Vice President Kamala Harris made headlines Sunday when she called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza. However, she qualified her demand by stating the pause would last “six weeks,” and include a deal for Hamas to release hostages.
The UK Daily Mail described Harris’s statement as a “break” with President Joe Biden, who has refused to call for a ceasefire. However, it simply reiterated his position, which is that there should be a six-week truce as part of a deal.
The Daily Mail reported Harris’s supposedly explosive remarks in an article that failed to include important context:
Her comments, made during a speech in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, are the strongest condemnation [sic] of Israel’s conduct since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack by a senior member of the Biden administration.
…
Citing the ‘immense scale of suffering’ in the war-torn nation [sic], she stressed ‘there must be an immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks’.
‘This will get the hostages out and get a significant amount of aid in. This will allow us to build something more enduring to ensure Israel is secure and to respect the right of Palestinian people to dignity, freedom and self-determination,’ Harris said.
Harris’s remarks were hardly the “strongest condemnation” of Israel by a senior Biden official; that dubious honor belongs to Biden himself, who accused Israel of “indiscriminate bombing,” a remark the White House had to walk back.
Moreover, Gaza is not a “nation.” It is a territory inhabited by Palestinians and governed, until recently at least, by a terrorist organization that launched the war on October 7 in a wholly unprovoked attack on innocent people in Israel.
More significantly, Harris’s demand was simply a reiteration of Biden’s current proposal for a hostage deal — one that Israel has accepted — in which fighting would stop for six weeks; Hamas would release some of the 134 Israeli hostages it still holds; Israel would release a larger number of Palestinian terror convicts; and more aid would enter Gaza. The only difference was the word “immediate,” which downplays the need for a negotiation to reach the pause in fighting.
So while Harris’s statement might have impressed her audience, and the media, it is largely a sop to the Democratic Party’s restive progressive base, rather than a “break.” It is simply a restatement of Biden’s own approach to the issue.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.