Former Vice President Kamala Harris accused both the Biden and Trump administrations of failing to rein in Israel over Gaza, drawing sharp rebukes from Jewish Republicans and a former campaign aide.
Speaking Wednesday at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, South Korea, Harris said Washington should have used its leverage “sooner and more forcefully” against the Israeli government during the war in Gaza. The New York Post reported her remarks targeting both the administration she served and the one now in office.
Harris framed the failure as a bipartisan lapse. She cast the current White House as too deferential to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and said her own team waited too long to push harder.
In her own words, she left little room for ambiguity about where she places blame.
"Most recently, the failure to use our leverage to curtail the Israeli government’s horrific conduct in the war in Gaza, both under the current administration, which offers [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu a blank check, and our administration before, where we should have acted sooner and more forcefully,"
That line put her former running mate’s record and President Trump’s approach in the same dock. It also revived a long-running fight over how she has talked about Israel when the cameras are on and when the pressure comes from the left.
The Republican Jewish Coalition did not treat the Seoul speech as a surprise. The group called her comments “unsurprising” and pointed to a pattern it says has defined her approach for years.
RJC cited her decision to skip Netanyahu’s 2024 address to Congress. It also flagged her opposition to legislation aimed at the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as BDS, which seeks to isolate Israel economically and culturally.
Those earlier choices matter because they undercut any claim that this was a one-off foreign-policy critique. They fit a record of distance from Israel’s elected leadership at moments when many Democrats still showed up.
That same distance has shown up at home, where Democrats have moved away from Harris as midterm campaigns take shape and party leaders weigh who still helps on the trail.
Harris had also called for a halt to Israeli military operations in Rafah. The Israel Defense Forces later found and rescued hostages there, according to the reporting on her record.
She presented the Gaza campaign as “horrific conduct” that U.S. leverage should have stopped. The hostage rescues in the same area she wanted frozen sit uneasily beside that demand.
Voters watching the exchange are left with a simple sequence: she pressed for restraint in Rafah; Israeli forces then pulled living hostages out of the zone she wanted shut down.
The coalition also reminded the public of a 2021 moment in which Harris agreed with a student who accused Israel of “ethnic genocide.” That phrase is not a policy disagreement. It is an extreme charge she did not shut down at the time.
Years later, the Seoul speech returned to the same posture, maximum pressure on Jerusalem, minimal patience for how Israel fights a war started by Hamas. The continuity is the story, not the venue.
Her standing inside the party remains unsettled for other reasons as well. Reporting has described how Doug Emhoff privately prefers she skip another presidential bid, a sign that even her inner circle is weighing the cost of another national run.
The political damage was not limited to Republican critics. Warren Kinsella, an attorney and author who worked on Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, wrote that he is “ashamed to have worked with her” after the Israel remarks.
"ashamed to have worked with her,"
When a former campaign hand uses that language, it is not a partisan hit job. It is an internal break over a core foreign-policy stance.
Harris offered no new operational detail in Seoul about what “more forcefully” would have meant in practice, conditions on weapons, public ultimatums, or something else. She named the failure and moved on.
Meanwhile, some Democrats have already shown they will not share a stage with her. Iowa Democrats Sand and Turek refused to campaign alongside her, another marker of how heavy the Harris brand has become in parts of the party.
Harris claimed the current administration “offers Netanyahu a blank check.” She did not, in the quoted remarks, lay out the specific concessions, arms packages, or diplomatic cover she says prove that claim.
She grouped Trump’s approach with what she now calls her own administration’s shortfall. The political move is clear: recast tough support for an Israeli war cabinet as moral failure, and place both parties under that label.
Conservative readers will notice what she left out. She did not dwell on who started the Gaza war, how Israeli civilians were murdered and taken, or why a nation under rocket fire and tunnel attack might reject outside timelines for its own operations.
Her broader 2028 shadow still hangs over Democratic politics. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he would stand aside in 2028 if Harris enters the primary, keeping her name in the mix even as her Israel comments reopen old wounds.
She has also kept ties to the party’s left flank, including turns such as when she stumped for progressive Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan while other Democrats kept their distance. The Seoul message fits that lane more cleanly than it fits the center.
Harris went to South Korea and told the world that American power should have been used earlier and harder against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. She said it about the Biden years she helped lead and about the Trump administration now in office. The Republican Jewish Coalition called it predictable. A man who worked to elect her said he is ashamed. The record she already built, skipping Netanyahu in Congress, fighting BDS legislation, freezing the Rafah fight in her rhetoric, and nodding along to a genocide slur in 2021, makes the latest speech feel less like a breakthrough than a continuation. Allies who needed a steady pro-Israel Democrat did not get one in Seoul.
When a former vice president soft-pedals Israel’s right to finish a war it did not start, she tells American voters exactly whose side she takes when the pressure is on.
