News Brief: Substance vs. Vibes in VP Harris’ Gaza PR Reboot
Citations Needed | August 2, 2024 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded, and we do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of Citations Needed. And today, Adam, we really wanted to talk about Kamala Harris and her position on Gaza now that Joe Biden has stepped aside after months of, let’s say, poor campaign showings, a terrible debate, and nearly 10 months of fully supporting funding and justifying a genocide in Gaza, he is now out of the race. Kamala is the heir apparent, and so Kamala, maybe she doesn’t have the Joe Biden genocide stink on her quite the same way. But I think it’s really important that we dig into where she actually does stand on Palestine, on Gaza, on the ongoing Israeli genocide there. And you have actually written a new piece for The Real News Network that came out on Wednesday, July 31, with the headline, “Israel’s Reckless Escalations Demand We Honestly Scrutinize Kamala Harris’ Gaza Position” and, Adam, I thought it would be good if you kind of laid out your take.
Adam: Yeah, I also wrote a piece the previous week for In These Times that covered somewhat similar ground, but specifically on the announcement prior to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress on July 23. Seven unions representing 6 million workers, including the UAW and SEIU, issued a demand that Biden stop selling arms to Israel, stop providing military aid to Israel. And so this is part of a broader shift in demand and rhetoric that came about because the White House, as we’ve talked about on this show since the Michigan primary, rather in anticipation and immediately after the Michigan primary, and when the uncommitted movement was gaining steam, switched the definition of “ceasefire” to mean something completely different than what activists, what Oxfam, what Amnesty International, what UN agencies and the hundreds of ex-Biden alum and Nobel laureates who signed petitions calling for a ceasefire, they completely switched the definition of ceasefire to mean something else. And the question became, and this bought them time, this was I wrote for my Substack. This was a very successful PR effort. It took a lot of the heat off in conjunction with college campuses shutting down for the summer and police crackdowns, but this really helped contribute to a kind of vibe shift away from blaming Biden, because they could point to these nebulous ceasefire negotiations.
So what does that mean? I’ll do a quick, brief recap of what that means. So in October, November, December, calls for a ceasefire had a very clear historical precedent based on previous conflicts. 2008, 2009 Cast Lead, 2014 Protective Edge. 2018, 2021, there was a precedent for what “ceasefire” meant, which means the US uses its dispositive leverage to compel Israel to stop bombing and invading Gaza, and then Hamas will stop as well. Typically, Hamas is the one that wants a ceasefire, since they are a sub-state actor and they don’t have an air force, so they benefit far more from that. And Israel, of course, has these bunker busters, these 2,000-pound bombs, you know, F-35s, F-16s, F-22s. So there’s historical precedent for what that means. Everybody knows what it means. Everybody, at least for the first few months, didn’t act like they didn’t know what it meant. But then when the uncommitted movement picked up steam in February and March, and this is after the White House issued a memo on October 20, rather, the State Department issued a memo on October 20 preventing all State Department employees, White House employees, from using the word “ceasefire.” So they initially rejected it because they knew what it meant, right? Everybody, so it had a very specific contextual meaning. In the context of Gaza, everybody knew what it meant. But then they realized they were getting hammered on this issue. This was right before the college campus protests really caught fire. But there were protests every day. And there was, of course, the uncommitted movement, which was leading to some embarrassing headlines and delegitimizing the Biden 2024 run. So then they decided to do, again, if you paid me $700,000 and I worked for the White House and I had a soul lobotomy, this is what I would have suggested, which is to just call you, say you’re supporting a ceasefire, but just change the definition of ceasefire, right? This is kind of PR 101.
Nima: Yeah.
Adam: Which is exactly what they did.
Nima: Now it means temporary pause. It doesn’t mean an actual cessation of killing people.
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: It’s just a temporary pause.
Adam: Well, it’s a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges immediately followed by a firm commitment by Israel to continue the destruction of Gaza for “years,” if necessary. And so people say, Well, they wanted a temporary pause because it could lead to a longer–but that’s actually not true. In fact, the second and then, of course, on May 31 Biden gave his deeply cynical speech where he calls for an “end to the war” that gave people some brief hope until it was followed up by Matt Miller and others at the State Department, who clarified that, no, they support Israel’s goal of “eliminating Hamas,” a goal that is not possible by definition, even according to Tony Blinken, who told Netanyahu that behind closed doors in January, according to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. So they have a pretextual and, by definition, unachievable goal of eliminating basically an ideology, or pretty much anyone with a gun fighting back, which, you know, good luck with that. We saw how that worked out for the US and Afghanistan.
