Say No To Kamala, an American Never-Trumper in Israel Urges

Political veteran grapples with a write-in for Fetterman

Harris campaigned in Michigan earlier this month.

[The Editors is not planning a presidential endorsement this year. The piece below, however, crossed our desk, and we thought it was worth publishing as as a newsworthy indicator of the views and reasoning of a certain segment of the electorate at this moment.— Ira Stoll]

It never occurred to me that I would actively advise friends how to vote — or, more accurately, how not to vote. But after months of contemplation, I have ultimately decided that the circumstances warrant it.

In past decades I have been involved in different capacities in three Democratic presidential campaigns. Of the nine presidential elections in which I have voted, I chose the Democrat in eight (the only exception was 2012). 

What’s more, my “never-Trump” credentials date back well before he even entered politics — in my early teens as a news-obsessed New Yorker I chafed at his crude celebrity. And I’ve already voted against him twice.

So how did it come to my asking friends NOT to vote for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris? Let me explain.

Hyperbole is the order of the day when it comes to presidential politics. Every election is the most important ever. The sky will certainly fall if my candidate doesn’t win. We all know the drill.

But given the set of circumstances that Israel and the Jewish people have been thrust into over this past year — and how the Democratic party has responded — the danger is too great. The next Democratic administration will not be led by Joe Biden, the last Democratic national figure with instinctual support for Israel in his bones.

Do I consider Trump a threat to American democracy? Given how he has behaved and what he has said over the years, who could unequivocally say that he isn’t? I have confidence in the Constitution and its nearly 250-year track record and believe that he won’t be any more successful in undermining it than he was the last time. 

What I have much less confidence in is what a Harris administration would do. Continuing to exude indecisiveness and weakness on the world stage will make the world ever more dangerous and further undermine the security of Israel — and of American Jews.

The most concise way to put it is this: In just the last months, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada have imposed weapons embargoes on Israel, and diminished their defense of Israel in international forums. None of those countries has a particularly extreme government — U.K. Prime Minister Starmer spent a year liberating his party from outright antisemitism. And yet everything these countries have done has already been discussed in the U.S. — not just by street protesters or academics —but by Democratic officials, including many in the administration, including many around the vice president.

There is no overstating how devastating even a slight U.S. move in that direction would be for Israel. The limited restrictions the Biden administration already put on weapons to Israel earlier this year literally endangered the lives of our soldiers (and for myself and my peers — “our soldiers” means “our children”). That is something I learned firsthand, in real time, at our shabbat table. 

If the US withdrew its veto to protect Israel from the perpetual pile-on at the U.N. Security Council it would have devastating consequences. (And that has already happened once in each of the last two Democratic administrations.)

If the U.S. legitimized the bigoted so-called judicial processes of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice our children could face arrest if they traveled outside of Israel.

And all this comes before Iran policy — which since 2015 has seen most of the Democratic Party deep in delusion about achieving a detente with the theocratic regime that sees our destruction as priority number one. The windfall brought to the Iranian regime by the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — and by the Biden administration’s relaxation of restrictions on oil sales and other sanctions — has not gone to improve the lives of Iran citizens but to fund the organizations that have attacked Israel on seven fronts over the last year. And it paid for the ballistic missiles used by Iran to directly attack Israel twice so far.

Estimates of when Iran will be capable of producing a nuclear weapon are in weeks and months. No, we cannot afford another four years of appeasement.

Finally, nothing has astonished me more than the feeble lack of response by the administration and Democrats in Congress to the floodgates of antisemitism that opened after October 7. President Biden had said that a single episode of bigoted protest in Charlottesville was what inspired him to run in 2020. What we have seen on the streets of American cities and on American college campuses this last year has been called “Charlottesville every day.” Senator Chuck Schumer (for whom I was an early bundler in his first Senate campaign) has refused for months to bring an antisemitism bill to the floor for a vote. Both the president and the vice president have vocally expressed respect for the views of hecklers and rioters that include even blatantly antisemitic slogans — Harris saying just last week that a protester screaming about Israel committing genocide: “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. It’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real and I respect his voice.”

A Harris administration would be populated by young graduates from Ivy schools who have only been told that Israel — and Jews — are the source of all the world’s evils. Personnel is policy, and we began to see the impact of this demographic over the last year, especially since President Biden’s decline has emboldened more junior members of the administration to put forth policies that have constrained Israel.

You say that you can’t vote for Donald Trump? I’m not asking you to. I haven’t even decided that I can do that. (I’m grappling with whether to write in Senator John Fetterman.)

But given the stakes for Israel and the Jewish people at this very fraught moment, and given the overwhelming likelihood based on available evidence that Vice President Harris will not come to understand that standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel is both in the U.S. national interest and is the right moral policy, I ask you to consider abstaining from granting her your sacred vote.

I decided to plead the Fifth.

Not the Fifth Amendment – the Fifth Commandment.

My parents are well into their 80s, are lifelong Democrats, and live in the U.S., not Israel as I do. Out of respect for them, I am not publishing this piece under my name.