No Professor Rosensaft, Kamala Harris is Hardly the ‘Pro-Jewish’ Candidate

It is often said that the Roman destruction of ancient Israel resulted from factionalism and infighting among the Jewish defenders of Jerusalem. That painful legacy casts a long shadow over Jewish history, and it explains why I regret writing this essay. The Jewish world is besieged now – on both the military and propaganda battlefields – and unity is critically needed against those who, per the Passover Haggadah, “in every generation . . . rise up to destroy us.”

But I do choose to write, in order to address a prominent voice of Jewish factionalism, one that has displayed a demeaning intolerance toward fellow Jews who do not share his views. I speak of Menachem Rosensaft, the distinguished former law professor and general counsel to the World Jewish Congress.

This past week Prof. Rosensaft published in these pages a scathing denunciation of the accomplished Jewish columnist and author Melanie Phillips. Per Prof. Rosensaft, Phillips’s crime was to have cited an abundance of evidence indicating that U.S. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her team would put the Jewish people and Israel at greater risk than they already face.

Full disclosure: I happen to agree with Phillips on that point. Which apparently means, per Prof. Rosensaft’s rhetoric, that I too must be a deemed a “reactionary” and a “zealot,” the kind of person who “worships seemingly breathlessly at the feet of Donald Trump [and] Benjamin Netanyahu,” and who harbors an “apocalyptic . . . quasi-fascist notion that extreme . . . ultranationalism is the only viable option.”

Well, I reject that categorization – not just as to myself, but also as regards Melanie Phillips, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and – Yes, I’ll say it – ex-President and now Presidential candidate Donald Trump. To be clear: I have my concerns with some members of PM Netanyahu’s cabinet, and I condemn the rhetoric of personal insult that Pres. Trump often indulges – although as Prof. Rosensaft’s column sadly demonstrates, Pres. Trump has no monopoly on that vice.

The most disappointing aspect of Prof. Rosensaft’s column is its sheer intolerance for those who, like Melanie Phillips, dissent from his favorable view of candidate Harris’s policy agenda, and who fear its predictably harmful impacts for both Jews and Israel. For there is an abundance of incontestable facts that cast grave doubts on Rosensaft’s sanguine view of Harris. We can disagree about their significance, but such facts cannot be wished away by ad hominem slurs like “reactionary,” “quasi-fascist,” and the like.

In particular, Harris and her team have embraced alarming policy positions in three critical areas of risk for Israel and the Jewish people: in the public narrative of Israeli self-defense; on geopolitical issues critical to Israel’s survival; and in America’s K-12 curricula concerning Jews and Israel.

On the public narrative front, Harris herself has made two grave errors in discussing Israel’s defensive war against Hamas’s genocidal atrocities. First, she has repeatedly recycled the UN’s and Hamas’s outright lies that “people in Gaza ‘are starving,’” and she has recklessly scolded Israel as needing to “significantly increase the flow of aid” there. In fact, the well documented reality is the opposite of Harris’s libels: Israel’s “food shipments to Gaza are enough to feed the enclave’s entire population,” and “the nutritional content of the aid exceeds the internationally accepted . . . guidelines for humanitarian efforts.”

Food shortages in Gaza, if any, are entirely the fault of Hamas’s well-documented hoarding of supplies for its own terror cadres, and of Hamas’s literally having shot at Gazans who approach food trucks to feed their families. Harris easily could and should know those facts – and if she does not, that signifies profound incompetence.

Second, in response to recent demands by the anti-Israel “Uncommitted movement,” Harris did indeed express “an openness to a meeting with the Uncommitted leaders to discuss an arms embargo” on Israel. True, Harris’s national security advisor Phillip Gordon later walked back the comment. But that Harris would even say such a thing amid Israel’s multi-front war of survival against heavily armed Iranian terror armies raises serious questions, especially given her role as Vice-President in an administration that just recently imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel.

Both of those public misstatements dangerously corrode Israel’s ability to defend itself. They help legitimize the vicious and false global propaganda war against Israel’s existence; and they incentivize Israel’s existential enemies across the Middle East, by telegraphing doubts about America’s future support for Israel’s survival.

