Last December, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to a climate conference in Dubai and quickly huddled with the leaders of three Arab nations to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The conflict, by then, was still weeks old, ignited by a terrorist attack in which militants killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took hundreds hostage. Ms. Harris saw a diplomatic opening for herself: to be the face of the future, and not of the current war. She told the assembled leaders, “The phase of fighting will end and we will begin implementing our plans for the day after.”
Planning for the phase after the war might have seemed rhetorically out of step with President Biden, who was managing growing domestic opposition to the conflict with his embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But the visit publicly established Ms. Harris as a more compassionate voice for the administration, and she has publicly and privately been more empathetic than Mr. Biden about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.
Still, according to U.S. officials and campaign advisers, the empathy she has expressed as vice president should not be confused with willingness to break from American foreign policy toward Israel as a presidential candidate.
The war is now over a year old, and the killing of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, has created what both Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden are calling an “opportunity” to end the fighting. Even if Ms. Harris were not aligned with Mr. Biden’s current approach — and her advisers stress that she is — she would not bow to political pressure and upend U.S. foreign policy at a precarious moment in the conflict, just days before an election.
Instead, she is returning to the message she embraced last winter, emphasizing that Gazans may someday soon be able to rebuild — if the Israelis are assured of their safety and their hostages returned.
