The Case for Kamala

Even despite Gaza.

It is one week until Election Day in the US. In many states, early voting is already underway. I hope you’re all casting your ballots or have plans to vote, because it really does matter.

Many leftists and progressives, though, are saying that they will refuse to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because of Harris’s role as vice president in an administration that has funded and supplied weapons to Israel for their ever-expanding war — in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, and on and on. Some Muslim and Arab voters who previously supported Democrats are now refusing to vote for them; some are publicly backing Trump, while others are abstaining or supporting Jill Stein.

Look: I’m not going to lecture anyone here. I understand that withholding one’s vote over an unconscionable war can be a legitimate expression of one’s most deeply-held morals. But I’m going to make the case that you should vote anyway — and vote for Kamala Harris.

As Rebecca Solnit put it, voting is not a valentine; it’s a chess move. A vote is not an endorsement of everything a candidate has ever done. In the US, it is a binary choice. If the Democratic candidate wins, the Republican candidate loses; if the Republican candidate wins, the Democratic candidate loses. There may be third parties, but in this particular setup and in this particular election, there are not actually third choices that stand any chance of ascending to power. Voting for one of them — say, perennial grifter Jill Stein — does not send a message so much as it increases the chances that the Republican Party wins and the Democratic Party moves right.

And what if the Republican Party wins? I’ve seen some people on social media argue that things couldn’t get worse, which strikes me as objectively insane. Things can always get worse. The worst things you can think of? They could have been worse. Trump has given no indication that he will do anything other than green light Israel’s actions — as well as Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and potential Chinese actions in Taiwan. Every single thing Trump and his team have said about Palestinians indicates that they see the group as subhuman — as terrorists from the time of toddlerhood, as Rudy Giuliani just put it at a Trump rally (“The Palestinians are taught to kill us at two-years old,” he said as he accused Harris of wanting to resettle Palestinian refugees in the US).

It’s worth noting here that during Trump’s first term, he cut the number of Muslim refugees resettled in the US by 91%. While more than 38,500 Muslim refugees were resettled in 2016, those numbers dropped to just 3,312 by 2018. The percentage of Christian refugees admitted also declined, but not nearly as precipitously: From 25,633 to 16,012.

Immigration is Trump’s top issue. He particularly dislikes immigrants from Muslim countries, as evidenced by his Muslim ban which, by the way, he can reinstate in another term. A Trump presidency would mean tens of thousands of would-be refugees stuck in camps and potentially confined to shorter, more brutal, more dangerous lives.

And for what? Trump will not be tougher on Israel. The thing to understand about Trump is that he truly does not care about most policy issues, and Israel-Palestine is on the Do Not Care list. On some issues — crime, immigration, the economy, prosecuting his perceived enemies — he’s invested and hands-on. With many others, he defers to those around him. On Israel, who do you think he’ll defer to?

Trump’s ambassador to Israel was David Friedman, a right-wing pro-settler lawyer (Friedman both believes illegal West Bank settlements are legitimate and has raised money for law-breaking settlers). He did not support a two-state solution and he ordered the State Department to not so much as second-guess Israel’s military and US funding of it. Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, a major provocation and a clear signal that his Israel policy comes from right-wing extremists who think Jews should control all of the land from the river to the sea.

When it comes to the protests against this war, Trump has also been quite clear that he will use maximal force. This is a guy who wanted to bring in the military to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters; he is not going to shrug off the kind of anti-Israel protests that roiled US college campuses last year and were a hugely galvanizing issue for the right. He has flat-out said that he will take steps to deport international students who participate in those protests.

There is much to criticize about how Democrats and college administrators handled the protests and the encampments. But a Harris/Walz administration will not round up foreign students studying in the US and deport them because it disapproves of their political views and political speech. A Trump administration absolutely will — or will at least try. And you can bet that any potential immigrant who is perceived as pro-Palestinian will be deemed terroristic and denied entry into the country.

A top Trump administration priority is taking over the FCC and using that agency’s power to crack down on media outlets the administration finds meddlesome and insufficiently supportive. What do you think that means for pro-Palestinian news outlets? For outlets that so much as cover the reality of this war? Even if the administration doesn’t go to extremes in every case, it only needs to make an example of a few media companies to see a chilling effect and news outlets complying with the authoritarian in advance. This is, unfortunately, a common outcome under authoritarian regimes, and it’s not always stated policy. Israel’s war is already becoming old news, despite it broadening out into several other countries in the region. A Trump administration media crackdown, or threat of a crackdown, creates pretty significant disincentives for journalists to cover the horrors of these wars with the depth and accuracy they demand. I think it makes it quite likely that pro-Palestinian voices will be even further smothered.

I think you have to be very foolish to believe that Trump will be any better on Israel / Palestine than Biden has been. I think if you’re listening to what Trump and those around him say, and if you look at what he did in his first term, there is ample evidence that he will be far worse.

