Posted on
Mar 31, 2016
By Sandy Tolan
Back in her radical
pro-Palestinian days, Hillary Clin … wait, her what?
Take two. Back in 1999, before
neutrality on Israel/Palestine was deemed radically treasonous by America’s
billionaire presidential anointers, Hillary Clinton actually spoke warmly of
Palestinian aspirations. On a visit to the West Bank, she shocked pro-Israel
enforcers by kissing the cheek of the Other, Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, who
had denounced Israel’s military domination of the Palestinians. The kiss was essentially diplomatic behavior by the then-first lady, but it rattled
the enforcers, already skittish about Clinton after her shocking use of the
actual word “Palestine” and her endorsement, a year earlier, of an
independent state of that name.
Soon Clinton would be atoning
for these sins as a candidate for the United States Senate from New York—the
first corrective step in a steady rightward march toward military intervention, war under false pretense, support for a military coup against a democratically elected
president, a $29 billion weapons deal that benefited million-dollar
donors to the Clinton Foundation, warm relations with accused war criminals then and now, and
the embrace of a billionaire benefactor hell-bent on shutting
down open discussion of Israel’s human rights disaster in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign
reveals the roots of her current fealty to Israel. Lickety-split, she abandoned
any pretense of support for Palestinians. She advocated moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel
Aviv—anathema to Palestinians, who wish to make their capital in East
Jerusalem. She even attacked her Republican Senate opponent for once shaking hands with Arafat. (A handshake is worse than
a kiss, I guess.)
As secretary of state, Clinton
did carry the weakly flickering torch of the two-state solution for Israel and
Palestine, which by then was long-established U.S. policy. She issued mild,
diplo-speak criticism that Israel’s settlement building “undermines mutual
trust.” (Well, yes, I guess the American failure to stop Israel from more than
tripling the West Bank settler population in the “Oslo era”—from 109,000 in
1993 to some 380,000 today—might slightly undermine trust in America’s
professed solution.) She also allowed that Israeli military demolitions of
Palestinian homes—the numbers are in the tens of thousands—are
“unhelpful.” (And, yes, getting your home smashed to pieces by American-made
Caterpillar bulldozers can, indeed, be quite unhelpful.) In 2010 she “yelled” at Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone after Vice
President Joe Biden, in Israel, had pledged America’s “absolute, total,
unvarnished commitment to Israel’s security,” only to learn hours later of
Israel’s plan to build 1,600 new housing units in Israeli-occupied East
Jerusalem. Oops.
But Clinton’s dressing-down of
the Israeli prime minister was more a matter of timing and American pride than
a policy rift. Though it’s to her credit that in her 2014 memoir, “Hard
Choices,” she acknowledged the hardships of Palestinian “life under
occupation,” as secretary of state she did her best to stop Palestinian
aspirations to establish their own state, blocking even mild United Nations resolutions that would
label Israeli settlements illegal.
For the last 18 years, then,
we have witnessed Hillary Clinton’s hawkish march—from her 20th century air
kiss of a former Palestinian first lady, and apparently sincere support for a
state called Palestine—to her current role as Hillsrael, the
Israel-can-do-no-wrong panderer-in-chief.
I hereby present you with the
2016 campaign’s Best of Clinton:
A promise to invite Netanyahu to the White
House “during my first month in office” in order to “reaffirm” the “unbreakable
bond with Israel”—no matter the prime minister’s attempts to embarrass and
undermine President Obama by trying to scuttle the Iran deal. Or worse,
Netanyahu’s devastation of Gaza during the summer of 2014, in which 521
children died, 108,000 Gazans lost their homes, 18,000 buildings were badly
damaged or destroyed, and Israel’s destructive power, compared to all the
rockets launched by Hamas, was an estimated 1,500 to 1.
Virtual silence on the settlement issue in a
speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 2016 conference.
During the event, even Biden—he of the “absolute, total, unvarnished” support for
Israel—decried the “steady and systematic process of expanding settlements.” By
contrast, Clinton’s speech, a “symphony of craven, delusional pandering,” as Slate’s
Michelle Goldberg put it, mentioned settlements only in the context of
protecting Israel against its own violation of international law.
An attack on Donald Trump from the right by denouncing Trump’s
once-expressed wish to remain “neutral” over Israel/Palestine. “We need steady
hands, not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday,
and who-knows-what on Wednesday, because everything’s negotiable,” Clinton told
the AIPAC gathering.
Unilateral condemnation of recent Palestinian
aggression that has killed 28 Israelis. “Israel faces brutal terrorist
stabbings, shootings and vehicle attacks at home,” she said at AIPAC.
“Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence.” Yet she had not one word
for the 188 Palestinians killed during the same period, some of them in extrajudicial executions by the Israeli military, including
here, here and here. Nor did she utter the word “occupation,” under which
Palestinians have been living for nearly half a century, and which has created
a Jim Crow-like inequality that reminded then-Archbishop Desmond Tutu of apartheid
South Africa.
Equating criticism of Israel with
anti-Semitism, largely through condemnation of BDS (Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions), a nonviolent movement to confront Israel’s human rights abuses
through direct economic and political pressure. (Would she prefer suicide
bombers and rockets?) Never mind that the relatively modest movement has been
endorsed by an assortment of international trade unions, scholarly associations, church groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Tutu himself. At the root of BDS, Clinton hints darkly, is
anti-Semitism. “At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world,”
Clinton wrote in a letter to donor Haim Saban, “we need to repudiate forceful
efforts to malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.”
This last item takes the
pandering cake. Clinton aims to silence free speech and legitimate criticism of
Israel, thus advancing deeply repressive and undemocratic policies—but only
when the target is Israel. Why, as a candidate for American and not Israeli
office, is she taking up this fight? In this case, Clinton’s cynical pandering
was written at the behest of one of her biggest donors, the Israeli-American
businessman and Hollywood mogul Saban (“I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is
Israel”). It was Saban—whose main claim to fame is the Mighty Morphin Power
Rangers franchise—who last year convened a “secret” Las Vegas meeting with
fellow billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the bankroller of GOP candidates and huge
supporter of Israel’s settlement project. Their aim: to shut down, if not criminalize BDS.
A few weeks later, with
Saban’s $6.4 million destined for Clinton’s campaign war chest, the
candidate wrote to her benefactor to express her “alarm” over BDS, “seeking
your thoughts and recommendations” to “work together to counter BDS.” There is
no record of Saban’s response, but in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino
attacks, he recommended Muslim communities in the U.S. receive “more scrutiny.” On the plus side, he was “not suggesting we
put Muslims through some kind of a torture room,” proving he was channeling not
Mussolini but simply Ted Cruz. What a relief. Saban later claimed he
“misspoke,” but I’m skeptical: “More scrutiny” is more scrutiny.
[…]
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