As Vice President Kamala Harris decides who will join her on the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential ticket, one man’s name continues to loom over the debate: that of Josh Shapiro, the first-term governor of Pennsylvania and the odds-on favorite to land the role.

It’s a situation that has concerned a number of progressives, starting with those who believe Israel’s conduct in Gaza is an urgent moral crisis the Democratic ticket must be prepared to address in ways Joe Biden has not been. Shapiro, who is Jewish and has strong ties to Israel, has criticized Benjamin Netanyahu — a position now safe for even the most staunchly pro-Israel Democratic politicians — but he’s cheapened that criticism by both ceaselessly supporting Netanyahu’s war effort and denigrating those in his state who have spoken out against it.

None of this is new for Shapiro, who has over the course of his public life (and, it turns out, before it) shown alarmingly little regard for both Palestinians and First Amendment rights where Israel and Palestine are concerned. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Shapiro backed a push to use the state’s anti–Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) law to punish Ben & Jerry’s after the company announced it would stop selling its ice cream not even in Israel proper, but strictly in Israeli settlements in Palestine that are illegal under international law. “BDS is rooted in antisemitism,” Shapiro wrote at the time. “I expect Commonwealth agencies with jurisdiction to enforce the Act.” Given the extent to which anti-BDS laws have been used as a blueprint by right-wing forces to attack everything from so-called critical race theory to climate action, the episode raised questions not just about Shapiro’s Israel politics but also about his willingness to embrace right-wing campaigns where he finds it personally convenient.

As David Klion pointed out in the New Republic shortly following Harris’s elevation to the top of the ticket, that trend has only intensified during Shapiro’s time as governor. As early as September, prior to the Hamas attack of October 7, Shapiro denigrated the Palestine Writes literature festival held at the University of Pennsylvania as “hateful” and said he’d been in contact with the university’s then president, Liz Magill, to urge her to develop a plan so “all students can feel safe on campus.” The festival, an annual celebration of Palestinian literature directed by the widely acclaimed author Susan Abulhawa, featured appearances from such noted threats to student safety as Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters.

The Nation described the backlash against the literary gathering as “absurd,” a brazen two-pronged attack on Palestinians and the freedom of the university, and it was only a precursor of things to come. Following Magill’s testimony before a House subcommittee in which she, inelegantly but not wrongly, refused to commit to policing anti-Israel speech, Shapiro leapt at the chance to participate in another blatant right-wing attack on academic freedom and institutions by calling Magill’s testimony “absolutely shameful.” He suggested that the university’s leaders “need to meet, and meet soon” to determine whether Magill’s testimony represented the values of the institution. Magill resigned just days later; Harvard’s Claudine Gay, similarly pilloried for her testimony, resigned a few weeks after that.

Given that backdrop, Shapiro responded to the spring campus protests over the war on Gaza in exactly the way you might imagine. He argued in a New York Times interview that universities “are willing to let certain forms of hate pass by and condemn others more strongly,” again drawing a false equivalence between criticism of Israel and antisemitism and baselessly asserting that the peaceful student encampment at the University of Pennsylvania was a threat to student safety. In a May speech in Pittsburgh, Shapiro called on the university to disband the encampment and “restore order and safety on campus,” which the university did a day later.

Shapiro’s backers within the Democratic Party have suggested the progressive animus toward Shapiro is a result of antisemitism, which is, on its face, absurd. Much of the Left supported a Jewish candidate for president in both of the last two open Democratic presidential primaries, and progressives have a much more positive view of another Jewish vice-presidential contender in Illinois’s J. B. Pritzker. Furthermore, many Jewish students have been on the front lines of the campus movements against the assault on Gaza that Shapiro has so zealously condemned.

Nominating Shapiro, while Israel is actively executing what the United Nations has said is likely a genocide, would be an unmistakable signal about how little Palestinian lives continue to matter to the people at the top of the Democratic Party. No one expects that Harris will choose an anti-Zionist running mate, but it seems reasonable, especially at a moment in which fewer than two in ten Democrats approve of Israel’s actions in Gaza, to select someone who can show at least a modicum of understanding for student protesters and uncommitted Democratic primary voters attempting to do what little is in their power to stem the atrocities their country bears so much responsibility for perpetrating. It seems all the more reasonable given that, for months, Harris and her team have been signaling that they are not as callous as Biden with regard to Palestinian lives.

That, at least, is a bar someone like Minnesota governor Tim Walz has met. In an appearance on CNN on the evening of the Minnesota presidential primary in March, Walz complimented uncommitted voters as “engaged” and said they should be making their voices heard. “Take them seriously,” Walz said. “Their message is clear: that they think this is an intolerable situation and that we can do more, and I think the president is hearing that.”