Kamala Harris Should Not Have Snubbed Bibi

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When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, his fourth such speech, the new leader of the Democratic Party was missing. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was busy delivering an address to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority’s Grand Boulé in Indianapolis. 

In normal times, Harris’s snub of Bibi would be expected. Democrats still sting from Netanyahu’s campaign in 2015 against former president Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. When Netanyahu spoke before a joint session that year to make his case, many Democrats boycotted. Things have only gone downhill since then: Bibi’s relationship with President Joe Biden has been strained in recent months; Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Bibi from the House floor in March; the Squad, along with lots of left-wing activists and many Arab American groups, have decried Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.” 

But Harris effectively won her party’s nomination within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement Sunday that he would not seek reelection. In other words: she does not need to please the anti-Israel base of her party in order to win a primary.

Instead, what Harris needs to do is spend the precious 100 days before the election defining herself before the nation. Simply sitting behind the rostrum as the leader of the Jewish state delivered a stirring address about how his country’s enemies were also America’s would have neutralized the Trump campaign’s efforts to paint the vice president as a San Francisco socialist who is out of touch with everyday people. 

“Nobody knows where Kamala Harris stands on Israel,” former GOP foreign policy adviser Dan Senor told The Free Press. “She’s a blank slate. This was a high-profile opportunity to define herself on this issue, and she took a pass.” 

Meantime, roughly half of congressional Democrats proudly boycotted. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) attended with a sign that read “War Criminal.” Nancy Pelosi posted on X that Bibi’s speech was the “worst presentation of a foreign dignitary” to ever address Congress. 

One wonders if the former House speaker noticed what was happening outside. Half a mile from where the prime minister was speaking, radicals and Park Police clashed at Union Station as some vandals replaced the American flags with Palestinian ones. Earlier in the week, the Palestinian Youth Movement claimed credit for releasing crickets and maggots at the Watergate Hotel where Netanyahu and his team were staying. 

Kamala’s absence from the chaos has left her open to attacks. On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference, “Madam Vice President, you say you want to be the leader of the free world, and yet you can’t bring yourself to sit behind our most important and strategic ally in this moment.”

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on X @EliLake, and read his piece “Trump Did Everything Wrong. So Why Did It Work?”