“I believe the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable,” she told New York’s Salute to Israel Parade at AIPAC’s annual conference shortly after taking office as senator in 2017. (AIPAC is a powerful — and particularly hawkish — pro-Israel lobbying group.)
According to Harris, her commitment to Israel started as a child. “It is just something that has always been a part of me,” Harris said at a private AIPAC conference the following year. “It’s almost like saying, ‘When did you first realize you loved your family or love your country?”
In the same speech, Harris recalled raising money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout. “We would … collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”
One of Harris’s first acts as a U.S. senator was to break — over Israel — with outgoing Democratic President Barack Obama, whose administration pointedly abstained in late 2016 from vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned the Jewish state for annexing land via settlements. Harris co-sponsored a Senate resolution that declared Obama’s position “inconsistent with long-standing United States policy.” Likewise, one of Harris’s first international trips as a senator was to Israel, where she met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2017.
GayJew
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