Are Biden and Harris playing good cop bad cop with Israel? - opinion

Over the past week or so, conversations have taken place between members of US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team and staffers who advise Vice President Kamala Harris regarding relations with Israel and the current conflict in the Middle East.

Such conversations are commonplace enough, but after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week, and especially his meeting with Harris, some of the president’s people felt the need to huddle with the vice president’s team on the issues involved.

Last week’s US political drama, when Biden announced his withdrawal from the race for reelection and instead put his support behind Harris, is most of all an American internal matter; however it clearly has ramifications for Israel.

Since October 7, the president has maintained an image as Israel’s strongest ally on the world stage in the war against Hamas, while Harris has used her podium to counterbalance Israel’s security needs with protecting Palestinians in Gaza.

Biden aides insisted that there was no contradiction; the president was also clearly concerned with the welfare of innocent Palestinians, and Harris also viewed Israel as an ally.

The most overused phrase was “good cop/bad cop.” Biden confidants conceded that it served the president’s purposes. Even as he was working closely militarily with Israel in its war against Hamas, his vice president was reassuring the critics that the administration hears them and is on top of the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

As long as Biden-Harris was considered one unit, it worked relatively well. The president and vice president still view themselves as a team running the country, say aides, but her new title, “presumptive Democratic presidential nominee,” gives her comments greater weight as someone who, on January 20, could herself be the president. She is no longer just a counterweight.

There was a stark contrast between the optics of the Biden-Netanyahu meeting and the Harris-Netanyahu encounter, just a couple of hours apart last Thursday; smiles at the former, at least to the cameras, and a quick cold handshake at the latter.

It was, however, the words of the vice president in her statement after the meeting with the Israeli prime minister that made some of Biden’s advisers think that the time was right for a chat with Harris, or at least her staff. A Biden aide and a Harris aide with whom I spoke this week say they were both involved in consultations but would not say who else participated.

At the beginning of her statement after meeting Netanyahu, Harris clearly stated that “Hamas triggered this war when it massacred 1,200 innocent people, including 44 Americans. Hamas has committed horrific acts of sexual violence and took 250 hostages.”

However, according to a Biden aide, there was “too much later in the statement that doesn’t address that Hamas remains an obstacle even now toward ensuring that humanitarian aid reaches the civilian Palestinian population and that Hamas is to blame not only for the deaths of Israelis but also of Palestinians.”

The Biden aide continued: “Listen, she [Harris] is not coming in from the outside. As vice president, she knows what’s been going on, and we’re not telling her how to run her campaign. 

Still, we talked with the vice president’s people this week about how we’ve promoted a victory over Hamas, ensuring that Hamas does not continue to control the Gaza Strip; how our administration has stressed the need to discuss who will rule once the war is over, which is really what ultimately will help the Palestinian people. I’m not sure that point came out clearly in her statement.”

The Biden aide added: “When you speak in such a broad way, you actually fall into the trap of empowering Hamas. She might have been understood as saying that Israel and Hamas are equally to blame for the lack of a ceasefire and hostage deal, and you definitely don’t want to be relaying that message.”

In general, he said, “there is too little discussion, even in the international community, of the connection between helping the Palestinian people and ridding them of the influence of the terrorists who pervade their lives and teach them to want to destroy Israel. We were able to gather a multinational alliance when it involved a massive Iranian attack against Israel in April. A number of countries were willing to help because of the regional aspect of an attack by Iran. However, Hamas is also Iran, and Tehran continues to sabotage the lives of Palestinians.”

With that, the Biden and Harris teams share concerns that Netanyahu has not always been drawing the correct balance between fighting in Gaza and working to free the hostages. The president and his people have also spoken with frustration in the past over the prime minister’s insistence on putting off talks about the future of Gaza, although, they say, there is movement on that issue.

Biden, Harris, and Senator Charles Schumer have led the way in classifying Netanyahu and members of his government as a problem, even as they insist that they strongly support Israel. 

The fact that the prime minister was visiting Washington during the very first week of Harris’s presidential campaign posed a great challenge to the vice president, and a couple of different sources in the US capital say that, as one source put it, “she might have gone too far with her body language at the photo-op with Netanyahu, indicating that she was worried she’d be losing votes in November with this handshake.”

When he was still a candidate for reelection, Biden felt the pressures mounting against him for his support of Israel. He was called “Genocide Joe” at protests, and a sizable number of Democrats preferred voting “uncommitted” instead of supporting him during presidential primaries, with the Gaza war given as a reason by many as to why they did.

The rhetoric is sharp on the streets of many US cities, with supposedly pro-Palestinian slogans chanted that are actually pro-Hamas. Some American officials maintain that Harris’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are shared “among the Israeli population; it doesn’t make her anti-Israel.” Others say that now she is in the “unenviable position of trying to win a presidential election at a crazy time,” but that once in office, “she would work closely with Israel.”

On Tuesday, after Israel killed Hezbollah’s most senior military commander, Fuad Shukr, Harris told reporters, “I unequivocally support Israel’s right to remain secure... Yes, it has a right to defend itself against a terrorist organization, which is exactly what Hezbollah is.” She then added that there was still a need to work on a diplomatic solution.

In her statement last week after meeting Netanyahu, Harris said, “I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.” 

A diplomatic correspondent on Kan 11 television suggested that her more recent comments, perhaps her nuance, seemed at least a bit more sympathetic, and he suggested that perhaps advisers had spoken to her since last week.

Indeed, they had. Now, all eyes will be on how she proceeds.

The writer is the op-ed editor of The Jerusalem Post.