On the geopolitical front, Harris’s core national security team has made clear that they embrace the dangerous Obama-Biden policy of appeasing both Iran and the Palestinian terror factions, and that they favor re-opening those entities’ access to billions of dollars of sanction-blocked funds – yet without requiring any of them to end their extensive campaigns of terror.

Specifically, Harris’s chief National Security Advisor, Phillip Gordon, has repeatedly called for easing and dropping sanctions against Iran, and publicly opposed the Trump administration’s killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s terror campaigns across the Middle East.

Harris’s recently-appointed director of “Jewish outreach,” Ilan Goldenberg, has similarly opposed American sanctions on Iran; opposed the U.S. defunding of UNRWA, whose Gazan schools indoctrinate children in Jew hatred and terror worship, and provide cover for Hamas weapon stockpiles; opposed the Taylor Force Act, which conditions U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority on the latter’s ending its practice of paying reward pensions to terrorists who murder Jews (which go up for each additional Jew killed); and yet helped draft and impose the Biden administration’s sanctions on Israelis accused of violence on the West Bank.

Both Gordon and Goldenberg also supported the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which lacked any effective monitoring/enforcement mechanism, and explicitly allowed Iran to develop nuclear weapons after ten years.

The central danger here resides in the fact that Harris’s national security team uniformly opposes sanctions against Iran, against the Palestinian Authority, and against UNRWA – all of which remain deeply invested in never-ending campaigns of terror targeting Israel. In stark contrast, the Trump administration heavily sanctioned all those entities, which correlated with significantly fewer terror attacks against Israel. By the end of Trump’s presidency, Iran’s oil export income was greatly reduced, and its foreign exchange reserves had plummeted. But then Biden-Harris – assisted by Gordon and Goldenberg – lifted those sanctions, yielding Iran an extra $100 billion it would not otherwise have had.

In sum, Harris’s national security team appears fully committed to protecting the money flow to Iran, to UNRWA, and to the Palestinian Authority, while refusing to impose any consequence for their ruthless campaigns of terror against Israel. But per Prof. Rosensaft, apparently this is just what good friends of Israel do.

Finally, on the K-12 education front, team Harris again presents great risks for Jews and Israel. Though little reported, Harris’s Vice-President Tim Walz just last year signed into law, a mandate that all Minnesota public and charter schools teach something known as the “Liberated Ethnic Studies Curriculum” (LESC). In its promoters’ own words, the LESC “[c]ritically examines global white supremacy, US imperialism and colonialism,” and teaches “practices of organizing for resistance and liberation against racism, white supremacy and other forms of oppression.” This Marxist program includes an explicitly anti-Zionist agenda, which:

portray[s] Israel as a racist, white supremacist colonizing project that deprives the true indigenous people of the land of their right to self-determination. It encourages teachers and students to give prominence to Palestinian victimhood and to establish a connection between the Palestinians and marginalized populations in the United States.

LESC also explicitly promotes the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, describing it as “a global social movement that . . . aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions . . . [i]nspired by tactics employed during the South African anti-apartheid movement . . . .”

Hence absent a clarification from the Harris-Walz presidential ticket, one can only infer that this antisemitic curriculum is what the Harris-Walz team favors for K-12 schools across America. Namely, a curriculum falsely teaching students throughout the country that Israel is an apartheid state, and that it deserves to be dismantled and replaced by a Palestinian state.

Taken together, these many expressed issue positions of the Harris-Walz team render incomprehensible Prof. Rosensaft’s claim that American Jewish voters have no logical choice but to enthusiastically embrace and support that Presidential ticket. Even more incomprehensible is his denouncing as quasi-fascist zealots, those who question his diktat that the Harris-Walz ticket is “pro-Jewish.”

I would respectfully urge Prof. Rosensaft to reconsider those claims – and should he still disagree, that he do so without the ad hominem epithets. It is neither zealotry nor “quasi-fascist” to make the following well-documented observation: The Jewish people are ill-served by leaders who choose to publicly scold Israel with false accusations, to appease and free up funds for Iranian and Palestinian terrorism, and to mandate that American schoolchildren be taught that Israel is an illegitimate, racist, and apartheid colonizing power.