Former President Bill Clinton
on Monday met in secret (no press allowed) with roughly 100 leaders of South
Florida’s Jewish community, and, as the Times
of Israel reports, “He vowed that, if elected, Hillary Clinton would
make it one of her top priorities to strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance.” He
also “stressed the close bond that he and his wife have with the State of
Israel.”
It may be tempting to dismiss
this as standard, vapid Clintonian politicking: adeptly telling everyone what
they want to hear and making them believe it.
After all, is it even physically
possible to “strengthen the U.S.-Israel alliance” beyond what it already
entails: billions of dollars in American taxpayer money transferred every year,
sophisticated weapons fed to Israel as it bombs its defenseless
neighbors, blindly loyal diplomatic support and protection for everything it does?
But Bill Clinton’s vow of even
greater support for Israel is completely consistent with what Hillary Clinton
herself has been telling American Jewish audiences for months. In November, she
published
an op-ed in The Forward in which she vowed to strengthen relations not only
with Israel, but also with its extremist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I have stood with Israel my
entire career,” she proclaimed. Indeed, “as secretary of state, [she] requested
more assistance for Israel every year.”
Moreover, she added, “I defended Israel
from isolation and attacks at the United Nations and other international
settings, including opposing the biased Goldstone report [which documented
widespread Israeli war crimes in Gaza].”
Clinton media operatives such as
Jonathan Alter have tried to undermine the Sanders campaign by
claiming that only Sanders, but not Clinton, has committed the sin of
criticizing Obama: “Hillary stopped criticizing Obama in 2008, when [Obama] was
nominee; Sanders stopped in 2015, so he could run as Dem.” Aside from
being creepy — it’s actually healthy to criticize a president and
pathological to refuse to do so — this framework is also
blatantly false. Clinton, in
her book and in
interviews, has often criticized Obama for
being insufficiently hawkish: making clear that she wanted to be more
militaristic than the Democratic president who has literally bombed
seven predominantly Muslim countries (thus far).
Her comments on Israel have
similarly contained implicit criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy: namely, that
he has created or at least allowed too much animosity with Netanyahu. In
her Forward op-ed, she wrote that the Israeli prime
minister’s “upcoming visit to Washington is an opportunity to reaffirm the
unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of
the United States and Israel.” She pointedly added: “The alliance between our
two nations transcends politics. It is and should always be a commitment that
unites us, not a wedge that divides us.” And in case her message is unclear,
she added this campaign promise: “I would also invite the Israeli prime
minister to the White House in my first month in office.”
Last month, Clinton wrote an even
more extreme op-ed in the Jewish Journal, one that made even clearer
that she intends to change Obama’s policy to make it even more
“pro-Israel.” It begins: “In this time of terrorism and turmoil, the
alliance between the United States and Israel is more important than ever.
To
meet the many challenges we face, we have to take our relationship to the next
level.”
“With every passing year, we
must tie the bonds tighter,” she wrote. Tie those bonds tighter. Thus:
As part of this effort, we
need to ensure that Israel continues to maintain its qualitative military edge.
The United States should further bolster Israeli air defenses and help develop
better tunnel detection technology to prevent arms smuggling and kidnapping. We
should also expand high-level U.S.-Israel strategic consultations.
As always, there is not a word
about the oppression and brutality imposed on Palestinians as part of Israel’s
decadeslong occupation. She does not even acknowledge, let alone express
opposition to, Israel’s repeated, civilian-slaughtering bombing of the
open-air prison in Gaza. That’s because for Clinton — like the progressive
establishment that supports her — the suffering and violence imposed on
Palestinians literally do not exist. None of this is mentioned, even in
passing, in the endless parade of pro-Clinton articles pouring forth from
progressive media outlets.
Beyond progressive
indifference, Clinton has been able to spout such extremist rhetoric with
little notice because Bernie Sanders’ views on Israel/Palestine (like his
foreign policy views generally) are, at best, unclear.
Like many American Jews,
particularly of his generation, he has long viewed
Israel favorably, as a crucial protective refuge after the Holocaust. But
while he is far from
radical on these matters, he at least has been more
willing than the standard Democrat, and certainly more willing than
Clinton, to express
criticisms of Israel. Still, his demonstrated preference for focusing on
domestic issues at the expense of foreign policy has unfortunately enabled
Clinton to get away with all sorts of extremism and pandering in this area.
Clinton partisans — being
Clinton partisans — would, if they ever did deign to address Israel/Palestine,
undoubtedly justify Clinton’s hawkishness on the ground of political necessity:
that she could never win if she did not demonstrate steadfast devotion to the
Israeli government. But for all his foreign policy excesses, including on
Israel, Obama has proven that a national politician can be at least mildly more
adversarial to Israeli leaders and still retain support. And notably, there is
at least one politician who rejects
the view that one must cling to standard pro-Israel orthodoxy in order to
win; just yesterday, Donald Trump vowed “neutrality” on Israel/Palestine.
As I noted
a couple of weeks ago, Clinton advocates are understandably desperate to
manufacture the most trivial controversies because the alternative is to defend
her candidacy based on her prior actions and current beliefs (that tactic was
actually pioneered by then-Clinton operative Dick Morris, who had his client turn
the 1996 election into a discussion of profound topics such as school
uniforms). If you were a pro-Clinton progressive, would you want to defend her
continuous vows to “strengthen” U.S. support for the Netanyahu government
and ensure that every year “we must tie the bonds tighter”?
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