeli intransigence.
how do you expect any nation to be able negotiate with the US? We have shown the world that our agreements and treaties are worthless when the administration changes. Eight years the the longest possible guarantee of American commitment. Now, all Trump’s treaties and agreements (for whatever they are worth) will be nullified by Biden. After Trump nullified all of his predecessors’ executive actions.
Unseated president Trump just fired Mark Esper 😡
I agree with your surmise on Harris with her dismal outdated views as many other Vice-Presidents, including Joe, have completely disregarded Israel’s apartheid and the imprisonment walling with extreme oppression of all non-Zionist Jewish Israelis. ” When will we ever learn? ” ” Wake the flock up! ” As the Divided States of America’s governments of the duopoly over these few decades have done with Palestine is throw it a bone with a few pennies on the dollar while giving the terrorist Zionist Israeli regimes with its militarism plenty of free American billions of dollars. No change have I seen in my lifetime nor do I expect it to change.
“Wunsch: Actually not. The 2008 Great Recession was the greatest economic crisis to strike America since the Great Depression. It took enormous effort and legislative cooperation to end it.”
It does not seem to me that the printing of ‘fiat money’ was of any great effort. Forming a ‘cabal[a word I personally despise’] was about all they had to do in conjunction with deciding who will take the fall.
After all money today is only paper which holds
up because people believe in it.
I would not expect Harris to have said anything controversial prior to assuming power. I think we do not know what she would do or how she would try to push Biden who has his own views and has probably heard Sanders views on the I-P situation as well. Their plate if full without this and there is a collective exhaustion about trying to solve it, leaving the trajectory to complete itself towards one state with half the people living there not citizens, either with no rights under military rule or with unequal rights. This is not sustainable. We should of course react a lot more equitably than we have in the past, moving away from unconditional support of Israel. Good luck with that. We should though affirm the international law that Trump defied. We should also move the US embassy operations back to Tel Aviv.
Elections have consequences. Already it’s clear to the parties and the international community that the US, like any other country, cannot be counted upon any more than any other country with elections, to hold onto all agreements, policies, deals made by the executive branch alone or even for that matter government branches in power that can pass laws.
I need to add, we should, I hope, stop sending weapons to the Middle East.