Kamala Harris Does Not Deserve the Endorsement of “The Nation”

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On September 23, The Nation endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “Of course we endorse Harris over Trump,” the unsigned editorial reads. “But we also endorse Harris in her own right, as an experienced and capable leader with a vision for America’s future…that represents a clear advance on Democratic nominees of the past half century.” The endorsement goes on to cite the magazine’s abolitionist founders—“both visionary radicals and deeply practical politicians”—as touchstones for the decision to support Harris.

We, The Nation’s current interns, find this endorsement unearned and disappointing. We have a different interpretation of the magazine’s abolitionist legacy, one that says a publication committed to justice must refrain from endorsing a person signing off on genocide. We do not support Donald Trump, but to champion Harris at this moment is to ignore the atrocities that are being carried out with weapons supplied by the Biden-Harris administration.

The Nation’s endorsement notes that on foreign policy the “positive case [for Harris] is harder to make,” adding that “she has failed so far to offer anything more substantive to the millions of Americans…desperate for an end to America’s unconditional support for Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.” Yet it goes on to endorse her anyway—implying that domestic concerns are somehow more important. We disagree. On the grounds of Gaza alone, Harris should not have received The Nation’s endorsement.

In the 12 weeks since she effectively became the Democratic nominee, Harris has failed to differentiate her policies from Joe Biden’s blank-check support for genocide. Instead, she repeats the same bland pronouncements about the need for a ceasefire and uses the same passive-voice support for the idea of Palestinian “freedom and self-determination.” Again and again, she has been asked by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim voters, along with a broad coalition of Democrats of conscience, to offer an alternative, and again and again she has refused. She would not even allow a pre-vetted Palestinian supporter of hers to speak at the Democratic National Convention.

We have watched this abdication of moral responsibility by the Democratic nominee with a growing sense of dismay. As young journalists, we think of our colleagues in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 175 journalists in Gaza since last October—and right now, with US support and the Western media’s indifference, Israel is effectively issuing hit lists of reporters in Gaza. During the last year, The Nation has published dispatches from Palestinian journalists, from 14-year-old Lujayn to the journalist Mohammed Mhawish, both of whom have survived air strikes, most likely from US-made weapons. We cannot advocate for a person who is complicit in the murders of fellow journalists and the bombing of colleagues whose pieces we have fact-checked.

We also struggle with the idea that Harris’s domestic agenda can offset the suffering her policies will inflict abroad. As we map even her sunniest domestic proposals against the contours of her foreign-policy program, we remember James Baldwin, a Nation Editorial Board member, who said, “Every bombed village is my hometown.”

Harris, for instance, promises to provide tax credits to families with newborns and to sign a law to restore the right to abortion nationwide. Yet her commitment to the welfare of children doesn’t extend to the more than 17,000 kids killed in Gaza, hundreds of whom died from inadequate postnatal care like incubators. She will fight for reproductive care in the United States, but in Gaza, tens of thousands of mothers have or will give birth without access to doctors, pain relief, hospitals, or food and water.

Harris also pledges to strengthen our healthcare system. But in Gaza, as many as 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed, 30 of 36 hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, and fewer than half are even partially functional. People routinely die from the blockade of basic sanitary equipment, ordinary medicines, and vaccines.

Harris’s plans to relieve the housing crisis in the United States ring hollow next to her support for Israel’s destruction of homes in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. With the Biden-Harris administration’s full knowledge and aid, 90 percent of Gazans have been forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged and destroyed. Nor has the administration done anything to stop the demolitions of houses and illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

While the Harris campaign declares that “no one is above the law,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu breaks international human-rights law with impunity, as does his country. The International Court of Justice has condemned Israel’s illegal settlement and occupation of Palestinian territory as unlawful, while the International Court of Justice has found it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide. Nor has the Biden administration itself proved to be terribly law-abiding. The president, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have all been accused of violating the Genocide Convention and international law. Blinken has deliberately broken the law by covering up reports by two US agencies that found that Israel was carrying out war crimes in Gaza and should be denied further military aid. Meanwhile, the State Department has failed to enforce the Leahy law, which requires sanctions against militaries committing war crimes—like Israel’s notorious Netzah Yehuda battalion.

