Nevertheless, like her boss, Harris has been vulnerable to the occasional verbal gaffe. On a tour of the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea in September 2022 to reassert Washington’s help for Seoul, she mistakenly touted a US “alliance with the Republic of North Korea”, which aides later corrected.
If Harris turns into her get together’s standard-bearer and might overcome Trump’s lead in pre-election opinion polls to win the White Home, the Israel-Palestinian battle would rank excessive on her agenda, particularly if the Gaza warfare remains to be raging.
Though as vice chairman she has principally echoed Biden in firmly backing Israel’s proper to defend itself after Hamas militants carried out a lethal cross-border raid on Oct 7, she has at occasions stepped out barely forward of the president in criticising Israel’s army strategy.
In March, she bluntly criticised Israel, saying it was not doing sufficient to ease a “humanitarian disaster” throughout its floor offensive within the Palestinian enclave. Later that month, she didn’t rule out “penalties” for Israel if it launched a full-scale invasion of refugee-packed Rafah in southern Gaza.
Such language has raised the chance that Harris, as president, may take at the least a stronger rhetorical line with Israel than Biden, analysts say.
Whereas her 81-year-old boss has a protracted historical past with a succession of Israeli leaders and has even referred to as himself a “Zionist”, Harris, 59, lacks his visceral private connection to the nation.
She maintains nearer ties to Democratic progressives, a few of whom have pressed Biden to connect circumstances to US weapons shipments to Israel out of concern for prime Palestinian civilian casualties within the Gaza battle.
However analysts don’t anticipate there could be a giant shift in US coverage towards Israel, Washington’s closest ally within the Center East.
Halie Soifer, who served as nationwide safety adviser to Harris throughout the then-senator’s first two years in Congress, from 2017 to 2018, stated Harris’ help of Israel has been simply as sturdy as Biden’s. “There actually has been no daylight to be discovered” between the 2, she stated.