But perhaps that isn’t enough; perhaps your argument is that a vote for a third party, or no vote at all, will send a message to Democrats that they need to move left. And while I like that idea and wish it were true, I have personally never seen it work in American politics. It has worked in primaries — see, e.g., 2016 Bernie voters pushing Hillary Clinton left, and in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protest movement pushing just about every Democratic candidate left. But in general elections, when the center-left candidate loses to the far-right candidate, the conclusion is never, “the Democrat should have moved further left.” The conclusion is that there are more conservative and moderate voters in the country than liberal and left ones, and if the liberal party wants to win, it needs to moderate. This indeed was the lesson of 2016 that manifested in 2020: Four years after that stunning loss, Democratic voters chose Joe Biden, the most conservative of the Democratic primary bench, as the candidate. Voters weren’t in love with Biden. They were largely thinking strategically, and had concluded that a moderate white guy was the only hope to get Trump out of office.

Reader, they were right. (For the record, I was a Warren supporter).

I would like to see the Democratic Party be a more progressive party. I am happy to see, for example, the party’s unapologetic embrace of abortion rights post-Dobbs. But the party gets more liberal when liberals win.

There are no benefits to Palestinians if Trump wins, and many greater potential costs. There are no benefits to the American political system if Trump wins — Democrats will not look at a Trump victory and conclude that the answer is a leftward shift.

And there are huge costs to just about everyone else: Undocumented immigrants and their families. Refugees. Women seeking abortions. International students. LGBT people generally and trans people in particular. The free press. The list goes on.

I personally don’t think the damage Trump can do is worth the virtually non-existent benefits of voting third party or not voting at all. I truly do understand feeling disgusted with Biden and Harris for their total cowardice when it comes to Israel. But I don’t think that sense of personal disgust, and the related desire to punish them in the voting booth, justifies all of the downstream effects that will come if Harris is not elected. And the fundamental reality is that if Harris is not elected — if enough people do not vote for Harris — then Donald Trump will be elected. And that will be the fault of the people who voted for Trump, but also of those who did not vote for Harris, and certainly of those who encouraged others not to vote for Harris. This is how elections work. There is just not a magical third option here where not voting for Harris but also not voting for Trump gets people who want to stop the shedding of Palestinian (and Lebanese and on and on) blood any closer to that aim.

(It should go without saying that voting for Trump almost certainly means more bloodshed and violence, and fewer safe havens, for Palestinians but also for millions of others around the world).

I’m a Bernie Sanders Democrat on the question of this war: I think any country would have defended itself in the aftermath of what Israel experienced on Oct. 7th, and I have very little time for those who argue Israel’s very existence is illegitimate or those who glorify the terroristic religious zealots of Hamas, just as I have very little time for those who deny Palestinians have a right to self-determination in their own state. But I also have eyes and can see that Israel is currently a right-wing authoritarian state waging a rage-campaign of vengeance and collective punishment against the people of Gaza. There are many architects of this war and soldiers carrying it out who seem to me plainly guilty of war crimes. It strikes me as obvious that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is desperate to keep his various wars going in an effort to save his own skin, and that he is the epitome of a dangerous narcissist who puts himself before his own nation (this should sound familiar to Americans). And while I do believe that Biden has had some very limited success in reining in Netanyahu’s worst impulses, I mean “limited” in the smallest sense — any reining-in has been a gentle tug of the bit, nothing close to what’s needed to stop this full-gallop violence.

I do believe Harris has even less respect for Netanyahu than Biden does (and Biden, it’s pretty clear, can’t stand the guy). I think Harris has been effectively pushed by the Democratic Party’s left flank, as well as the many moderates and even former conservatives, who have argued for the US to use its purse strings to change Israel’s behavior (when former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass is saying the Biden administration should take a tougher line with Israel, you know current Israeli government has lost the confidence of everyone in American political life save right-wing extremists). But it is also plainly true that the Biden administration has not done nearly enough to push Israel to end this horrific war, and that they have done far too much to support it. I am personally disgusted by how this administration has aided Israel’s prosecution of this war, which has not been proportionate or just. I think the purse for offensive weapons should be snapped shut until Israel changes its behavior.

I’m not an idiot: I don’t think a President Harris is going to do what I want when it comes to US support for Israel. But I know that Trump is definitely not going to do what I want. And I suspect he will take the status quo to new levels of horror.

If you also believe that’s true, I hope you’ll cast your ballot for Harris. You don’t have to be happy about it. But you do have to make a moral calculus: What are the real costs if Trump wins, to Palestinians and also to people the rest of the world over? How do those compare to the costs if Harris wins? If you do that math and still decide to sit it out or vote for someone who is not Harris — effectively decreasing her chance of taking office — well, that is certainly your right, and it may indeed feel quite righteous. But the real-world outcome is one you’re going to have to live with.

xx Jill