President Biden is missed already. As bad as he was, Vice President Kamala Harris is one hundred times worse. One of her first official acts as nominee for President was to make sure not to attend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress even though she is the President of the Senate and it is more than just customary for her to do so.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “it is outrageous to me and inexcusable that Kamala Harris is boycotting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech.” Would she have declined attending Winston Churchill’s speech to Congress on December 26, 1941? Israel is America’s only real and reliable ally in the Middle East. It was brutally and savagely attacked on October 7. It has been and continues to be bombarded by missiles from Hezbollah. Twelve children were killed in their latest bombing. Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles, drones and UAVs on April 13. Israel is deeply concerned that their very existence is at stake. Britain felt the same way during World War II. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said in his address, President Biden visited Israel soon after October 7 to lend support because he was aware of the gravity of the situation. It was a war against evil.
Winston Churchill devoted most of his speech to Congress to ultimate victory over the Axis powers. He quipped about his Brooklyn-born mother, “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British instead of the other way around; I might have gotten here on my own. In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.” He went on to say, “both of us have much to learn in the cruel art of war. We have therefore without doubt a time of tribulation before us.” He was warmly received on both sides of the aisle. He understood war and its consequences. No one tiptoed around the evil that the Axis Powers had unleashed. No one, including the “isolationists,” boycotted the event. It is ironic that Prime Minister Netanyahu has addressed Congress four times. Churchill did it three times. Although Kamala Harris might think that the situations are different, it is not an excuse. Israel is facing a multi-front war and is preventing the war from spreading to the U.S. shores.
Harris has already encouraged campus protests against Israel by stating that “they are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza.” Her quick call for a ceasefire as early as March only hardened the hearts of Hamas prolonging the war. Her moral equivalency about the conflict will only make a hostage deal even more difficult.
As one Israeli official said after Prime Minister Netanyahu and Vice President Harris met, “When our enemies see the U.S. and Israel aligned, it increases the chances for a hostage deal and decreases the chances for regional escalation. When there is such daylight, it pushes the deal further away and brings a regional escalation closer.” Vice President Harris has thus far only made the situation worse.
Joseph M. Frager is a physician and lifelong activist.