Kamala Harris will most likely not appear beside Benjamin Netanyahu when he speaks to Congress this week. Former senior Biden administration officials say that was likely by design.
Harris declined to attend Netanyahu’s joint address later this week, Axios journalist Juliegrace Brufke reported Monday. And the decision was made before Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.
The vice president would have sat directly behind Netanyahu’s podium during the Wednesday event. Instead, last week, Biden’s campaign had scheduled her to speak in Indianapolis.
“That probably wasn’t an accident,” a former senior administration official told The Times of Israel. The source theorized that Biden may keep Harris away from the White House while Netanyahu is in town to avoid images that feature Harris associating with the Israeli prime minister. This would mark a significant shift in U.S. policy, if appearing with Netanyahu is suddenly viewed as a bad thing.
At the same time, Harris is receiving flack from Zionist organizations over comments she made about student protests in support of Palestine in an interview with The Nation earlier this month. The Zionist Organization of America accused Harris of endorsing “Arab Islamist criminality,” among other racist remarks.
However, a current U.S. official said that a future Harris administration’s policies on Palestine won’t differ much from Biden’s. “Vice President Harris shares President Biden’s support for an iron-clad U.S. commitment to Israel’s security coupled with a commitment to advancing a two-state solution in order to bring an end to this cycle of violence,” the official said, speaking anonymously.
But Biden may also snub Netanyahu. A senior official in his office told reporters that Netanyahu may not meet with the U.S. president after all. Meanwhile, a record number of Democrats are set to boycott Netanyahu’s speech.
