President Joe Biden’s decision to abandon his re-election bid amid growing concerns over his age has completely upended the 2024 presidential contest, which now appears to be between former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris, the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. Who Americans ultimately choose to succeed Biden will have a profound impact not only on the future of the U.S., but of the wider world—and perhaps nowhere more so than in Gaza.
Biden, who has committed to remaining in office until the end of his term in January 2025, has indicated that he will dedicate the remainder of his presidency to ending Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which is in its ninth month, and securing the release of the roughly 120 Israeli hostages who have remained captive there since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack. So far, Israel’s bombardment has resulted in the near-complete destruction of the Strip and the killing of more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the U.S. government and the U.N., though researchers fear the actual toll is much higher. While Biden has expressed optimism about the prospect of achieving an as-yet-elusive ceasefire deal, few expect him to change tack on the issue between now and January.
“The fact that he doesn’t have to think about potential reelection, I don’t think it’s going to change very much,” says Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, a U.S.-based political research group. “I don’t think he’s going to radically shift course.”
Under Harris: Continuity, with some potential for change
Should the war continue into January, however, the responsibility of ending it will fall to whoever Biden’s successor is—an outcome that will almost certainly shape the U.S.’s policy on this issue. If that person is Harris, observers predict that she will bring as much continuity as she does change. Compared to Biden, who is regarded as perhaps the most pro-Israel president in American history, Harris doesn’t have the same deep-seated affinity for Israel, nor does she seemingly share Biden’s longstanding, if at times fractious, relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Harris, in an apparent snub, has opted against presiding over the Israeli premier’s contentious address to Congress this week; she is, however, expected to meet with him privately at another point during his visit.
The Vice President has proven herself to be more attuned to the concerns of Democratic voters who are increasingly perturbed by the immense suffering taking place in Gaza as a result of Israeli bombardment backed and funded by the U.S. She was the first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and openly took the Israeli government to task for not doing enough to help ease the “humanitarian catastrophe,” lamenting that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” While Biden did eventually come around to these positions, Harris was seen to do so first, and more forcefully.
“Her language was the most humanizing when it came to the Palestinians—or, at the very least, the least dehumanizing to the Palestinians,” says Hala Rharrit, a former Arabic language spokesperson for the State Department who resigned earlier this year in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. “When we were actually seeking to amplify certain messaging from the administration to the Arab world, we would often pull out from her speeches.”
Still, observers warn that rhetorical differences between Harris and Biden don’t necessarily presage major policy deviations. Harris, like Biden, has repeatedly pledged support for Israel’s security and self-defense. She has also dismissed calls by her fellow lawmakers to introduce conditions on aid to Israel, in line with U.S. law.
Read More: What Gaza Reveals About the Limits of American Power
“There is a well-established Democratic establishment consensus on Israel-Palestine, and I don’t expect Harris to break out of it to go to the more progressive side of the party,” says H.A. Hellyer, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the Middle East. “At the same time, Biden held a particularly hard line when it came to supporting Israel. Harris won’t need to hold to that in order to keep the party together.”
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and policy network, agrees that Harris would be unlikely to usher in any significant policy changes. But he notes that her lack of ideological commitment to Israel relative to Biden could make her more open to change in future. “She might see where this unconditional support for Israel is actually hurting U.S. interests more than Biden was able to see,” he says. “She might even be able to see how it’s hurting Israeli interests and she might take more of a combative stance against Netanyahu in particular and try to separate him and his far-right corner from her support for Israel.”
Under Trump: “Nobody has any idea what he’s going to do on anything”
Should Harris lose the election and Trump be reinstated in the Oval Office, however, one might expect the former president to resume the kind of unambiguous support for Israel seen during his first term. After all, it was Trump who opted to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (the eastern half,which is considered occupied Palestinian territory under international law) and struck a series of normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors known as the Abraham Accords. But Trump’s rather incongruous statements on the state of the war (he has simultaneously suggested that Israel ought to end the war and “get back to normalcy” and that the U.S. should let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza) make it difficult to predict exactly what he might do.
“Trump obviously is a wildcard because nobody has any idea what he’s going to do on anything,” says Koplow, noting that the former president’s insistence that Israel “finish up” the war could be interpreted both as him suggesting that the war needs to end, or as a tacit endorsement for Israel to do what it needs to in order to achieve its endgame of “total victory.”
But even if Trump opts to continue Republicans’ staunch support of Israel, his backing of the war could be tested depending on how long it drags on. “He’s very transactional about everything with U.S. foreign policy,” Koplow says, referencing Trump’s long standing aversion to U.S. funding for NATO and Ukraine.
“The isolationist wing is just louder in Republican circles now than it was before,” Koplow adds, noting that while many tend to make exceptions for Israel, “a lot of them don’t.”
