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Episode: News Brief: Substance vs Vibes in VP Kamala Harris' Gaza PR Reboot

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 00:21:12

Episode Shownotes

In this public News Brief we analyze the new Democratic nominee's "shift in tone" and whether more sophisticated Empathy-Speak and continued appeals to bogus "ceasefire negotiations" signifies a meaningful break from Biden.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_01
Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citationsneededpodcast.

00:00:19 Speaker_01
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded and we do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full length episodes of Citations Needed. And today, Adam,

00:00:31 Speaker_01
We really wanted to talk about Kamala Harris and her position on Gaza.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
Now that Joe Biden has stepped aside after months of, let's say, poor campaign showings, a terrible debate, and nearly 10 months of fully supporting funding and justifying a genocide in Gaza, he is now out of the race. Kamala is the heir apparent.

00:00:56 Speaker_01
And so Kamala, maybe she doesn't have the Joe Biden genocide stink on her quite the same way, but I think it's really important that we dig into where she actually does stand.

00:01:10 Speaker_01
On palestine on gaza on the ongoing israeli genocide there and you have actually written a new piece for the real news network that came out on Wednesday july 31st with the headline israel's reckless escalations demand.

00:01:23 Speaker_01
We honestly scrutinize kamala harris's gaza position and adam I thought it would be good if you kind of laid out your take

00:01:30 Speaker_00
Yeah, I also wrote a piece the previous week for In These Times that covered somewhat similar ground, but specifically on the announcement prior to Netanyahu's speech before Congress on July 23rd, seven unions representing six million workers, including the UAW and SEIU, issued a demand that Biden stop the selling arms to Israel, stop providing military to Israel.

00:01:52 Speaker_00
And so this is part of a broader shift in demand and rhetoric that came about because the White House, as we've talked about on this show,

00:02:00 Speaker_00
since the Michigan primary, rather in anticipation and immediately after the Michigan primary, when the uncommitted movement was gaining steam, switched the definition of ceasefire to mean something completely different than what activists, what Oxfam, what Amnesty International, what UN agencies, and the hundreds of ex-Biden alum and Nobel laureates who signed petitions calling for a ceasefire, they completely switched the definition of ceasefire to mean something else.

00:02:24 Speaker_00
And the question became, and this bought them time. I wrote for my sub stack, this was a very successful PR effort. It took a lot of the heat off in conjunction with college campuses shutting down for the summer and police crackdowns.

00:02:36 Speaker_00
But this really helped contribute to a kind of vibe shift away from blaming Biden because they could point to these nebulous ceasefire negotiations. So what does that mean? I'll do a quick, brief recap of what that means.

00:02:51 Speaker_00
So, in October, November, December, calls for a ceasefire had a very clear historical precedent based on previous conflicts, 2008, 2009, Cast Lead, 2014, Protective Edge, 2018, 2021.

00:03:03 Speaker_00
There was a precedent for what ceasefire meant, which means the US uses its dispositive leverage to compel Israel to stop bombing and invading Gaza. And then Hamas will stop as well.

00:03:13 Speaker_00
Typically, Hamas is the one that wants to cease fire since they are a sub-state actor, and they don't have an air force. So they benefit far more from that. And Israel, of course, has these bunker busters, these 2,000-pound bombs, F-35s, F-16s, F-22s.

00:03:26 Speaker_00
So there's a historical precedent for what that means. Everybody knows what it means. Everybody, at least for the first few months, didn't act like they didn't know what it meant. But then when the uncommitted movement picked up steam,

00:03:37 Speaker_00
in february march and this is after the white house issued a memo on october twentieth rather the state department issued a memo in october twentieth preventing all state department employees white house employees from using the word ceasefire so they initially rejected they knew what it meant right everybody so that i had a very specific contextual meaning.

00:03:53 Speaker_00
In the context of Gaza, everybody knew what it meant. But then they realized they were getting hammered on this issue. This was right before the college campus protests really caught fire, but there were protests every day.

00:04:03 Speaker_00
And there was, of course, the uncommitted movement, which was leading to some embarrassing headlines. and delegitimizing the Biden 2024 run.

00:04:12 Speaker_00
So then they decided to do, again, if you paid me $700,000 and I worked for the White House and I had a sole embodiment, this is what I would have suggested, which is to just call you, say you're supporting a ceasefire, but just change the definition of ceasefire, right?

00:04:23 Speaker_00
This is kind of PR 101. Which is exactly what they did. Now it means temporary pause.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
It doesn't mean an actual cessation of killing people. It's just a temporary pause.