And that is, of course, not really their goal. Their goal is to displace, to force immigration out of Gaza, to kill, to make life a living hell as part of a very open policy of collective punishment. And so they want this to sort of go on for as long as it needs to go on, and having these ceasefire negotiations they’re allegedly taking part in provides the appropriate cover for this, because then they could always say, Well, we are negotiating a ceasefire.
Nima: Right.
Adam: But then, of course, Nima, they blew up the person they were ostensibly negotiating a ceasefire with early Wednesday morning.
Nima: Right. And just to be clear, that’s Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated while attending the inauguration ceremonies for the new president of Iran, was assassinated in Tehran this week. And again, this is the longtime political leader of Hamas and the lead negotiator on whatever a ceasefire would be. And so the idea that Israel cares at all about actual negotiating a cessation of the ongoing genocide, I think it’s pretty clear where Israel stands on that if they are assassinating the person that they’re talking to.
Adam: And this is the thing, Israel, to their credit, has been perfectly honest about this. Netanyahu has been perfectly honest about this. It’s liberal Zionists and liberals in the US who have been trying to spin this.
Nima: Who pretend that they are handwringing about this, rather than that this is the entire policy.
Adam: Well, they’re pretending that this is pursuing some end of the hostilities. This is a total invention by US media and spinsters stateside and the White House. This idea that this was an Israeli ceasefire proposal in the generally understood sense that this was an end of hostilities, is something that Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected publicly in English, that he is not saying that they want to end hostilities. And Israel has been saying S , the US media then puts it into some liberalese translator, comes out as Y, and then you go back and you read X, and you say, well, X doesn’t equal Y. They’re saying something completely different. They said hours after his May 31 speech, Netanyahu was crystal clear that he did not agree with Biden’s interpretation of their proposal, which was, step one was a temporary hostage release, and then they reserved the right to continue bombing and invading Gaza. That was very clear, and they’re very firm about that. Israelis are not being shifty or deceptive here. This is purely the White House and the State Department, projecting and asserting a vibes-based desire to end the war that simply doesn’t exist.
Nima: The media just wants people to think that Israel is not actively and consciously engaged in genocide.
Adam: Right. And so there’s, there was very little effort in the media to even point out, as I again, as I wrote in my Substack months ago, back in June, that these two statements or two positions were entirely in contradiction. That the White House’s definition of a ceasefire as anything that would “end the war.” And then, of course, it was even contradicted by follow-up statements where they said, Oh, Hamas surviving post-war is unacceptable. Well, if you demand the surrender or the dissolution of the military defeat of an enemy as a condition of a ceasefire, that’s not a ceasefire, that’s just you winning the war. And so they had to look like they supported a ceasefire while maintaining support for the goals of “eliminating Hamas,” which, again, by Israel’s own mission, will take years. So what they did is they sort of put the ceasefire negotiations, which were really a negotiation over hostages and a temporary ceasefire. That was the only earnest negotiations. There was never any earnest negotiation to end the war, ever. Period. Israel rejected that out of hand. Everybody knows that. They put it in this category, that way, the burden shifts away from the White House and onto this, you know, the sort of recalcitrant Hamas-Israeli negotiators. So therefore, they kind of washed their hands of it. Meanwhile, they continue to ship bombs and munitions to Israel, as it continues to kill dozens of Palestinians a day, continues to displace, continues to starve. You know, now there’s a polio outbreak in Gaza.
And so the question became, when Harris took over a week and a half ago, was, What would her policy change? And there was a lot of vibes-based and again, I understand why people want that. I get it. There was always an assumption that Biden was even relative to other Democrats, uniquely pro-Israel, uniquely indifferent to Palestinian life. So she comes into, he drops out. She takes over more or less overnight. And then Netanyahu visits three days later, four days later. So immediately, this is on the sort of radar, right? And then she gives a speech. She doesn’t go to his speech, which I think was kind of a, but then she met with him. That was supposed to be some signal. Doesn’t fucking mean anything. She gets her inaugural Barak Ravid from Axios piece about increased tensions, that sort of leaked piece that the Harris, you know, just like the Biden camp plants over and over again, they planted it. It’s the sort of, to give the illusion of dissent, the illusion of disagreement. Netanyahu doesn’t mind those because it gets the libs off their back. It creates this idea that somehow there’s real tension, right? Comes through the same reporter every single time. It’s a trope so obvious, I’ve written, if I wrote about it back in December.
Then she gives a speech, and she sort of does more empathetic box-checking than Biden has historically done. Biden, again, to his sort of grim credit, never really even bothered acting like he gave a shit about Palestinian lives. He would maybe sort of throw in a word here and there, but it was mostly, you know, he denied death counts. Didn’t really seem like he gave a shit, just an old, you know, old-school, kind of Silent Generation racist. And Kamala Harris gives the sort of flowery, what I call empathy speak, and then she appeals to this alleged ceasefire negotiations. But in terms of actual policy, there’s been at least now, and again, this could change. And I want to be very clear, this could change. I’m not sort of being doomer about this, but as of now, there is no meaningful difference between Biden’s and Harris’s Gaza policy.
