Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania and a proud, religious Jew, is widely expected to be named as Kamala Harris’s running mate in the coming days. Some have speculated that a Shapiro vice-presidency can tell us much about a Harris administration’s orientation toward the Middle East. The war in Gaza – which will either still be bloodying the Strip by the time the next American president is sworn in, or else will have left wreckage the likes of which will demand prolonged, expensive international assistance – has been at the centre of the divide in the Democratic Party between establishment Democrats and progressives. The establishment, personified by President Joe Biden, has essentially maintained the same opinions and policy perspectives on Israel and Palestine for decades. Progressives believe that the status quo has changed and so must America’s policies: a country guilty of war crimes, they hector, should not receive billions of American dollars in aid.
Shapiro distinguishes himself aggressively from this latter bunch. He was quick and consistent in his condemnation of Hamas’s grotesque attack on Israel on 7 October, days after which he insisted during a local radio interview that it was time “to recognise what is so clearly wrong – the acts of Hamas – and what is right, and that is Israel, our key ally’s right to defend herself in the face of this barbarism”. These comments enraged the US’s Muslim community and in the face of their ire Shapiro acknowledged that Hamas does not represent all Palestinians and that “there are so many peace-loving Arabs and peace-loving people in that region, no question”. And, whereas he continued to express support for Israel’s activities in Gaza, he has also called the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “one of the worst leaders of all time,” and called for an “immediate two-state solution”. These comments did little to assuage the anger – critics were also freshly incensed after a 31-year-old college newspaper piece by Shapiro resurfaced, wherein he described Palestinians as “too battle-minded”.
Does all this indicate that a President Harris will be at least as pro-Israel as President Biden is? Of course not.
As America has recently had occasion to discover, vice-presidents’ world-views, for almost all of their tenure, matter not at all. This is the case often up until right at the very end of their term, at which point, sometimes quite suddenly and with gusto, they start to matter quite a lot. But only because it becomes possible that they will be the next president. Such was the case with Harris, a name that, until about two and a half weeks ago, rarely occurred in the same sentence as “Gaza” and “Jerusalem”. The reason for this is obvious: when it comes to foreign policy, particularly in the Biden administration, the only person in the executive branch whose opinion ultimately determines policy choices is the president.
The president does often, of course, confer with advisers while making decisions: no woman can be expected to know all that she would have to know about the things she will decide over the course of a presidency. There is a litany of government positions dedicated to offering the president advice and supplying information and context regarding urgent foreign policy issues: the national security adviser, the secretary of state, the secretary of defence, and the director of the CIA are just a few of those jockeying to influence the president and shape American foreign policy. Which of them actually succeeds depends in large part on which adviser the president most trusts, respects and likes.
But the vice-president is almost certainly not in the running. That was true of Vice-President Harris, and it would be true of a Vice-President Shapiro.
If Shapiro is selected to run as Harris’s running mate, it will be because the Harris campaign has decided that a Harris-Shapiro ticket is the most likely to win the election in November. Minds engineered to crunch numbers and analyse polls will have determined that Jewish voters are the voters about whom Harris should be most worried, not Muslim voters. This makes twisted, solid sense. Muslims know that a Trump presidency will be bad for Palestine. It was a testament to their fury at Biden that many Muslims and their progressive allies committed to not voting for him in the general election. But that same electorate knows well that Harris is not Biden, that the sins of the president are not to be visited upon his VP, and that she had nothing to do with Biden’s Israel policy.
This is all good news for progressive voters: they are free to vote Democrat so long as the one running has clean hands. Trump is in the wings and Trump is worse than Harris.
American Jews have given Harris’s team reason to believe that they do not feel this way. For reasons that boggle the mind, many Jewish voters have determined that Harris is anti-Semitic. How a sentient human being could come to that conclusion, especially while she is running against Donald Trump, is beyond comprehension. But if Shapiro is on the ticket, that will be why – not because Harris will depend on him to craft an Israel-Palestine policy, or even fly to the region to engage with diplomats on both sides while working towards either a ceasefire or a “day after” policy plan.
So who will be doing that? Which of her colleagues would Harris select as advisers who will be able to influence America’s role in the next phase of this blood-soaked saga? That is a question that cannot be answered with certainty until Harris, if she were to win in November, has stocked her cabinet. But it’s a safe bet that one of the people on that list would be Philip Gordon, the man currently serving as Vice-President Harris’s national security adviser. In this capacity, Gordon has already been sent to the region to represent the US at the Herzliya Conference, an annual summit held at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, the aim of which is: “taking stock of Israel’s national security across a wide range of dimensions”. In remarks made at the conference, Gordon urged Israel to end the war in Gaza in such a way that Israel is secure and that Palestinians have a “hopeful political horizon to freedom, security and an eventual state living side by side with Israel in peace” [emphasis mine]. This is no small thing considering that just a few weeks later Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Four years ago, Gordon published a book about his vision for Middle Eastern foreign policy, Losing the Long Game. It is worth reading in full: it will tell us a lot more about a Harris administration’s potential policies on Israel and Palestine than anything Josh Shapiro has ever written.
[See also: The hollow hype behind Kamala Harris’s campaign]
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