00:04:34 Speaker_00
Well it's a temporary pause for the purposes of hostage exchanges immediately followed by a firm commitment by Israel to continue the destruction of Gaza for quote unquote years if necessary.

00:04:45 Speaker_00
And so people say well they wanted a temporary pause because it could lead to a longer But that's actually not true.

00:04:51 Speaker_00
In fact, the second and then, of course, on May 31st, Biden gave his deeply cynical speech where he calls for a, quote, unquote, end to the war that gave people some brief hope until it was followed up by Matt Miller and others at the State Department who clarified that no, they support Israel's goal of, quote, unquote, eliminating Hamas, a goal that is

00:05:06 Speaker_00
not possible by definition, even according to Tony Blinken, who told Netanyahu that behind closed doors in January, according to NBC's Andrea Mitchell.

00:05:13 Speaker_00
So they have a pretextual and by definition, unachievable goal of eliminating basically an ideology or pretty much anyone with a gun fighting back, which, you know, good luck with that. We saw how that worked out for the U.S. and Afghanistan.

00:05:25 Speaker_00
And that is, of course, not really their goal. Their goal is to displace, to force immigration out of Gaza, to kill, to make life a living hell as part of a very open policy of collective punishment.

00:05:36 Speaker_00
And so they want this to sort of go on for as long as it needs to go on.

00:05:40 Speaker_00
And having these ceasefire negotiations they're allegedly taking part in provides the appropriate cover for this, because then they could always say, well, we are negotiating ceasefire.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
But then, of course, NEMA, they blew up the person they were ostensibly negotiating a ceasefire with. early Wednesday morning.

00:05:56 Speaker_01
Right. And just to be clear, that's Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated while attending the inauguration ceremonies for the new president of Iran, was assassinated in Tehran this week.

00:06:07 Speaker_01
And again, this is the longtime political leader of Hamas and the lead negotiator on whatever a ceasefire would be. And so the idea that Israel cares at all about actual negotiating a cessation of the ongoing genocide.

00:06:26 Speaker_01
I think it's pretty clear where Israel stands on that if they are assassinating the person that they're talking to.

00:06:32 Speaker_00
And this is the thing. Israel, to their credit, has been perfectly honest about this. Netanyahu has been perfectly honest about this. It's liberal Zionists and liberals in the U.S.

00:06:41 Speaker_01
who have been trying to spin this, who pretend that they are hand-wringing about this rather than that this is the entire policy.

00:06:48 Speaker_00
Well, they're pretending that this is pursuant some end of the hostilities. This is a total invention by US media and spinster stateside and the White House.

00:06:56 Speaker_00
This idea that this was an Israeli ceasefire proposal and the generally understood sense that this was an end of hostilities is something that Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected publicly in English.

00:07:07 Speaker_00
He is not saying that they want to end hostilities, and Israel has been saying X. The U.S.

00:07:12 Speaker_00
media then puts it into some liberalese translator, comes out as Y, and then you go back and you read X and you say, whoa, X doesn't equal Y. They're saying something completely different.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
They said hours after his May 31st speech, Netanyahu was crystal clear that he did not agree with Biden's interpretation of their proposal, which was

00:07:27 Speaker_00
Step one was a hostage, a temporary hostage release, and then they reserve the right to continue bombing and invading Gaza. That was very clear, and they're very firm about that. Israelis are not being shifty or deceptive here.

00:07:38 Speaker_00
This is purely the White House and the State Department projecting and asserting a vibes-based desire to end the war that simply doesn't exist.

00:07:46 Speaker_01
The media just wants people to think that Israel is not actively and consciously engaged in genocide.

00:07:53 Speaker_00
Right.

00:07:54 Speaker_00
And so there was very little effort on the media to even point out, again, as I wrote in my sub-stack months ago, back in June, that these two statements or two positions were entirely in contradiction, that the White House's definition of a ceasefire as anything that will, quote unquote, end the war.

00:08:09 Speaker_00
And then, of course, it was even contradicted by follow-up statements where they said, oh, Hamas surviving post-war is unacceptable.

00:08:15 Speaker_00
Well, if you demand the surrender or the destitution of the military defeat of an enemy as a condition of a ceasefire, that's not a ceasefire. That's just you winning the war.

00:08:24 Speaker_00
And so they had to look like they supported a ceasefire while maintaining support for the goals of a quote unquote, eliminating Hamas, which again, by Israel's own admission will take years.

