Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted former Vice President Kamala Harris’s book event on Wednesday night, forcing her to confront the war in Gaza at the first stop of her book tour.
Harris’s memoir, 107 Days, was released on Wednesday and details her sprint to the White House after former President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
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“What’s happening to the Palestinian people is outrageous, and it breaks my heart,” she said at the New York City book tour event after protesters yelled from the audience. “I get it.”
About 30 minutes into Harris’s conversation with moderator Aaron Parnas, at least three protesters yelled about the “genocide” in Gaza, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“Your legacy is genocide. The blood of the Palestinians is on your hands,” one protester said. “You pledged your full support for Israel as they shot babies and they blew babies up … you cared more about protecting an apartheid state than defending the rights of Americans.”
As the audience began yelling for the protesters to be removed from the venue, Harris urged it to “bring the temperature down.”
“Unlike the current president of the United States, I understand what’s happening right now in Gaza,” she said, adding, “I’m not president right now; there’s nothing I can do.”
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When responding to the protesters, Harris said she discussed this in her book. In 107 Days, Harris expressed frustrations about the pro-Palestine protesters who disrupted her campaign rallies and the activists who threatened not to vote for her over Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.
“The threat to withhold their vote got to me. It felt reckless,” she writes. “The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was.”
“Why weren’t they protesting at Trump rallies? I wondered,” she also wrote.
Harris also attempted to distance herself from Biden’s response to the war in Gaza at Wednesday night’s book tour event.
“People in our administration can tell you what my voice was in those rooms, in those closed rooms in the Oval Office. I was not the president. I couldn’t make the decision. But I made my position clear,” she said.
Her comments are the latest attempt by the former vice president to distance herself from Biden regarding Israel and Gaza. In the book, she wrote that Biden’s response to the Palestinians felt “inadequate” and “forced.”
“I had pleaded with Joe, when he spoke publicly on this issue, to extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians,” Harris wrote in 107 Days.
During the event, Harris also criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the war in Gaza and his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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“Donald Trump has given Netanyahu a blank check to do whatever he wants,” she said at the event.
The Washington Examiner has contacted representatives for Harris, Simon & Schuster, and the White House for comment.