Noah Rothman on Kamala Harris’s Views of Israel and the Middle East

Suddenly, Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic party’s candidate for president. She’s been in the public eye for much less time than Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and much less is known about her views on many subjects—including on the U.S.-Israel relationship or America’s posture in the Middle East.

For instance, as Israel’s war in Gaza ramped up earlier this year, Harris became an outspoken critic of it, and a champion of a ceasefire arrangement between Israel and Hamas on the grounds of humanitarian concern for Palestinian civilians. But it’s possible that these attitudes were a product of her role in the Biden administration, that she was assigned the role of bad cop to the president’s good cop.

So what does Harris really think about the subject? What role might her Jewish family members play in her views? How does she understand the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship? To answer those questions, host Jonathan Silver speaks here with Noah Rothman, a senior writer at National Review and the author of a recent essay there called “The Left Thinks It’s Getting an Anti-Israel Radical in Kamala Harris.” Together, the two also survey the wide coalition of the Democratic party—its elected officials, its voting base, its NGOs and operatives—and try to understand the pressures, the points of leverage, the incentives, and the political vulnerabilities to avoid on questions related to Israel.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.