00:08:34 Speaker_00
So what they did is they sort of put this ceasefire negotiations, which were really a negotiation of hostages and a temporary ceasefire. That was the only earnest negotiations. There was never any earnest negotiation to end the war ever.

00:08:43 Speaker_00
I mean, period. Israel rejected that out of hand. Everybody knows that. They put it in this category. That way, the burden shifts away from the White House. And onto this, you know, the sort of recalcitrant Hamas Israeli negotiator.

00:08:53 Speaker_00
So therefore they kind of wash their hands of it. Meanwhile, they continue to ship bombs and munitions to Israel as it continues to kill dozens of Palestinians a day, continues to displace, continues to starve.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
You know, now there's a polio outbreak in Gaza. And so the question became when Harris took over a week and a half ago was, What would her policy change? And there was a lot of vibes based, and again, I understand why people want that. I get it.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
There was always an assumption that Biden was even relative to other Democrats, uniquely pro-Israel, uniquely indifferent to Palestinian life.

00:09:26 Speaker_00
So she comes into, he drops out, she takes over more or less overnight, and then Netanyahu visits three days later, four days later. So immediately this is on the sort of radar, right? And then she gives a speech.

00:09:38 Speaker_00
She doesn't go to his speech, which I think was kind of a – but then she met with him. That was supposed to be some signal, doesn't fucking mean anything. She gets her inaugural Barak Ravid from Axios piece about increased tensions.

00:09:51 Speaker_00
That sort of leak piece that the Harris, you know, just like the Biden camp plants over and over again, they planted it. It's the sort of – to get the illusion of dissent, the illusion of disagreement.

00:10:01 Speaker_00
Then Yahoo doesn't mind those because it gets the libs off their back. It creates this idea that somehow there's real tension, right? Comes through the same reporter every single time.

00:10:10 Speaker_00
It's a trope so obvious I've written, I wrote about it back in December. Then she gives a speech and she sort of does more empathetic box checking than Biden historically done. Biden, again, to his sort of grim credit,

00:10:23 Speaker_00
never really even bothered giving a shit, acting like he gave a shit about Palestinian lives. He would maybe sort of throw in a word here and there, but it was mostly, you know, he denied death counts, didn't really seem like he gave a shit.

00:10:33 Speaker_00
Just an old, you know, old school kind of silent generation racist. And Kamala Harris gives the sort of right flowery, what I call empathy speak. And then she appeals to this alleged ceasefire negotiations.

00:10:45 Speaker_00
But in terms of actual policy, there's been at least now and again, this could change. And I want to be very clear, this could change. I'm not sort of being a doomer about this.

00:10:52 Speaker_00
But as of now, there is no meaningful difference between Biden's and Harris's Gaza policy.

00:10:56 Speaker_00
So let's read what the New York Times wrote on Thursday, August 1st about this, specifically in the context of her VP pick about Josh Shapiro, who infamously compared campus protests to the KKK, which led to some people being upset. But of course,

00:11:09 Speaker_00
it's true that all the vice president candidates are more or less going to also probably have the same position.

00:11:13 Speaker_00
The New York Times would write in their analysis of Harris's veep stakes, quote, the progressive wing of the party is already becoming less vocal in its criticism over Gaza, believing the vice president is inching towards them on Israel and Palestine.

00:11:25 Speaker_00
With her forthright calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, her acknowledgement of, quote, catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, unquote, in the territory, and her, quote, pledge to not be silent on Palestinian suffering, unquote.

00:11:36 Speaker_00
So this is a very bleak statement. If it is indeed true, it is a very bleak commentary on the sort of nature of the so-called US left, right?

00:11:44 Speaker_00
Because there are groups, plenty of Palestinian organizations, the Uncommitted Movement, Rashida Tlaib has said she's withholding her endorsement until she gets a phone call or hears some indication from from Vice President Harris.

00:11:56 Speaker_00
There are plenty of ways in which Harris can signal and back channel a meaningful break from Biden to actually use America's leverage to end this conflict, if in the event that she becomes president. And she hasn't done so.

00:12:09 Speaker_00
She has not done that at all. What she's done is more sophisticated, empathy speak.

00:12:13 Speaker_00
You know, the late Glenn Ford, you know, who I didn't always agree with, and I don't even necessarily agree with the sort of extremeness of the statement, but I always said, Barack Obama is not the lesser of two evils.

00:12:22 Speaker_00
He's the more effective of two evils. And I think he probably was the lesser of two evils, but I think it's kind of also speaking to a real truth, which is Obama did do a lot of evil stuff because he was more effective.

