Kamala Harris mainly evaded the Israeli-Gaza conflict during her presidential campaign, largely because anything she said would invite harsh criticism from one segment of the diverse Democratic coalition. Now that Donald Trump is headed back to the Oval Office, how will America’s traditional support for Israel intensify or diminish?
Selective empathy
Medhi Hasan
In the dying days of 2023, MSNBC host Medhi Hasan informed his audience he was stepping down. Although Hasan refused to discuss the matter, it was soon apparent the network had given him an ultimatum: Stop talking about Palestine or you’re done.
“Context was a bad word,” one MSNBC colleague reported. “Empathy for Palestinians almost felt forbidden inside MSNBC.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists broke through the barrier separating Gaza and Israel, killed an estimated 1,139 people, then retreated to Gaza with 251 hostages. Two months later, any hint of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians was off the table. Anyone who offered critical historical context, as Hasan did, was considered complicit.
But context matters.
For decades now, Palestinians have been treated like second-class citizens even as Israeli settlements have drastically reduced Palestinian-controlled territory. In a recent interview, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ezra Klein agreed Israel was actively pursuing an apartheid policy. The first time Klein visited the West Bank, he said, it struck him that this is what the Jim Crow South must have felt like to African Americans.
Coates freely admits that, during the visit to Israel that he chronicles in his most recent book, The Message, he interviewed dozens of Palestinians but no Jewish residents. Pressed to account for this glaring imbalance, Coates said everything the media had told him about Israeli society turned out to be a lie. So, once he had learned the truth, “I probably was not compelled to have a conversation with people who I feel even now it was in their interest for me to get it wrong.”
Selective empathy is an almost universal reality for those living close to the action. In a Pew poll taken seven months after the Hamas raids, 37% of Israelis thought the military response in Gaza was “about right” and an additional 34% believed the assault “had not gone far enough”.
Appearing on “The Bulwark” podcast Hasan explained why he wasn’t telling Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to vote for Kamala Harris: “I know people who have lost not one, not two, not three, not 10, but 20, 30, 40 members of their family in Gaza to bombs supplied by the Biden-Harris administration.”
People living in that kind of grief, Hasan suggested, aren’t capable of universal empathy, nor should we expect them to be.
The Harris dilemma
Since the first FDR administration, unflinching support for Israel has been standard policy for both Democratic and Republican administrations. In 1962, John F. Kennedy described the bond between the United States and Israel as “really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.”
“Harris couldn’t place Gaza in historical context without breaking with established precedent.”
Harris couldn’t place Gaza in historical context without breaking with established precedent. A presidential campaign is no place for lectures on Israeli-Palestinian relations, and even the slightest attempt to establish context would have been denounced as pro-Palestinian. Even the appearance of a single Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention was considered risky.
Harris stuck to brief statements affirming Israel’s right to self-defense while expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza. Important questions went unaddressed. Does the right to self-defense justify the slaughter of innocents or the displacement of more than a million people? For Harris, these questions fell into the third-rail category — touch them and you die.
The Democratic candidate’s refusal to address the horror of Gaza lost her the support of Muslim Americans and the college-based pro-Palestinian segment of the Democratic base.
Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend the Abraham Accords signing ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sept. 15, 2020. Former President Donald Trump later lashed out with profanity at Benjamin Netanyahu for congratulating President Joe Biden on his victory in the 2020 election, an Israeli newspaper reported.. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
What should we expect from Trump?
It is frequently argued on the left and the Never-Trump right that the Republican candidate feels no empathy for anyone because he is a psychopath. While clinical assessments are dangerous, we should note that everything Trump has said and done over a period of decades is consistent with this diagnosis. If so, he is incapable of shame or empathy.
The shame deficit helps explain Trump’s remarkable resilience. A normal person who has been convicted of sexual assault and financial fraud while under indictment for a laundry list of additional felonies would slink off to a secluded spot and roll up into the fetal position. Being shameless, Trump can respond with bold confidence, expressions of grievance and promises of retribution.
Trump wields his inability to empathize like a Samurai sword. Being indifferent to the suffering, terror and fear experienced by Israelis, Gazans and American citizens, the once and future king is free to work an unspeakable tragedy to his own political advantage.
“The once and future king is free to work an unspeakable tragedy to his own political advantage.”
At the very least, Trump will maintain America’s traditional pro-Israel policy. We send $3.8 billion to Israel every year and, between October 2023 and October 2024, we transferred an additional $17.9 billion in military aid to supply Benjamin Netanyahu’s military escapades. In February 2024, the United States was the only member of the U.N. Security Council to veto a United Nations proposal for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
Joe Biden always has been a staunch ally of Israel, but this has not made his administration popular in Israel. A September survey revealed 54% of Israelis favored Trump in the U.S. election, with 24% supporting Harris, and the rest registering no preference. Trump claims to be “the most popular person in Israel” but feels abused by the American Jewish community. Israelis favor Trump’s full-throated endorsement to Biden’s reluctant largesse; American Jews do not.
For Trump’s MAGA base, his manifest lack of empathy always has been a selling point, and the outcome of the 2024 election suggests a slight majority of voters are, at the very least, willing to tolerate his unqualified embrace of the Netanyahu regime.
Curiously, the MAGA coalition contains both virulent antisemites and Christian Zionists, two groups that seem willing to live with logical contradiction so long as it gives them a seat at the table. But Christian Zionism is a church-based phenomenon while American antisemitism is far less institutionalized.
Unbounded support for Israel runs deep within Trump’s white evangelical base. Several conflicting eschatological visions battle for dominance within the white evangelical world, but there is general agreement that God’s favor for biblical Israel overflows to the Jewish state founded in 1948. Thousands of evangelical tour groups visit Israel each year, and there is a sense within the most Zionist faction of that Israeli Jews should be regarded as spiritual kin.
Trump has zero interest in the intricacies of evangelical eschatology or the aspirations of Israeli Jews. He will ingratiate himself to white evangelicals and Israeli Jews only if he thinks it helps him personally.
If the past is prologue, it probably will.
Alan Bean
Alan Bean serves as executive director of Friends of Justice. He is a member of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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