Within days, Vice President Kamala Harris will be picking her running mate for the November election. Among the contenders under consideration is Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro.
Shapiro has drawn ire from the political left over a range of issues, but the one that has most contributed to turning him into a lightning rod is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Shapiro’s progressive critics have pointed to, among other things, his steadfast backing of the Israeli government during the present war in Gaza, his likening of some Palestinian solidarity protesters to the Ku Klux Klan, his support for ousting University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill for her failure to crack down on speech that was harshly critical of Israel and his support for laws that would punish institutions that divest from Israel or Israeli settlements.
Meanwhile, his defenders argue that Shapiro is being unfairly singled out for criticism, perhaps due to his faith — he is an observant Conservative Jew. He has, as some point out, harshly criticized Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling him “one of the worst leaders of all time.”
Shapiro is also far from the only pro-Israel candidate under consideration.
Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, another member of Harris’s VP shortlist, was the first governor in America to embrace the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which labels various forms of criticism of Israel to be antisemitic — actions which earned him thanks from an Israeli diplomat.
Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz, who many progressives favor, was a reliable vote for military aid to Israel and pro-Israeli government resolutions when he served in Congress, rarely dissenting from the party line.
It might seem, then, that Shapiro was merely one among many candidates with similar views on a polarizing foreign conflict.
Yet that line of defense appeared to collapse on Friday, when the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story about an op-ed that a 20-year-old Josh Shapiro wrote in 1993 while a student at the University of Rochester.
In that op-ed, Shapiro expressed deep pessimism about peace in the Middle East. “Using history as a precedent, peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible and will never come,” he wrote.
One reason why, he wrote, is because Palestinians “will not coexist peacefully. They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”
It is certainly true that antipathy toward the Palestinians is normalized in the American political scene. Lawmakers who would never dare utter an antisemitic slur are quick to label people sympathetic to Palestinian rights and freedom the “Hamas caucus.”
But some in the progressive space were quick to note that Democratic officials treated anti-Black racism much more harshly. In 2019, Democratic lawmakers from coast to coast asked former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to vacate his position after a photo featuring blackface and the Ku Klux Klan was unearthed in his personal yearbook. Despite that, no Democrat would be trying to unseat Shapiro for his caustic words about Palestinians.
Advocates for the Palestinian cause in Washington have long been pushed to the margins, and it’s understandable that progressives view a Shapiro pick as furthering the American double standard that sees Israeli lives as sacred and Arab lives as worthless.
But some who know Shapiro offer a more nuanced view. I recently interviewed Mireille Rebeiz, the Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College and a Lebanese-American Antiochian Orthodox Christian. She’s an active member of the state’s Arab-American community and was part of a group lobbying the governor to sign a proclamation declaring Arab American Heritage Month last year.
She was invited to meet with Shapiro the day he signed the proclamation into law, and she walked away impressed.
“It was a wonderful meeting. He was very down to earth, easy to talk to, definitely today considering the geriatric presidential race, it’s nice to have a young politician who’s active, willing to listen,” she recalled.
She had brought her nine-year-old son along, and he made a point to tell Shapiro that he was happy to live in a state that valued his culture. Shapiro replied by telling him he should be. He also wrote him a note excusing his absence at school.
“It was a very heartwarming moment,” Rebeiz said.
The meeting was emblematic of relatively warm relations between Shapiro and the local Arab and Muslim community since he was attorney general of the state. He was one of the leaders in the national campaign to oppose then-President Trump’s ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries.
In contrast to many other politicians, Shapiro was known locally to visit mosques and attend Ramadan events held by his constituents, and also spoke out eloquently against anti-Muslim hatred in 2022.
“I’m someone who believes in making sure everybody is at the table, and everybody gets to be heard and seen,” Shapiro said that year. “We certainly have an appreciation and respect for one another. Let’s be real — we’ve seen a rise in Islamophobia, and a rise in antisemitism. And both are wrong, and both make us less safe. An attack against one is an attack against all.”
The message was well received by area Muslims and Arabs, who supported his campaign enthusiastically.
But things began to change after the start of the war in Gaza, when he immediately came out in favor of the Israeli position on the conflict, while attacking and dismissing opponents of the war at home.
Rebeiz, who considers Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist groups, was initially sympathetic to his response. “As a first reaction, you know, it was like, okay, understandable,” she said.
But as the war dragged on and he continued to offer support for Israel without speaking up against the killings and abuses in Gaza, her heart sank.
“Nine months into this I can honestly say that Governor Shapiro’s position on the war in the Middle East not only indicates ignorance of American foreign policy and Middle East history but also it proves to be a huge disappointment,” she said.
Shapiro did offer some more nuanced words to The Washington Post in a March interview. “We need a solution that ends the war. We need every hostage to be returned home. We need Hamas to no longer be in power, whether that’s because they’re defeated or put into exile,” he said. “And there needs to be a meaningful conversation toward a two-state solution. And ideally, that conversation would happen with an Israeli government that is not led by [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been a destructive force for Israel over time.”
But mere criticisms of Netanyahu have failed to quell progressives. Many simply suspect that Shapiro is disproportionately partial to Israel and that he would fail to bring a sense of balance back to the White House after what many have seen as intense favoritism toward Israel by President Biden.
Part of what makes this issue difficult for progressives to discuss is that many don’t want to acknowledge the cultural subtexts behind Shapiro’s positions.
Shapiro was born in the 1970s and came of age as a college student in the 1990s. While many of the anti-war protesters marching through college campuses today are themselves Jewish, they come out of an entirely different cultural context from Shapiro’s.
The split within the Jewish-American community over Israel is largely along generational lines. One 2021 survey found that 38% of Jewish Americans under the age of 40 agreed with the statement that “Israel is an apartheid state,” compared to just 13% over the age of 64.
While it’s impossible to read his mind, it is likely that Shapiro’s views expressed as a 20-year-old were influenced by the culture he was raised in, which was much more conservative than the ones young Jews in the United States are experiencing today.
But people grow — especially when politics necessitates it. In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton arguably ran to George H.W. Bush’s right when it came to the Israel-Palestine conflict, criticizing him for delaying some loan guarantees to force Israel to come to the table for peace negotiations.
That’s not the Democratic Party of today. By the spring of this year, most Democratic voters wanted the U.S. to halt arms shipments to Israel. Many of the Democrats in Congress who have expressed opposition to Israel’s policies during the war are themselves Jewish.
Can Shapiro catch up to his party’s consensus in time to heal these rifts — bringing Muslim, Arab and progressive voters like Rebeiz back into the fold? Should Shapiro evolve his views in the way so many other Americans — Jewish and non-Jewish — have on this issue, he would have the opportunity to play a powerful role as vice president.
Given his own religious background and credibility on the issue, he could advocate for using levers like U.S. military aid and diplomatic cover to push Israel to make the tough choices necessary to bring about peace.
In doing so, he wouldn’t be betraying his younger self so much as proving his own pessimism wrong — peace is possible, if only the U.S., and maybe Vice President Josh Shapiro, are willing to take the steps to achieve it.
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