Pennsylvania Governor and potential vice presidential nominee Josh Shapiro tries to distance himself from a recently uncovered op-ed he wrote in college in which he identified as a former volunteer in the IDF and argued that the Palestinians are too “battle-minded” to pursue peace with Israel.
Palestinians will not coexist peacefully,” Shapiro also wrote in the op-ed titled “Peace Not Possible.”
“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,” added the then-20-year-old.
Dismissing this as something he wrote when he was 20 and neither believes in nor stands for anymore is the reasonable thing to do. But we all know politics isn’t reasonable, and particularly not when it comes to this specific issue. It’s deeply emotional, and this will look bad to a lot of voters regardless of how unreasonable it is.
I think picking Shapiro for VP would be risky.
Judging by his anti-BDS stand that he still holds, and his he dealt with campus protests, I don’t think you can claim he changed his opinions.
He still believes it whether to a smaller degree. I listened to his interview with his friend David Sirota (the point at which I stopped listening to his podcast) because they basically said the same thing.
The Democrats seem to think that a “policy re-tweak” will be all that’s necessary once they get the right person. They’ve done this with Kamala, and they think it’ll work with their VP pick— I don’t think that kind of wizardry will work twice.
Mark Kelly is, everyone agrees, the winning pick mathematically, but there are a couple of others that could work otherwise. Shapiro is on the “loser” list, and he just needs to go.
Agreed. Though even Mark Kelly has a less than ideal stance on Gaza/Israel. Overall I think his upside outweighs it, though.
Based on what? Because he said so just in time to be considered for a prestigious gig after not recanting it at all for decades?
Excuse me if I don’t automatically take him st his word 🙄