Kamala Harris backs Israel, pushes Netanuahu on peace

The US Vice-President declares she will ‘not be silent’ about the suffering of innocent Palestinians in the war to destroy Hamas.

Benjamin Netanyahu meets Kamala Harris in Washington on Thursday. Picture: AFP

Kamala Harris has backed Israel’s right to defend itself but declared she would “not be silent” about the suffering of innocent Palestinians in the nine-month-long war to destroy Hamas, and said “far too many” had died.

The Vice-President and Joe Biden met separately with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday (Friday AEST), after his landmark speech in congress a day earlier, which Ms Harris and dozens of congressional Democrats controversially declined to attend.

Ms Harris, whom pro-Israel advocates fear might take a tougher line on the Jewish state as president than Mr Biden, in part to satisfy the left wing of the Democratic Party, which takes a dim view of Israel’s military actions, said “what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating”.

“There has been hopeful movement in the talks to secure an agreement on this deal. And as I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” she said, in public remarks that weren’t earlier on her public schedule.

“So to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire, and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”

Earlier, Mr Biden, whose repeated attempts to broker a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel have failed, had an hour-long meeting with the Israeli leader in the White House before the meeting with Ms Harris.

His Vice-President’s growing clout on the international stage came as a new poll showed she and Donald Trump were almost level in the presidential race, confirming the new Democratic nominee is more competitive against the Republican candidate than Mr Biden had been.

The poll also shows that Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Ms Harris as their new nominee, with only 14 percent saying they would want another option.

Democrats have rushed to endorse the Vice-President, who was anointed as the party’s new nominee within 48 hours of Mr Biden’s withdrawal, and without a challenger.

Former president Barack Obama is expected to endorse Ms Harris in coming days, according to The New York Times, after standing out for declining to back her in the hours and days after the President threw his weight behind his 59-year-old deputy.

The New York Times/Siena College poll found Mr Trump leads Ms Harris by just 48 per cent to 47 per cent, compared to the last poll earlier this month which showed Mr Biden six points behind Mr Trump.

The findings will boost the Democrats after a dramatic and unprecedented week in which the president abandoned his quest for a second term and Mr Harris clinched the nomination.

The poll shows Ms Harris doing better than Mr Biden with younger and non-white voters, two demographics which Mr Biden was struggling to attract.

Ms Harris on Thursday (Friday AEST) spoke at her fourth public event in four days since Mr Biden quit the race, repeating her theme that Mr Trump would “return America to a dark past”.

“We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books,” she told a cheering crowd, referring to state-based Republican policies to withdraw sexually explicit books from public school libraries.

“Bring it on,” she declared at the event organised by the American Teachers Federation, the first union to endorse Ms Harris publicly, as she praised unions for their role in boosting middle-class living standards. “They have the nerve to tell teachers to strap on a gun in the classroom while they refuse to pass common sense gun safety laws,” she said.

Separately, Democrats lambasted comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance in 2021, in which he said in a Fox News interview the US was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made”, playing into the hands of Democrat party strategists who hope to cast Republicans as anti-women.

Mr Trump has labelled Ms Harris as a radical-left extremist, saying her ideology and record made her unfit for office and a danger to the nation.

He has attacked her over her failure to secure the border, her role in the cost-of-living crisis, saying her policies would drive up energy prices and threaten Americans’ right to own a gun.

But the former president, who has continued to attack Mr Biden this week even after he quit the race, stopped short of saying he should be removed as President immediately.

“Should he stay? I guess that’s up to him, and it’s up to the people, and I don’t think they should use the 25th Amendment,” Mr Trump said, referring to the amendment that declares a president unfit for office.

Mr Trump, who is due to meet with Mr Netanyahu at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Saturday (AEST), said Israel was facing an increase in bad publicity over its war with Gaza and he was urging Mr Netanyahu “to finish up and get it done quickly”.

“You got to get it done quickly, because they are getting decimated with this publicity,” Mr Trump said. “And you know, Israel is not very good at public relations.”

Speculation over whom Ms Harris would pick as her running mate continued to swirl days after her nomination was all but confirmed, with focus remaining on the governors of critical swing states in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Josh Shapiro and Andy Beshear respectively.