The US presidential race has been thrown wide open
Joe Biden will be remembered as a landmark US president, having defeated Donald Trump in 2020 and done some good works (alongside some failings). He will also be remembered as a positive force in America’s relationship with Israel. That is not everyone’s major concern right now, and it shouldn’t be by a stretch, but it was the focus of a discussion I participated in today on I24 News, and I think it is interesting.
Biden, as a member of the generation that came of age in the years immediately after World War II and the establishment of Israel, is a friend of the version of Israel that dominated the discourse in those years: A plucky people, central to the Judeo-Christian tradition, that arose as the Pheonix from the ashes of the Holocaust and laid a marker in the sand, not just for the Jewish birthright in the Holy Land but also as a vanguard of Western civilization.
Biden not only became the only US president to visit Israel during wartime – last October – but also, a little over a year before, visited Israel and declared himself “a Zionist” in an era in which the word, via progressive gaslighting fueled by DBS talking points, has become a slur in much of the West.
Even if Biden held up some munitions to Israel in recent months, amid disagreements over the war in Gaza, the fact is that the administration mostly enabled Israel’s hugely unpopular effort to remove Hamas from Gaza despite the huge cost in the lives of Gaza civilians, among whom Hamas is embedded and whose lives Hamas is knowingly and even giddily sacrificing.
Moreover, the Biden administration has made mighty efforts since Oct. 7 to organize for Israel an exit plan from the war it launched in reaction to the Hamas invasion from Gaza of Oct. 7, which led to the massacre of some 1,200 people in Israel and the kidnapping of about 250, about half of whom (deal or alive) remain in Gaza.
Biden’s plan would involve Israel agreeing to restore some version of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, entering talks (which could last forever) on Palestinian statehood – and receiving in return an alliance with not just Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations but also the West, up to and potentially including NATO, arrayed against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If Israel’s government were rational, it would embrace this plan with extreme prejudice, and even take some risks and make some sacrifices to bring it about. That is because Iran is the head of the snake that has surrounded Israel on all sides with Iranian proxy militias dedicated to its destructions – from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north to Yemen’s fanatical Houthis from the south to Iraqi rogue militias from the east.
All of this cannot be tolerated, and Israel should not be left to deal alone with the lunacy of failed states like Lebanon, Yemen and even Iraq allowing Iranian-proxy militias to attack it with immunity.
Biden’s plan is a very reasonable response to this challenge. The Netanyahu government’s indifference to it is a result of the extortionary power that far right parties which prefer an occupation and colonization of Gaza have on the prime minister – and this approaches a crime against the Zionist enterprise.
I don’t think this is a high-probability scenario, but it is at least possible that Biden will be freed, in his lame-duck status, to try to push this project forward with some brutality. It could be interesting.
But there are also other possibilities, depending on what happens with the project of replacing Biden. The easiest thing for the Democrats will be to rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris. That would avoid a messy competition for Biden’s nominee slot – and it would also prevent a helpful competition.
Either way, my assessment is that this is how it will go. Harris’ poll numbers – while unimpressive – are not bad enough to compel more risk-taking. As of Sunday night, that is very much how things were looking – including because of the endorsement Harris received from Pennsylvanian Gov. Josh Shapiro. Harris will speak of having to “earn” the nomination, but the reality is that the Democrats want a coronation so they can focus on Trump.
The trick will be to make that not be unpopular. If that is how it goes, the actual competition will then be for the vice presidential slot. Shapiro could be a candidate; a Jewish VP nominee is not unprecedented (remember Joe Lieberman in 2000), but Shapiro is important because his state is a must-win for the Democratic candidate.
Another possible VP option is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She would bring perhaps a boost in the state in which she is governor, Michigan – and she would create an electrifying all-female ticket that might maximize the impact of the Republicans’ vulnerability on the abortion issue (and their shameful role in scuttling the Equal Rights Amendment).
The third option, I assess, is California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He brings a lot of negatives: he like Harris is from California, and that state is red meat to the Republican talking points on how the largest state in the nation is a progressive hellhole where crime is somehow tolerated. But on the other hand he’s tall and presidential-seeming, with his gray hair and moderate pitch of voice, and he is eloquent and he is not a woman.
The pollsters will be working overtime to figure out who maximizes the chances of beating Trump. Another issue that is extremely inelegant came up already Sunday in a tweet from Republican VP nominee JD Vance, who asked why Biden doesn’t resign the presidency. After all, if he is unfit to run, is he fit to serve? This probably won’t work for Vance, but if it does the Republicans may regret it: Harris would be more formidable as the incumbent president.
Whatever happens, the exit of Biden will be a changing of the guard. All the Democratic politicians I mentioned above are reasonably pro-Israel – and of course all of them oppose the policies of right-wing Israel, but politely and moderately so.
I do not believe that Harris is some sort of closet-DBS progressive, as some elements in the Israeli and Jewish right will suggest. She is a centrist and a former prosecutor and her husband is Jewish. She will support Israel, as would the others, and as American public opinion in fact demands. She wants to succeed and is ambitious. I would not be surprised – despite her less-than-stellar term as VP, to dismantle the 78-year-old Trump in a debate.
But will she love Israel? Will she or the others manifest the emotional and visceral connection that Biden does? I think not. That ship has sailed.