While some express hope that Harris will break with Biden on Israel as soon as she is elected, they would do well to remember that the current administration has hardly broken from Trump: It completed Trump’s plan to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and reaffirmed his acknowledgment of the illegally occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory. There is no evidence that Biden has constrained Netanyahu in his war, and any belief Harris would do so is wishful thinking.

At the same time as the Harris campaign has spurned Palestinian supporters, it has rebuffed the left more broadly. Harris has made it clear that she thinks she can win the White House by attracting more conservative voters. She is now posing as sufficiently right-wing that high-profile Republicans feel comfortable signing off on her candidacy. The Republicans for Harris movement’s membership lists the likes of Anthony Scarramucci and Stephanie Grisham—both of whom were part of Trump’s cabinet (and could vie for a spot in Harris’s administration as well, since she has promised it will include at least one Republican). In endorsing Harris, The Nation also now finds itself in the company of former vice president Dick Cheney, a principal architect of the Iraq War—a war that The Nation forcefully opposed from the outset.

In an unsigned editorial, this one published on the eve of Congress’s 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war, The Nation wrote: “The silence of those of you in the Democratic Party is especially troubling.… For the sake of staying in power, you are told, you must not exercise the power you have in the matter of the war. What, then, is the purpose of your reelection?”

The same question needs to be asked today.

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There will be people wondering whom we would endorse, if not Harris. Our answer is that we choose not to endorse any party’s candidate for president. We know that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster, but we believe that we cannot vote our way out of this genocide. And while some of us will be voting for president in November—and some of us will not—we all reject the idea that democracy will be safe under a Harris administration.

The systems of oppression in the United States and Israel are linked. It’s no coincidence that FEMA is running low on funds while the federal government sends $17.9 billion to Israel or that the inspirations for Cop City and other vast police training centers are Israeli Urban Warfare Training Centers, which were built with US aid. It’s no coincidence that the same technology that Israel uses to enforce apartheid the US deploys at its southern border, which Harris seems eager to further militarize.

Still, we want to be clear: In opting not to support Harris, we are not naïve enough to think we can opt out of politics altogether. Instead, we believe we must challenge institutions devoted to the status quo in the US and, crucially, in Israel. There are so many ways to engage.

When it comes to Gaza, you can protest—and keep protesting—until universities and workplaces divest from weapons manufacturers. You can support downballot candidates who support Palestinians. You can shut down highways. Interrupt speeches by war criminals. Boycott institutions and companies that profit from and perpetrate genocide. Give to mutual aid networks in Gaza and Lebanon that attempt to counteract the harm caused by US tax dollars. Don’t just unsubscribe but boycott news outlets that feed the genocidal rhetoric—and tell them why you are unsubscribing. And don’t stop talking about Gaza wherever you are.

As journalists, we take this last directive seriously, feeling the weight of the question Palestinian American writer Fargo Tbakhi posed in December: “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” We believe that one of the most vital contributions we can make is to confront the media ecosystem that enables—and all too often promotes—the slaughter of Palestinians. Over the last year we’ve seen the spirit of McCarthyism overtake our industry, with journalists being fired or pushed out of newsrooms or barred from covering Palestine for speaking out. Many publications are punishing journalists who have the moral clarity to accurately describe the horrors of the genocide. As long as journalists on the ground in Gaza continue to risk their lives to tell the story of their own annihilation, then the least US outlets can do is follow their lead and not be afraid to show the truth.

It is in seeking to follow their lead that we, as journalists, refuse to promote Harris. When we think of her, we do not think of the redemption of American democracy. We think of mangled bodies. Press jackets buried with shredded remains in shoeboxes. Hospital patients, still attached to IVs, burning alive. Grieving mothers wailing until they pass out. The haunted eyes of a Palestinian prisoner. We think of pigtails and lifeless eyes, the smell of rot over mass graves, bodies without heads.

We think of ashes, dust, and blood.

Written by Thomas Birmingham, Xenia Gonikberg, Kelly Hui, Samaa Khullar, and Grayson Scott.