


[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]
Elder of Ziyon discusses Kamala Harris’ statements about Israel during her debate with Donald Trump: “The mistakes in ABC’s question about Israel to Kamala Harris, and more in her answer,” Elder of Ziyon, September 12, 2024:
[Harris:] But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.
[Elder of Ziyon:] The US policy has been to help Israel defend itself, but it is not keen on Israel winning any wars. A nation that is behind fences and always worried about where the nect [sic] attack can come from is not a secure country, no matter how good its defense is.
If Harris was serious about supporting Israel, she would say she supports an Israeli victory – not another detente with terror groups that led to October 7 to begin with.
It’s not enough to give Israel weapons to help defend itself. It has to be able to go on the offensive, to destroy threats before they are fully realized. That means, above all, to supply the IDF with bunker-buster bombs so that it might destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities at Fordow. Israel cannot only be in a defensive crouch, prepared to retaliate but not to take the offensive. Israelis from now on will follow the Talmudic injunction: “If someone is planning to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
[Harris:] But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.
“Two-state solution”? Good god, where has Harris been? Does she not realize that the Palestinians have repeatedly said that any “state” they may acquire after Israel has been squeezed back with in the 1949 armistice lines, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, lines described. by Abba Eban as “the lines of Auschwitz,” will only be used as a base from which to launch further assaults on a much smaller and more vulnerable Israel, until the Jewish state disappears, to be replaced “from the river to the sea” by a twenty-third Arab state?
Why does Kamala Harris think that the Palestinians have given up their long-held dream of destroying Israel? Has anyone among the Palestinians suggested that they are prepared for that? No, I thought not. Harris’s phrase about how the Palestinians must “have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve” makes one gag. That “they so rightly deserve”? They’ve been conducting war and terrorism against the Jewish state for 76 years. They were delighted with the October 7 attack by Hamas. Why do they “so rightly deserve” anything? Would we have said in 1945 that “the Germans, now that they are no longer a threat, need to have the security, self-determination, and the dignity they so rightly deserve”?
Here is what Kamala Harris should have said at the debate:
On October 7, 6,000 Hamas operatives smashed into Israel, accompanied by several hundred Gazan civilians, where they proceeded to torture, rape, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 250. Israel was thus forced to fight a war that it did not expect and did not want. It has been fighting not just in Gaza, but against Hezbollah in Lebanon, against the Houthis in Yemen. In fact, the Israelis are now fighting what has been called a “seven-front war,” in Gaza against Hamas, in the West Bank against Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in Lebanon, against Hezbollah, in Yemen against the Houthis, in Syria against Assad’s army, and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps bases, in Iraq against the Shia militia known as Kata’ib Hezbollah, and above them all, their string-pulling puppet-master Iran.
We know, and appreciate, the colossal efforts the IDF has made to minimize civilian casualties, by warning Gazans to leave areas or buildings about to be targeted. We know about the nine million leaflets dropped, the fifteen million messages sent, the sixteen million robocalls made by the IDF, to warn Gazans to move away from danger. We know, too, how Hamas uses Gazans as human shields, and steals aid meant for the people of Gaza.
We will unstintingly provide Israel with all the weapons it needs both to defend itself and, when the IDF deems it necessary, to take the fight to the enemy before it has a chance to harm the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
There. That’s much better. Feel free, Kamala, to use it.