I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a few Democratic aides, as well as one sitting Democratic senator, have gone a bit around the bend.
“I certainly worry that Prime Minister Netanyahu is watching the American election as he makes decisions about his military campaigns in the north and in Gaza,” Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a potential secretary of state in a Kamala Harris administration, said on CNN last week.
The Hill reports that “a senior Senate Democratic aide backed Murphy’s claim” by directing the reporter’s attention specifically to South Lebanon and saying: “Look at everything that’s been happening. One hundred percent interference into domestic politics. He’s done it his entire career.”
Let’s zoom out for a moment. We are observing the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a massive regional war with an unprecedentedly bloody invasion of Israel. Hamas refuses to surrender or to return the hostages it took, so the war continues. We’ve also since learned that Hezbollah had similar plans in the works up north, so Israel undertook the most impressive pinpoint strikes on terrorists in the history of warfare to hamstring the Iranian proxy’s ability to carry out its planned mass murder of civilians.
If you read the preceding paragraph and said “sounds like Israel’s meddling in U.S. elections,” you should probably neither be in the Senate nor be entrusted to handle heavy machinery.
I would also add that Murphy and the brave anonymous Democratic aides quoted by the Hill are not making a very strong case for Harris if their argument boils down to: The more our allies defeat the bad guys and eliminate terrorists with American blood on their hands, the worse it is for Harris’s campaign.
Of course, that isn’t actually true. Harris has not squandered her lead in the polls as Israel has killed bad guys. There is no reverse-correlation because, excluding this country’s elite institutions of higher education, Americans don’t like terrorists and they do like Israel.
Yet there is reason to worry that Harris doesn’t think Chris Murphy is so crazy.
“Do we have a real close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?” CBS’s Bill Whitaker asked the vice president.
“With all due respect,” Harris responded, “the better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
In fact, with all due respect, it is not the better question. Harris is vying to be the head of the United States government and Netanyahu is the head of the Israeli government and so Whitaker had gotten the question right on the first try.
For his part, President Biden is open to the possibility that Netanyahu is meddling in U.S. domestic politics by having his own country survive. “Do you have any worries that Netanyahu may be trying to influence the election and that’s why he has not agreed to a diplomatic solution?” the president was asked at a recent press conference. His answer: “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know, but I’m not counting on that.”
Whatever that means.
Perhaps I’m being too dismissive and the plot actually goes deeper than even Chris Murphy and other Democrats imagine. We all know David Ben-Gurion played political hardball as well as anybody. Maybe he declared the independence of the state of Israel 76 years ago knowing this day would come—that a series of events over decades would lead to Kamala Harris usurping Joe Biden’s nomination and felt he had a responsibility to found Israel and set in motion a plan to exacerbate Harris’s weakness with white working-class voters. Or something. So what if Harris wasn’t even born yet? Ben-Gurion always saw a few moves ahead.
The alternative to this scenario is that Chris Murphy needs to grow up and Kamala Harris needs to start meeting the seriousness of the moment. I don’t know which is more realistic.