So let’s read what the New York Times wrote on Thursday, August 1, about this specifically in the context of a VP pick about Josh Shapiro, who infamously compared campus protests to the KKK, which led to some people being upset. But of course, it’s true that all the vice president candidates are more or less going to also probably have the same position. The New York Times would write in their analysis of Harris’s veepstakes, quote:
The progressive wing of the party is already becoming less vocal in its criticism over Gaza, believing the vice president is inching toward them on Israel and Palestine with her forthright calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, her acknowledgment of “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity” in the territory and her pledge to “not be silent” on Palestinian suffering.
So this is a very bleak statement, and a very bleak if it is indeed true, it is a very bleak commentary on the sort of nature of the so-called US Left, right? Because there are groups, plenty of Palestinian organizations, the uncommitted movement. Rashida Tlaib has said she’s withholding her endorsement until she gets a phone call or hears some indication from Vice President Harris. There are plenty of ways in which Harris can signal and backchannel a meaningful break from Biden to actually use America’s leverage to end this conflict, if, in the event that she becomes president, and she hasn’t done so, she has not done that at all. What she’s done is more sophisticated empathy speak, you know, the late Glen Ford, you know, who I didn’t always agree with, and I don’t even necessarily agree with the sort of extremeness of the statement, but he always said Barack Obama’s not the lesser of two evils. He’s the more effective of two evils. And I think he probably was the lesser of two evils. But I think it’s kind of also speaking to a real truth, which is, Obama did do a lot of evil stuff because he was more effective. And old stodgy racists like Biden just aren’t as sophisticated at this kind of rhetoric.
Nima: Right.
Adam: And Harris is good at it, you know, sort of, We will not be silent. She literally says, “We see you. We hear you.” It’s this kind of, you know, nonprofit-ese that she’s comfortable speaking in. But of course, $3.95 and empathy speak will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. This doesn’t mean anything. This is literally just vacuous rhetoric. And so those who are charged with trying to provide some kind of momentum to end the genocide have understandably been like, Okay, cool, but what is your actual policy change? And thus far, that has not been forthcoming. And so what you get is, you get the New York Times saying, Oh, well, look, the Zoomers fell for it. They’re a bunch of fucking drooling idiots.
Nima: Without actually crediting anyone, right? They’re doing the kind of, “Some say,” or, you know, “We hear that,” like, no one is quoted then in the Times as being like, you know, Jewish Voice for Peace, you know, says that Kamala Harris is moving left on this position. No one is going, no one is credited, because it’s not real. It’s not a real thing. So the Times is just kind of laundering, you know, maybe like liberal-slash-slightly-progressive-leaning people that they’re talking to as kind of a broader shift, right? This idea that the “Left” is shifting, and, you know, less vocal about this issue because they trust more in Kamala Harris’s position. But there’s no, you know, there’s no systemic movement towards that which can be credited, which could be pointed to. So it’s just, you know, it’s all vibes. And you know, right now this campaign is kind of running on vibes, and how those vibes are then translated through the campaign to audiences on the other side of the media, is the media’s job, right? So the media is doing that kind of vibe shift on behalf of the Harris campaign.
Adam: Well, no one in the media, literally nobody, is actually interrogating what any of these concepts mean. So when the New York Times says, there’s a sort of myth that Harris called for a ceasefire before the White House did, that’s not true at all. She gave a speech on March 4, which was a week after Biden used the word “ceasefire” for the first time in anticipation of the February 27 Michigan primary. Her messaging, and then when you read the speech, and you read her follow-up comments, her definition of a ceasefire was a temporary pause. It used to be what a temporary pause was, that she did not support a lasting ceasefire. As John Kirby laid out in his interview with The New Yorker that same week, the White House did not support a long-term ceasefire. We have no indication that what she’s saying when she says immediate ceasefire is that she supports a ceasefire in the sense that people with guns in Palestine are permitted to continue in Gaza, which is the definition of what eliminating Hamas means to Israel, as they’ve laid out.
There’s no indication, again, a ceasefire, that’s just the other side’s surrender is not a call for a ceasefire. And I feel like I’m losing my mind here, because the media just kind of went with it. They’re like, Okay, Biden supports a ceasefire now, but if they don’t support a ceasefire, what they’re demanding is and what they’re saying is a repeated demand of surrender or a commitment to a yearslong Israeli military campaign to completely level and destroy anyone in Gaza fighting back. There is no indication, again, maybe, I assume there’s some splits within the White House. I assume the CIA genuinely wants to wrap this up. I don’t doubt that. But they’ve never really made that clear from a policy standpoint, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they want a genuine ceasefire as you and I understand it, as activists use it, as it’s understood a normal contextual conversation–
Nima: You can’t really be calling for a ceasefire while continuing to ship bombs and bullets to one side.
