The candidate’s Jewish outreach director Ilan Goldenberg is a radical, anti-Israel leftist.

By Ronn Torossian, JNS

As Israel faces an existential war, the 2024 U.S. presidential election is shaping up to be the most important the Jewish people and the State of Israel have ever seen.

With the stakes as high as they can be, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris has chosen Israeli-born Ilan Goldenberg as her Jewish outreach director. Goldenberg who joined the Biden Administration in 2021 will serve as “the campaign’s main liaison with Jewish community leaders and stakeholders and advise the campaign on issues related to the U.S.-Israel relationship, the war in Gaza and the broader Middle East.”

Goldenberg supports a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem; a freeze on settlements; and “ending the practice of shielding Israel from international consequences.” He opposed American recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. These radical viewpoints suggest that a Harris administration will be hostile to the Jewish state and American Jews who support Israel.

In 2017, Goldenberg criticized the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He supports reopening the PLO mission in D.C., which was closed because the PA supports illegitimate anti-Israel actions at the International Criminal Court.

Furthermore, Goldenberg supported Obama’s abstention on the anti-Israel Security Council Resolution 2334, as well as Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech at the end of the Obama Administration, in which Kerry said: “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic—it cannot be both—and it won’t ever really be at peace” so long as settlement construction continues.

Goldenberg wrote that settlements “swallow up more land and, the more plugged into the Israeli economy and infrastructure they become, the more difficult they are to physically remove. They also become accepted by Jewish-Israeli society as part of Israel and raise the domestic political cost of removing them.” He asks, “How will Israeli society come to terms with the relocation of hundreds that would likely be part of a two-state solution.” In other words, he lamented that Israelis won’t support racist plans to make the biblical Land of Israel Judenrein.

Goldenberg also came close to legitimizing a boycott of the Jewish state, noting that Resolution 2334 calls “on states to ‘distinguish, in their relevant dealings’ between Israel and the occupied territories—a far cry from attacking tech companies in Tel Aviv.”

Boycotting the settlements is something the radical American Jewish left has long advocated. Similarly, Goldenberg has recently worked to sanction Israelis as part of an interagency initiative to produce sanctions against Israeli entities and individuals. If Israel doesn’t comply with this proposed policy, then Goldenberg advocates for boycotts and sanctions. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Goldenberg supported President Barack Obama’s terrible Iran nuclear deal, opposed leaving it, opposed imposing maximum sanctions on Iran and supported rejoining the nuclear deal. This capitulation to Iran has destabilized the entire Middle East, strengthened Hamas and brought Iran to the brink of nuclear power.

Goldenberg also opposed the Taylor Force Act, which seeks to end U.S. economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority because of the P.A.’s so-called “pay-for-slay” policy that pays terrorists for killing Israelis.

Goldenberg supported restoring funding to UNRWA, which we now know is composed of terrorists who killed Jews on Oct. 7. He also supports “a political process that simultaneously pursues the reintegration of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a long-term ceasefire between Israel and a group of Palestinian factions that include Hamas and Fatah and that has the blessing of the PLO.”

He also claims the U.S. must “find a way to work with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas” and should “press Israel to allow voting in East Jerusalem.”

The radical left-wing organization J Street’s president Jeremy Ben-Ami praised Goldenberg as “one of the most respected, thoughtful people in Washington working with the Jewish community and on Israel-Palestine. What a great pick by the Harris-Walz campaign for this sensitive assignment.”

If Goldenberg was still a voting Israeli—he has renounced his citizenship—he’d vote for the Israeli far-left and he represents the radical left of the American Jewish community.

Lenin famously referred to those who work against their own best interests in support of their enemies as “useful idiots.” Shamefully, Ilan Goldenberg is one of them.