Appeasing anti-Zionist bigots – that’s what cost Kamala the election

The problem with Harris was that her sense of ‘centre’ was blown gruesomely off course by a rabid, obsessed bloc of anti-Israel progressives

It used to be that when Jews complained about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, eyes rolled. We were boring on about a niche issue! Nobody cared!
Sometimes even I wondered if, nearly 80 years on from Hitler, we were exaggerating our own importance, the degree of enmity facing us, and its seriousness. I shouldn’t have. The year since October 7 has once again shown loud and clear that far from niche, we are so important that the intensity of beliefs about us – which have repeatedly redrawn the world – are doing so again.
American history has just been turned on its head because of the Jews. Trying – and ultimately failing – to appease the Muslim and progressive “voices” who demand an abandoned, traduced and fatally vulnerable Israel, led Kamala Harris to shun the popular, Jewish and pro-Israel governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.
Grotesquely dubbed “Genocide Josh” by the loony Lefties to whom Harris gave such power, Shapiro was wildly popular, effective, and would have helped her clinch the deal in the all-important state. Shapiro’s appeal went far beyond the Jewish vote. In shunning him, she sent such a clear message to Jews throughout the country that the traditionally staunch Democratic bloc ended up voting Republican in greater numbers than they have since Reagan – for someone many of them started off abhorring.
Jews in and of themselves can’t swing an American vote for president, but the issues that swirl around them can. Tim Walz with his “ceasefire now” stance did little to soothe those who had spent the year looking aghast at the anti-Zionist rallies, campaigns, encampments, sit-ins and die-ins on their streets and the college campuses attended by their children – and wondering what on earth had happened to America.
Nate Silver, the American statistician, said in choosing Walz over Shapiro, Harris “blew one big opportunity to tack to the centre”.
The problem with Harris was that her sense of “centre” was blown gruesomely off course by a rabid, obsessed bloc of anti-Israel progressives who insist that anything short of cutting Israel off from all trade, travel or assistance in war, and arresting Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defence minister, the painfully moral Yoav Gallant, for war crimes, was an endorsement of “genocide”.
To them, Harris and Walz were hardly better than Nazis themselves. Instead of telling these people where to get off, Harris was bothered by it.
In the modern Democrat style pioneered by Barack Obama, Joe Biden has consistently tarnished his support of America’s ally with pointless or counterproductive belittling, threats and condescension. With belief-beggaring malignity, someone in his administration actually leaked Israeli plans to de-activate Iranian nuclear sites. But to be fair, Biden has hung in there, entrenching his own ludicrous moniker of “genocide Joe”.
As she faced the future and fate of America and the free world, Harris could have done one better – and done so as a progressive and a liberal. She could have unapologetically spelt out her support for Israel, drawing it into a wider framework of American power against a potentially deadly cancer in the form of an anti-Western axis run by China, Iran and Russia.
She could have insisted that a good progressive ought to want the violent forces of misogyny, theocracy and homophobia pushed back as powerfully as possible. But instead, as Israeli flags were burnt on American streets, Harris paid lip service to mouth-frothing anti-Israel fantasists.
The final straw for many lifelong Democrats, Jews and others was Harris’s response to a protester who interrupted a campaign speech she was giving at the University of Wisconsin, demanding that she address “the genocide”.
Instead of correcting or rebutting him, she said: “It’s real. What he’s talking about is real” as he was led away. Given that it is very much not real, and a deliberate if mainstream perversion of what is going on drawn straight from the ancient dictionary of anti-Jewish tropes with direct and huge consequences for world stability, a potential president ought not to have said it was.
The surreal thing is that to most sane people, Harris lost because she catered to the hard Left – including in her attitude to Israel. But to the angry Lefties, from New York Times columnists to academics to anti-racist activists, her crime was being too Right-wing, measured exclusively by her failure to go far enough in promising to effectively punish Israel into oblivion.
Among elite progressives, this dynamic played out with a surreal flourish. An email from a formerly Right-wing friend announced that he wanted Harris punished for her Middle East policy. It took me a minute to realise he meant because she was not anti-Israel enough.
I know others whose support for Harris fell down simply because of this failure to promise to destroy Israel. It is mad. To these people, Israel is simply everything, despite their having no skin in the game.
Of course, as has now been widely pointed out, to ordinary American folk Israel is not everything. It’s just part of a package.
Regardless, Jews have once again proved world-shapingly important.
In being afraid to properly stand with Jewish state, Harris shunned the Jewish governor for running mate who might have got her on the right track – as well as delivering votes she needed.
Then on top of that she was punished by those galvanised by their obsessional demonisation of Israel. Distracted and misguided thus, she ended up turning off the very working people she was meant to appeal to.