Adam: Especially when the one side just bombed the person they’re supposedly negotiating a ceasefire with. I mean, if you need any more evidence that this is not a “good faith” ceasefire negotiation, that would be it.
Nima: But of course, they know that, which is, which is our entire point, that “ceasefire” doesn’t mean ceasefire. It means surrender, and it’s being used to try and dull the efficacy or the, you know, kind of power building, maybe, of the uncommitted movement and others who are actually trying to hold Kamala Harris to account on this, you know, kind of front end of the new presidential campaign, and this kind of home-stretch season where we are seeing this genocide now enter its 10th month.
Adam: Yeah, and it’s important for people to not be bogged down in the fives and the fog. And so I wrote for my piece, I’m going to quote myself, which is kind of annoying, but it’s easier.
One must stay focused and keep in mind three central questions: (1) Are kids still being bombed? (2) Are US bombs still being shipped? (3) Is the person in question refusing to commit to stopping the shipment of said bombs? If the answer to all three questions is yes, then bleeding-heart box checking and vague appeals to “ceasefire negotiations” don’t matter much at all.
Nima: Right.
Adam: And I think that’s the questions you have to keep repeating yourself, which is, this is why the shift, after the White House co-opted the term ceasefire. This is why the shift among activists and among unions, again, these are unions representing six million workers shifted to ending military aid, because the implied mechanism of enforcing a ceasefire prior to that co-option effort was the threat of removing military aid. And now people just have to say it explicitly, because the White House got fucking cute and just redefined the term.
Nima: Right.
Adam: But the idea is, you withhold US support for genocide, and then people say, Oh, well, it doesn’t matter if the US supports Israel, they’re going to keep doing it. Which is not true at all, by the way. Nobody believes that. Brooking Institute, Israeli officials say it all the time. But even if you grant that to be true, still funding and arming a genocide is still bad as such, per se, right? Like it is still not good.
Nima: Exactly. Well, it’s like the ceasefire-to-halting-military-aid switch is kind of like that. Switch from saying vaguely Black Lives Matter, something that could be co-opted, and has been co-opted, and then actually shifting it to saying defund the police, something that is much harder to co-opt.
Adam: Right.
Nima: It actually means something. There are meaningful policy shifts. There are meaningful outcomes. Things need to happen to make that thing be real. You can’t just be like, Well, there’s a ceasefire, but what we actually mean is we’re going to stop for 15 minutes before Israel continues carpet bombing. But that was a ceasefire because it ceased firing for, you know, 19 seconds.
Adam: That was the analogy I made on Sam Seder’s show yesterday. I said the exact same thing. I said, there’s a reason, you know, when you can have the WellsFargo.com Black Lives Matter forum, you can’t really have the WellsFargo.com Abolish the Police or Defund the Police forum, right? And I understand why people rallied around the term ceasefire, because it had a historical precedent. Everybody knew what it meant, it had a very specific contextual meaning, but I think we didn’t, maybe people didn’t anticipate enough this sort of cynicism of the White House.
Nima: That’s it. Exactly. We keep underestimating how cynical support for genocide is. And so that shift, that very vocal shift, and now, you know, backed by powerful unions representing millions of people, actually calling for real, you know, different policy in the form of halting military aid.
Adam: And make no mistake, there are groups and people who Harris can signal to to make those assurances, and yet, every single one of those groups and every single one of those people are completely silent and not endorsed her yet. So she has yet to do so. That doesn’t mean she can’t, but it’s important that people, not as the New York Times seems to think has already happened, not get swept up in the vibes, not get swept up in wishful thinking, wish casting and reading into this liberal empathy speak, this is not going to change anything. There needs to be commitments. Now she could, of course, renege on the commitments, but at least it’s something, right, and the fact that she hasn’t made that indicates that those things probably mean something, and it’s important we can stay focused and ask yourself the central three questions. Number one: Are kids still being bombed? Number two: Is the US still sending those bombs? And number three: Is the person in question for or against continuing to send those bombs? And if the answer to all three is yes, then nothing else they say matters.
Nima: Well, that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Please do check out Adam’s new pieces on The Real News Network and his piece last week in In These Times. We will be back very soon with another full-length episode of Citations Needed. So thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. We are 100% listener funded, so all your support is so very much appreciated, but that will do it.
Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy.
I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Friday, August 2, 2024.
