Under pressure to demonstrate she is not as hostile to Israel as some might believe, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Monday named a campaign liaison to the Jewish community.
He is Ilan Goldenberg, who served as an adviser to Harris on the Middle East before transitioning to his new role. Now he will guide the campaign on "issues related to the U.S.-Israel relationship, the war in Gaza, and the broader Middle East," a campaign aide told Jewish Insider.
So, is it a peace offering? Well, Goldenberg has longstanding ties to the anti-Israel group J Street and served as a foreign policy adviser to Elizabeth Warren’s failed 2020 presidential bid. Throughout his professional career, both in and out of government, he has served as a public defender of the Democratic party’s criticisms of Israel, a critic of the GOP’s efforts to strengthen ties with the Jewish state, and a proponent of deepening diplomatic relations with Iran.
During his tenure as her Middle East adviser, Harris has offered pushback on Biden's public support for Israel and support for pro-Hamas protesters in the United States. She did not, for example, attend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress late last month, and has extended sympathy to anti-Israel and anti-Semitic campus agitators, telling the Nation in July that "they are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza." She rebuked the Jewish state in March for sparking a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza and called for an immediate Israeli ceasefire.
Before joining the Biden administration in 2021, Goldenberg participated in a briefing organized by the anti-Israel group J Street in which he described President Joe Biden’s historically pro-Israel view as "old school" and said the United States must "publicly criticize the Israelis" in order to pressure them to accept a ceasefire.
During Warren’s failed presidential bid, with Goldenberg by her side, the Massachusetts senator urged the Jewish state to end its "occupation" and create "an independent and sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip living alongside Israel." Warren skipped AIPAC's 2019 conference and pledged to do so again, saying, "For America to be a good ally of Israel and of the Palestinians, we need to encourage both parties to get to the negotiating table. And we're not doing that if we keep standing with one party and saying, ‘We're on your side.’"
Goldenberg was also a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s approach to the region, panning the president’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, which he described as a "bad idea" that should only take place if the United States accompanies it with a "formal recognition of the state of Palestine."
"Moving the embassy would upend 50 years of American policy, which has held that the issue of Jerusalem can be negotiated only between Israelis and Palestinians," Goldenberg wrote in a piece for Politico magazine, warning incorrectly that the move "could spark violence targeted at American diplomatic facilities across the Middle East."
He was also critical of the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Abandoning the accord, he said, would serve as "an invitation to war." Trump's alternative to the deal, he argued, "is a leaky, weak international sanctions regime that will not bring Iran back to the table, but will free it of its nuclear obligations under the deal."
And when the Obama administration took a parting shot against Israel shortly before Trump took office, Goldenberg broke with a majority of congressional Democrats and defended the move.
In a January 2017 op-ed for the National Interest, he said the administration's abstention from a U.N. vote condemning Israel’s decision to build homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was "necessary and appropriate," adding that his former boss "made the right call" to rebuke Israel on the international stage. Then-U.N. ambassador Samantha Power could have killed the vote with a veto, and her refusal to do so prompted a bipartisan resolution repudiating the Obama administration, which 109 Democrats supported.
Goldenberg subsequently argued in a 2020 policy paper that the U.S. must reverse Israel’s "settlement activity" by "ending the practice of shielding Israel from international consequences."
Goldenberg joins several other Harris campaign advisers who have long histories of pressuring Israel and advocating for strengthening relations with Iran. They include Harris's national security adviser, Phil Gordon, who is the subject of a congressional probe into his ties to a member of an Iranian government influence network, the Washington Free Beacon reported last month.