Is Hillary Clinton a friend of Israel? - Jeff Dunetz

by Jeff Dunetz

Except for the time she needed New York’s Jewish voting bloc, Hillary Clinton has never been pro-Israel.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote an op-ed for the liberal Jewish Newspaper the Forward. In the piece she pledges her continued friendship with the State of Israel, and to Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That pledge should raise the eyebrows of any fair-minded observer.

If one looks at Hillary Clinton’s public history one finds a lifetime of anti-Israel positions. But wait some might say, Hillary was a big supporter of Israel when she was in the U.S. Senate. Indeed, she was. With the possible exception of the time from her first campaign New York’s Senate seat in 2000 to her resignation from the Senate to become Secretary of State in January 2009– except for the time she needed New York’s Jewish voting bloc, Hillary Clinton has never been pro-Israel. And when she held the position of Secretary of State, she helped Barack Obama craft his anti-Israel positions.

Even before her marriage to Bill, Hillary Clinton was opposing Israel and promoting the forces of terrorism. In his book American Evita on page 49, Christopher Anderson writes.

At a time when elements of the American Left embraced the Palestinian cause and condemned Israel, Hillary was telling friends that she was “sympathetic” to the terrorist organization and admired its flamboyant leader, Yasser Arafat. When Arafat made his famous appearance before the UN General Assembly in November 1974 wearing his revolutionary uniform and his holster on his hip, Bill “was outraged like everybody else,” said a Yale Law School classmate. But not Hillary, who tried to convince Bill that Arafat was a “freedom fighter” trying to free his people from their Israeli “oppressors.”

On page 50 of the same book, the author relates an experience that Hillary and her future husband had during a trip to Arkansas in 1973:

It was during this trip to his home state that Bill took Hillary to meet a politically well-connected friend. When they drove up to the house, Bill and Hillary noticed that a menorah-the seven branched Hebrew candelabrum (not to be confused with the more common and subtler mezuzah)-has been affixed to the front door.

“My daddy was half Jewish,” explained Bill’s friend. “One day when he came to visit, my daddy placed the menorah on my door because he wanted me to be proud that we were part Jewish. And I wasn’t about to say no to my daddy.”

To his astonishment, as soon as Hillary saw the menorah, she refused to get out of the car. “Bill walked up to me and said that she was hot and tired, but later he explained the real reason.” According to the friend and another eyewitness, Bill said, “I’m sorry, but Hillary’s really tight with the people in the PLO in New York. They’re friends of hers, and she just doesn’t feel right about the menorah.”

Hillary’s attitude did not change when she became first lady. In May 1998 Ms. Clinton became the first person ever who attached to any presidential administration ever to call for a Palestinian State. Think about that for a moment, nobody in the Carter administration made that demand neither did anyone in the Reagan or Bush 41 presidency. It took Hillary Clinton to “break the ice.” She told a youth conference on Middle East peace in Switzerland, that she supports the eventual creation of an independent Palestinian state. Her spokesperson, Marsha Berry told reporters: “These remarks are her own personal view.”

In November 1999, while on a purported State visit to the Middle East, she publicly appeared with Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha. Mrs. Arafat made a slanderous allegation:

“Our [Palestinian] people have been submitted to the daily and intensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.” Suha also accused Israel of contaminating much of the water sources used by Palestinians with “chemical materials” and poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.”

Mrs. Clinton sat by silently listening to a real-time translation, and the terrorist’s wife hug and a kiss when she finished speaking.

Later, many hours after the event, and only after a media furor put her on the spot for what many view as a bit more than a mere political “boo boo Mrs. Clinton called on all sides to refrain from “inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations,” including Israel, whose leaders made no such accusations.

Glossing over this repugnant affair, Hillary Clinton has yet to specifically contradict and denounce the monstrous lies uttered by Yasser Arafat’s wife in her presence. Only years later did she make feeble attempt at an excuse, the translator screwed up.

