This Is Who Kamala Harris Fails
As a Palestinian American, I’ve watched with growing apprehension the recent rebranding and memeification of Kamala Harris: Look! Here’s a woman that does jubilant dances, is firmly intelligent, has the same guffaw as your mother. It’s endearing. It’s refreshing.
I’m not immune to the charms of American mythology. I spent much of my childhood in Midwestern suburbia, bred on romcoms and the glittering spectacle of professional wrestling. I, too, love the promise of a third act, a swooping hero, the prop of a good soundtrack. But for me to lean into the powerful marketing of the current vice president as a bastion of hope requires enormous amnesia — not only of this administration’s complicit funding of Palestinian slaughter, but of Ms. Harris’s own track record on criminal reform, immigration and law enforcement.
Because even in those Midwestern suburbs I was also Palestinian, raised on stories of the Nakba, land theft, a boy burned alive, a young American woman mangled by an Israeli bulldozer, the searing image of a man trying to protect his son from flying bullets. Harris’s viral quote on existing in your context is handy here: Palestinian Americans and their allies are bringing a context to this election. They carry a hope for ending Palestinian oppression that feels almost futile, but irresponsible to abandon, and a memory that extends past a few glitzy weeks.
The Democratic National Convention was a visually and sonically arresting display, full of bright-eyed, stirring speeches on race, identity, democracy — including a moving speech by the parents of an Israeli hostage — and talk of social justice and liberation. It began with a land acknowledgment. And yet the word Palestine was only held, briefly, in the mouths of non-Palestinians. Mentions of a cease-fire in Gaza were urgent but vague, as though one would be midwifed via fervent prayer rather than the sober reconsideration of our nation’s active participation and funding of the current onslaught.
The most generous read of Ms. Harris vis-à-vis Palestinians is that she has inherited — versus had an active role in — a disastrous foreign policy on Gaza, and now must contend with hundreds of thousands of ambivalent voters who oppose it. There is no doubt Ms. Harris is more articulate than President Biden on the issue. In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination, she spoke of Palestinians’ devastation, of their displacement, their hunger, their right to “freedom” and “self-determination.” “The scale of suffering is heartbreaking,” she said.
I appreciate Ms. Harris’s broken heart. What I’d appreciate more is a direct naming of who is killing and starving Palestinians, acts that are neither inevitable nor without a perpetrator. I’d appreciate the upholding of international law through sanctions and an arms embargo. It’s hard to abide the passive framing of Palestinian death in the same speech that reasserts a nuclear power’s right to defend itself — a “defense” that in the past few months has included both American and Israeli representatives calling to level Gaza, mobs rioting to defend the rights of soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner, and bombs shredding hundreds of starving children in refugee camps.