00:12:32 Speaker_00
And old, stodgy racists like Biden just aren't as sophisticated at this kind of rhetoric. Right. And Harris is good at it, you know, sort of, we will not be silent. She literally says, we see you, you hear you.

00:12:42 Speaker_00
It's this kind of, you know, nonprofit-ese that she's comfortable speaking in. But of course, 395 and Empathy Speak will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. This doesn't mean anything. This is literally just vacuous rhetoric.

00:12:55 Speaker_00
And so those who are charged with trying to provide some kind of momentum to end the genocide have understandably been like, okay, cool, but what is your actual policy change? And thus far, that has not been forthcoming.

00:13:07 Speaker_00
And so what you get is you get the New York Times saying, oh, well, look, the zoomers fell for it. They're a bunch of fucking drooling idiots.

00:13:12 Speaker_01
without actually crediting anyone, right?

00:13:14 Speaker_01
They're doing the kind of some say or, you know, we hear that like, yeah, no one is quoted then in the in the times as being like, you know, Jewish voice for peace, you know, says that Kamala Harris is moving left on this.

00:13:28 Speaker_01
Like no one is going no one is credited because it's not real. It's not a real thing.

00:13:32 Speaker_01
So the Times is just kind of laundering, you know, maybe like liberal slash slightly progressive leaning people that they're talking to as kind of a broader shift, right?

00:13:42 Speaker_01
This idea that the left, quote unquote, is shifting and, you know, less vocal about this issue because they trust more in Kamala Harris's position. But there's no, you know, there's no systemic

00:13:54 Speaker_01
movement towards that, which can be credited, which can be pointed to. So it's just, you know, it's all vibes.

00:14:00 Speaker_01
And, you know, right now, this campaign is kind of running on vibes, and how those vibes are then translated through the campaign to audiences on the other side of the media is the media's job, right?

00:14:11 Speaker_01
So the media is doing that kind of vibe shift on behalf of the Harris campaign.

00:14:15 Speaker_00
Well no one in the media literally nobody is actually interrogating what any of these concepts mean so when the new york times says that there's a sort of myth that has called for a ceasefire and before the white house did that's not true at all she gave a speech on march fourth.

00:14:31 Speaker_00
which was a week after Biden used the word ceasefire for the first time in anticipation of the February 27th, Michigan primary.

00:14:37 Speaker_00
Her messaging, and then when you read the speech and you read her follow-up comments, what her definition of a ceasefire was a temporary pause, but it used to be what a temporary pause was.

00:14:45 Speaker_00
That she did not support a lasting ceasefire, as John Kirby laid out in his interview with The New Yorker. that same week. The White House did not support a long-term ceasefire.

00:14:53 Speaker_00
We have no indication that what she's saying when she says immediate ceasefire is that she supports a ceasefire in the sense that people with guns in Palestine are permitted to continue in Gaza, which is the definition of what eliminating Hamas means to Israel as they've laid out.

00:15:08 Speaker_00
There's no indication. Again, a ceasefire that's just the other side surrender is not a call for a ceasefire. And I feel like I'm losing my mind here because the media just kind of went with it. They're like, okay, Biden supports a ceasefire now.

00:15:18 Speaker_00
But if they don't support a ceasefire, what they're demanding and what they're saying is a repeated demand of surrender or a commitment to a years-long Israeli military campaign to completely level and destroy anyone at Gaza fighting back.

00:15:30 Speaker_00
There is no indication. Again, I assume there's some splits within the White House. I assume the CIA genuinely wants to wrap this up. I don't doubt that. But they've never really made that clear from a policy standpoint.

00:15:42 Speaker_00
And there's absolutely no reason to believe that. They want a genuine ceasefire as you and I understand it, as activists use it, as it's understood in normal contextual conversation.

00:15:50 Speaker_01
You can't really be calling for a ceasefire while continuing to ship bombs and bullets to one side.

00:15:56 Speaker_00
Especially when the one side just bombed the person they're supposedly negotiating a ceasefire with. I mean, if you need any more evidence that this is not a good faith, quote unquote, ceasefire negotiation,

00:16:06 Speaker_01
That would be it but of course they know that which is which is our entire point that ceasefire doesn't mean ceasefire.

00:16:12 Speaker_01
It means surrender and it's being used to try and dull the efficacy or the You know kind of power building maybe of the uncommitted movement and others who are actually trying to hold kamala harris to account on this, you know kind of front end of the

00:16:30 Speaker_01
new presidential campaign and this kind of homestretch season where we are seeing this genocide now enter its 10th month.

