Sen. Mitch McConnell in conversation with Jewish Insider
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sat down with Jewish Insider on Thursday for an interview about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the surging rates of antisemitism in the United States, and the foreign policy divisions within both parties.Seth Mandel: Harris’s Naivete on the Mideast
The conversation came one day after Netanyahu’s joint session and the subsequent protests that turned violent and saw the defacing of Union Station, and hours after McConnell called on the Department of Justice to pursue the same maximum sentences for those involved in the Wednesday’s violence that prosecutors sought “for the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6.”
Below is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity:
Jewish Insider: I want to start with what you said on the floor this morning about what we’ve seen occur at the Watergate and at Union Station over the past few days. I’m going to quote you, you said it “only underscores the challenge facing the world’s only Jewish state.” Taking a more domestic view, what do you think these last 36 hours say about the current state of antisemitism in the United States and what do you think needs to be done to address it?
Mitch McConnell: I think from the very beginning, this effort to try to convince people that there’s some sort of moral equivalence between how Israel is conducting the war and how it started has been outrageous. [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi yesterday attacking the prime minister of Israel for what I thought was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard shows you that on the political left in this country, they’re confused, in my view, about the moral equivalency between being attacked and defending yourself and going after the attackers. So, I think it tells you something about the critics that they can’t tell the difference between Hamas, which started the whole thing and murdered 1,200 people, and the response to that, which has been about as selective as the Israeli military could be.
JI: About Democrats, do you have any thoughts on the dichotomy between [Senate Foreign Relations] Chairman [Ben] Cardin, who presided in Vice President Harris’ place and praised the address, with [Senate Minority] Leader [Chuck] Schumer still not offering his thoughts on the speech? What do you make of that? Is it that Chairman Cardin is retiring and doesn’t have to worry about political considerations?
MM: He was the only one willing to do it. The vice president, who should have been there, was not there. The president pro tem [Patty Murray] took a pass. I think the Democrats in the United States are confused about which side we ought to be on, unequivocally on. They’re divided by a fanatically sort of anti-Israel crowd. Frankly, I’ve been surprised by the level of antisemitism in this country. I had no idea, I thought this was something we had gotten past years ago. I’m pleased that in my party there seems to be no confusion about which side we ought to be on. I’m proud of our folks for sticking with Israel, our Democratic ally. Even the Biden administration trying to tell the Israelis how to run the war or the majority leader saying they ought to have an election, it’s not our job to tell a Democratic ally defending itself how to conduct a war, and by the way, you ought to have an election to get a new prime minister. We don’t do that normally, and I’m certain the Israelis are not confused about seeing the difference in this country.
The question that first came to mind watching Kamala Harris’s brief monologue (it was billed as a press conference, but there were no question taken) after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was: Who is she talking to? Who is the audience for this?Seth Mandel: Identity Politics and the Israel-Hamas War
By the end of her comments, I realized she wasn’t actually trying to convince or reassure anyone of anything. It would have been quite useful to hear her answer questions in the moment, but alas we’re not yet at that stage of the Kamala rollout.
One point of continuity between Harris and Biden, however, was made clear when the vice president seemed to address a Democratic base that no longer exists. She went to great efforts to project empathy for the Palestinians when the progressive activist base doesn’t want to hear anything about Palestinians. Their focus is Israel, exclusively.
Hence, “Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” is crafted to appeal to both sides. And that might have succeeded… in 1994. The activists who have been interrupting President Biden’s speeches and press conferences and church visits don’t believe Israel has a right to defend itself and therefore “how it does so” doesn’t matter at all to them. The rioters attacking police officers yesterday while painting “Hamas is coming” graffiti, the “tentifada” students on college campuses, and the captured academic institutions all share a strong belief that Israel’s self-defense is itself illegitimate.
Indeed, the UN’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Francesca Albanese, rejected outright Israel’s right to self-defense after Hamas’s October massacre.
“The right to self-defense can be invoked when the state is threatened by another state, which is not the case,” Albanese said in November. “It cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory kept under belligerent occupation.”
Israel’s putative occupation of Gaza ended 20 years ago, but Albanese is speaking the language of the global left, which does not acknowledge this indisputable reality. A very popular slogan among the demonstrators is “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”
In May, the New York Times looked into why antiwar sentiment at black colleges didn’t turn into pro-Hamas encampments. “The reasons stem from political, cultural and socioeconomic differences with other institutions of higher learning,” the reporters wrote. “While H.B.C.U.s host a range of political views, domestic concerns tend to outweigh foreign policy in the minds of most students. Many started lower on the economic ladder and are more intently focused on their education and their job prospects after graduation.”
There is also a sense of self-awareness at these colleges that is sorely lacking at a ridiculous elite circus like Columbia. “Whether people support the decision or not,” Morehouse President David Thomas said of the school hosting a speech by Biden, “they are committed to having it happen on our campus in a way that doesn’t undermine the integrity or dignity of the school.”
One gets the sense that, just as dignity is not a word readily associated with the behavior of students and faculty at Columbia or the University of Pennsylvania, dignity is also unlikely to be a factor in the considerations of a hundred thousand white women for Harris—the latter are heavily invested in self-actualization, not self-awareness.
So are these white wonder women going to turn their self-love army into anti-Kamala riots in Chicago? Unlikely. Will they interrupt Harris’s speeches to accuse her of not caring about “brown people”? I don’t think they will. Legions of white women who think saving the world requires a vote for Kamala Harris aren’t going to protest Kamala Harris as an avatar of white supremacy and colonialism.
The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, one of the more prominent voices to amplify celebrations of Hamas’s slaughter on October 7, wants Harris to believe the threat is there. “If Harris does not get Gaza and protests right, especially as colleges start the fall semester — the campaign will be in *SERIOUS* trouble with young + PoC voters,” she posted. Attiah added: “Do people not understand that these groups could just as easily organize massive ‘Young People for Uncommitted’ Zooms just as quickly as people mobilized for Harris?”
No, they can’t. And they won’t. Harris’s speech yesterday suggests she, unfortunately, won’t seek to take much advantage of the neutralizing of this factional revolt when it comes to the war in Gaza. Harris seems dedicated to presenting the conflict as a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas. But her strong statement against the pro-Hamas protesters and rioters on Wednesday was a sign that she understands that the insulation from protests that Biden had pales in comparison to what Harris has in her pocket.