Speech came alive

The moment when Kamala Harris’s speech came alive

The Democratic nominee got foreign policy — and especially Israel-Palestine — right.

by Zack Beauchamp

Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech started slow, getting bogged down in a familiar recitation of her biography. But it got stronger over time, really hitting its stride when she got around to a topic that’s often dry: foreign policy. There, she showed a facility with policy and an aptitude for navigating deeply divisive issues like Israel-Palestine that did wonders for her commander-in-chief credibility.

Part of what worked was Harris’s palpably emotional delivery. But there was also a real crispness to the speech’s arguments. Here’s what she said, for example, in discussing Trump’s affinity for dictators:

I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un who are rooting for Trump. Who are rooting for Trump because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself.

In just three lines, she presented an entire cogent theory of what’s wrong with Trump — that he is a selfish, unserious man whose entire approach to politics is anathema to American democracy — and illustrated it with a compelling, easily graspable example. As a writer, it’s hard not to admire the craft here.

She also applied that in her discussion of Israel-Palestine, where she delivered one of the deftest handlings of the issue I’ve ever seen from a politician, one that displayed empathy for both sides while also implicitly distancing herself from Biden’s unbalanced pro-Israel approach:

I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself, because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that a terrorist organization called Hamas caused on October 7, including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.

At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost, desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking. President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.

Harris’s framing not only recognized the strongest points in both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the current conflict, it took them seriously.

She did not mince words or dance around the horror of October 7. She acknowledged why the attack was such an unforgivable assault on Israeli lives and reiterated her commitment to preventing it from ever happening again. At the same time, she went much further than even most Democrats are willing to in recognizing the immense and ongoing suffering of Palestinians. More than that, actually: She acknowledged that Palestinians have legitimate rights — rights that demand even more than an end to this war, but a future where Palestinians truly rule themselves.

Too often, people discussing this topic feel the need to only recognize one of these narratives — and in American politics, that’s most often the Israeli one. Yet Harris placed them on truly equal footing, taking the moral ideas implicit in a two-state solution to the conflict and bringing them to the fore. The result was a discussion that anyone who cares about both Israeli and Palestinian lives could appreciate, and one that felt genuine in the delivery rather than just pro forma.

Now, to be clear: President Joe Biden has said similar-sounding things about Palestinian dignity, and his policy has still been overwhelmingly tilted in Israel’s direction.

But this speech felt meaningfully different in two respects.

First, its rhetorical structure: Presenting Palestinian aspirations for self-determination as the moral climax of her discussion of the issue, the apex concern, felt like a meaningful shift away from a biased status quo. Second, and more importantly, it’s consistent: In public and reportedly in private, Harris has demonstrated far more concern with the suffering of Palestinian civilians.

Harris “would certainly show more pragmatism and flexibility than Biden has, and in her public commentary has also demonstrated a far more humanizing approach to the Palestinians in the past year,” Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned over Biden’s approach to Gaza told the New York Times in July.

I don’t want to read too much into mere words; no one should be confident that Harris would govern perfectly on Israel-Palestine or any other foreign policy issue. But a speech that good at least earned her the benefit of the doubt.