00:16:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, and it's important for people to not be bogged down in the vibes and the fog. And so I wrote for my piece, I'm going to quote myself, which is kind of annoying, but it's easier.

00:16:47 Speaker_00
Quote, one must stay focused and keep in mind three central questions. One, are kids still being bombed? Two, are US bombs still being shipped? Three, is the person in question refusing to commit to stopping the shipment of said bombs bombing said kids?

00:17:00 Speaker_00
If the answer to all three questions is yes, then bleeding heart box checking and vague appeals to a ceasefire negotiation don't really matter much at all.

00:17:09 Speaker_00
And I think that's the questions you have to keep repeating yourself, which is, this is why the shift after the White House co-opted the term ceasefire. This is why the shift among activists and among unions.

00:17:19 Speaker_00
Again, these are unions representing 6 million workers shifted to ending military aid because the implied mechanism of enforcing a ceasefire prior to that co-option effort was the threat of removing military aid.

00:17:30 Speaker_00
And now people just have to say it explicitly because the White House got fucking cute and just redefine the term. But the idea is you withhold U.S. support for genocide. And then people say, oh, well, it doesn't matter if the U.S. supports Israel.

00:17:42 Speaker_00
They're going to keep doing it, which is not true at all, by the way. Nobody believes that. Brookings Institute, Israeli officials say it all the time. But even if you grant that to be true,

00:17:48 Speaker_00
Still funding and arming a genocide is still bad as such per se, right? Like it is still not good.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
Exactly.

00:17:55 Speaker_01
Well, it's like the ceasefire to halting military aid switch is kind of like that switch from like saying vaguely Black Lives Matter, something that could be co-opted and has been co-opted and then actually shifting it to saying defund the police, something that is much harder.

00:18:11 Speaker_01
It actually means something. There are meaningful policy shifts. There are meaningful outcomes. Things need to happen to make that thing be real. You can't just be like, well, there's a ceasefire.

00:18:24 Speaker_01
But what we actually mean is we're going to stop for 15 minutes before Israel continues carpet bombing. But that was a ceasefire because it ceased firing for 19 seconds.

00:18:33 Speaker_00
That was the analogy I made on Sam Seder's show yesterday. I said the exact same thing.

00:18:37 Speaker_00
I said, there's a reason when you can have the wellsfargo.com Black Lives Matter forum, you can't really have the wellsfargo.com abolish the police or defund the police forum, right?

00:18:48 Speaker_00
And I understand why people rallied around the term ceasefire, because it had a historical precedent. Everybody knew what it meant, it had a very specific contextual meaning.

00:18:56 Speaker_00
But I think we didn't maybe people didn't anticipate enough this sort of cynicism of the White House.

00:19:00 Speaker_01
That's exactly what we keep underestimating how cynical support for genocide is.

00:19:07 Speaker_01
And so that shift, that very vocal shift and now backed by powerful unions representing millions of people actually calling for real, real different policy in the form of halting military aid.

00:19:20 Speaker_00
And make no mistake, there are groups and people who Harris can signal to, to make those assurances. And yet every single one of those groups and every single one of those people are completely silent and not endorsed her yet. So she has yet to do so.

00:19:31 Speaker_00
That doesn't mean she can't. But it's important that people not, as the New York Times seems to think has already happened, not get swept up in the vibes, not get swept up in wishful thinking, wishcasting, and reading into this liberal

00:19:44 Speaker_00
Empathy speak this is not going to change anything there needs to be commitments now she could of course reneg on the commitments but at least it's something right in the fact that she hasn't made that indicates that those things probably mean something.

00:19:55 Speaker_00
And it's important we can stay focused and ask yourself the central three questions are kids still being bombed. Number two, is the US still sending those bombs? And number three, is the person in question for or against continuing to send those bombs?

00:20:08 Speaker_00
And if the answer to that is all three is yes, then nothing else they say matters.

00:20:13 Speaker_01
Well, that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Please do check out Adam's new pieces on The Real News Network and his piece last week in In These Times. We will be back very soon with another full-length episode of Citations Needed.

00:20:28 Speaker_01
So thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citationsneededpodcast.

00:20:40 Speaker_01
We are 100% lister-funded, so all your support is so very much appreciated. But that will do it. Citations needed. Senior producer is Florence Borough Adams. Producer is Julianne Tweeton. Production assistant is Trenton Lightburn.

00:20:53 Speaker_01
Newsletter by Marco Carvalhano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. I'm Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. Thanks again, everyone. We'll catch you next time.