Is Kamala Harris a Zionist?

As Vice President Kamala Harris emerged this week as the Democrat all but certain to replace President Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, some activists who had dogged Biden for his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict started challenging Harris on similar fronts.

From the pro-Palestinian left, Maryam Iqbal, a leader of Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, warned on X: “She is a Zionist.” And Zei Squirrel, a popular account on the platform, called Harris a “genocidal Zionist queen” who is  “wedded to the ongoing Gaza genocide.”

Meanwhile, Judea Pearl, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles — and the father of Daniel Pearl, the journalist murdered by Pakistani militants in 2002 — wrote , “I am waiting for Kamala Harris to declare publicly ‘I am a Zionist.’”

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And the number of people asking Google “Is Kamala Harris is a Zionist?” spiked, with a large share of queries coming from Michigan, where 100,000 Democratic primary voters voted “uncommitted” in February as a rebuke to Biden’s support for Israel.

The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a query Thursday morning about whether the vice president considers herself a Zionist and CNN reported Thursday “an aide did not give a direct answer” when asked that same question by the cable network. A deep dive into past coverage of Harris and her social media posts suggests that she has never publicly stated — and perhaps never been directly asked until this week — her views on the terms Zionist and Zionism. She does seem to have met various criteria for what might make someone a Zionist, though the very definition of the term has become contentious and elusive.

What is Zionism?

Zionism began as a Jewish nationalist movement established in the late 19th Century by Theodor Herzl. It eventually focused on creating a Jewish nation-state in the Jews’ biblical homeland, which was then known as Palestine and under the rule of the Ottoman empire.

Once a deeply contentious issue even among major mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States, Zionism became a largely unifying cause among American Jews following Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 and especially after its victories in the wars of 1967 and 1973.

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Virtually no public surveys in the U.S. have explicitly asked whether people consider themselves “Zionists,” but polls have consistently found that around 85% of American Jews want Israel to remain under Jewish control. Alan Cooperman, director of the Pew Research Center, has explained that pollsters may avoid asking about Zionism because people “have different understandings of the term.”

Some Jews who support a Jewish state also have increasingly shied away from identifying as Zionists as it has become a pejorative in left-wing spaces. On many college campuses, the term is presumed to mean an endorsement of the worst Israeli abuses toward Palestinians, rather than support for independent Jewish and Palestinian states existing side-by-side, the position held by most American Jews.

That all makes it hard to say whether Harris would call herself a Zionist. But she has repeatedly expressed support for Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, favorably quoted from Herzl’s Zionist manifesto and raised money for the Jewish National Fund.

Kamala Harris raised money for a Zionist organization that plants trees in Israel

Biden has used the Z-word openly and proudly for decades, famously declaring shortly after the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel, “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” Not so Harris, but the Times of Israel quoted an unnamed former official in the Biden administration on Monday saying that while Harris might not openly identify as a Zionist, “believing in a need for a Jewish state” — one traditional definition of Zionist — is “where she’s at.”

And Sam Lauter, a board member of Democratic Majority for Israel, told Jewish Insider this week that Harris is an “old school liberal Zionist.”

Harris herself has said that “as a young girl growing up in the Bay Area in California,” she fundraised for the Jewish National Fund, which was founded in 1901 to purchase land for Jewish settlement in historic Palestine. The organization says that dropping coins into its iconic blue boxes — is a “popular means to turn the Zionist vision into a reality.”

“Those of you who — I will date myself — who are old enough, you will remember those little blue boxes, which we would walk around asking people to please donate so we could plant trees in Israel,” Harris said in a speech last year celebrating Israel’s 75th anniversary.

“And yet, that act of us as children and young people was about so much more,” she continued. “It was about our sense of connection to the importance of building the state of Israel, helping the Jewish people thrive, dreaming together and willing the dream into reality.”

Kamala Harris has supported Israel while in public office — but added sympathy for Palestinians

Harris sponsored several pro-Israel measures in Congress while serving as California’s junior senator, and during the 2020 election she pledged support for unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. As vice president she has reiterated the administration’s commitment to Israel’s security and she recently hosted a White House screening of Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary on sexual violence during the Hamas terror attack. “We cannot look away and we will not be silent,” Harris said at the event. “My heart breaks for all these survivors and their families and for all the pain and suffering from the past eight months in Israel and in Gaza.”

But Harris has also advocated within the administration for greater empathy toward Palestinians suffering in Gaza, and in March she publicly called for an immediate ceasefire. While she has regularly spoken out against antisemitism, Harris has been more careful than Biden about distinguishing between harsh criticism of Israel and antisemitism.

The vice president skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress Wednesday to attend a Black sorority conference in Indiana. But a spokesperson told Jewish Insider that the move “should not be interpreted as a change in her position with regard to Israel.”

After she met privately with Netanyahu Thursday, Harris reiterated her “longstanding and unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel and the people of Israel” but also said she would “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering in Gaza.”

“Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters,” she said. “What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating.”

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