July 04, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   California’s junior senator Kamala Harris has announced her presidential candidacy, joining what will likely become an unusually large field of Democrats seeking the nomination.

Harris is being embraced by many progressive Democrats, and she’s branding herself as a progressive. Yet in the course of her little more than two years in the U.S. Senate, she’s taken some foreign policy positions that should give pause to supporters of human rights and international law.

An Unpromising Start

In her very first foreign policy vote in January 2017, for instance, Harris sided with President Trump in criticizing the outgoing President Obama’s refusal to veto an otherwise-unanimous, very modest, and largely symbolic UN Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements. Among other things, that resolution reiterated previous Security Council calls for Israel to stop expanding its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, which violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice.

The Senate resolution, on the other hand — which Harris herself co-sponsored — challenged the right of the United Nations to weigh in on questions of international humanitarian law in territories under foreign belligerent occupation.

The Security Council resolution called on both the Israeli and Palestinian governments to prevent violence against civilians, condemn and combat terrorism, refrain from inciting violence, and comply with their obligations under international law. But Harris’s resolution called the UN version “one-sided,” and effectively equated opposition to the illegal colonization drive by Israel’s right-wing government with opposition to Israel itself.

Harris’s measure also appeared to argue that Obama’s decision to abstain on the UN resolution somehow undermines the Oslo Accords for an eventual two-state solution. Mysteriously, according to Harris, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of settlements to the point that the establishment of viable contiguous Palestinian states alongside Israel is no longer possible does not.

Harris insists that the United Nations should not have any role regarding Israel and Palestine. Her resolution asserts that the issue of these illegal settlements should be decided only through U.S.-sponsored “direct talks” between the Palestinians under occupation and their Israeli occupiers. Not only has Kamala Harris’s strategy not worked (since this has been U.S. policy for 25 years, during which the settlements have quadrupled), but Trump’s appointees focusing on the negotiations are all strong supporters of Israeli occupation and settlements and oppose Palestinian statehood.

In supporting this resolution, Harris sided with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell against fellow California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and with Republican House leader Paul Ryan against Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi. This is a troubling indication of who her foreign policy allies will be if she becomes president.

Setting Roadblocks to Peace

On the 50^th anniversary of Israel’s 1967 conquest of neighboring Arab territories, Harris supported another Senate resolution celebrating the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. As an apparent effort to discredit reports by human rights groups critical of Israeli treatment of non-Jewish residents in the city, the resolution praised Israel for ensuring that the rights of Muslim and Christian Palestinians were “respected and protected.”