Vice President Kamala Harris met privately with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday at the White House. The meeting took approximately 40 minutes, according to Israel’s Government Press Office.
The meeting came a day after Harris skipped Netanyahu’s speech to Congress to attend a sorority luncheon, and after she struggled to condemn radical anti-Israel protests that saw the U.S. flag burned on the streets of Washington, D.C.
Netanyahu’s visit with Harris became a necessity after she emerged quickly this week as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, following President Joe Biden’s announcement Sunday that he would drop out of the race.
Harris has a decidedly mixed record on Israel. As Breitbart News reported earlier this week:
Harris has a mixed record on Israel. She, like most of the other Democratic presidential candidates, boycotted the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in 2019, then met separately with the group.
More recently, she praised the “emotion” behind anti-Israel protests (while rejecting their antisemitism). She warned Israel of consequences if it attacked Hamas in the town of Rafah in Gaza — “I have studied the maps,” she infamously declared — and bizarrely mourned the loss of “innocent lives” in Israel’s daring rescue of four hostages in Gaza.
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish, and helped lead the Biden administration’s controversial antisemitism “strategy” — which included working with an antisemitic Muslim group to protect extreme criticism of Israel.
Netanyahu will meet with former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Friday.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “ ”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “ The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