Before her tenure in the State Department, Bill and Hillary Clinton made mega dollars from their extensive involvement with Dubai. Besides being a leader in the movement to boycott Israel, Dubai is the “Hong Kong” of the terrorist world. And a major commerce and shipping point for the “business-side” of terrorism. Bill and Hilary are major friends of Dubai, to the point where the Clinton Foundation have established Dubai Study departments in universities in the US and London. They worked hard at granting legitimacy to this Jew-hating, terrorist supporting nation.

While she was running for President in 2007, San Francisco Examiner columnist P.J. Corkery, wrote that Clinton made $10 million a year from Yucaipa a Dubai firm. Ron Berkle, the owner of Yucaipa companies was a major fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary. And all this was before the recent questions about the Clinton Foundation donations.

The Clintons also had a connection to what was then, the worlds biggest exporter of terrorism, Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Royal Family donated $10,000,000 to the Clinton Library.

According to a 1993 New York Times article, Prince Turki bin Feisal was a college classmate of Bill’s at Georgetown University and (at the time of the article’s writing) was the head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service. While he was still governor of Arkansas, it looks like Bill Clinton cashed in on that relationship, “work[ing] hard to secure a multimillion-dollar Saudi donation to a Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas.” Due to the intervention of the Gulf War, the first installment of $3.5 million didn’t arrive until 1992, with another $20 million arriving after Bill Clinton’s first inauguration.

During her Senate years Ms. Clinton became a vocal supporter of Israel because she needed the Jewish vote. But one of her first actions after leaving the Senate to become Secretary of State was to ignore a previous deal with Israel and call for the end of the construction of new homes in existing settlement neighborhoods.
Clinton’s demand for a building freeze in existing settlement communities broke a US/Israel agreement made during the Bush administration. Ms. Clinton said there was never an agreement between Israel and the US about natural expansion of existing settlements. But Elliot Abrams who negotiated the agreement for the United States said Clinton’s contention is simply not true.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton first demanded the “settlement” freeze in 2009 and was quickly backed up by Obama. What she perceived as a minor concession (a “settlement” freeze including no new housing units in existing communities) was for Israel a grave sacrifice. For all intents and purposes Clinton was telling Israeli parents their married children could no longer live in their neighborhoods

This was a major error by the Clinton State Department and it was compounded by the inclusion of Jerusalem in the mix and the constant public berating of the Jewish State by Clinton and Obama that as we know, continued even after she left the administration.

Immediately the Palestinians seized upon the Hillary-created settlement issue. Seeing an opportunity to avoid talking, they used the administration’s demands, to make a “settlement” freeze a precondition to further talks even though there were negotiations and construction going on simultaneously before Hilary Clinton became Secretary of State.

In August 2009 Prime Minister Netanyahu announced a ten-month “settlement” freeze. It was approved by the cabinet and implemented on November 25, 2009 and was to run till September 25, 2010. Despite pressure from the United States, the Palestinians refused to join any talks the first 9+ months of the freeze; they did not come to the negotiation table till September 2010, three weeks before the freeze ended.

As the end of the construction halt approached, the US began to negotiate with the Israel to extend the freeze. Based on their experience with Clinton denying the deal negotiated by Elliot Abrams during the Bush Administration, Israel demanded that any proposal be presented in writing, as any oral deal with Clinton and the Obama administration was worth the paper on which is was printed on.

The written offer never came; the Secretary of State wasn’t negotiating in good faith. Instead Ms. Clinton was playing “Bait and Switch.” As Israel waited for a letter clarifying America’s guarantees in exchange for a proposed building ban for Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, a diplomatic source finally came forward saying that no such letter is on its way. The United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton misled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The source, a senior diplomat with inside knowledge of Netanyahu’s recent meetings in Washington, said Clinton made commitments when talking to Netanyahu, but later slipped out of them by claiming that she had not been speaking on behalf of U.S. President Obama – who, she said in the end, did not give his approval.

In 2011 speaking at the at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the liberal Brookings Institute, Clinton tried to delegitimize Israel as a free nation by expressing concern for Israel’s social climate in the wake of limitations regarding female singing in the IDF and gender segregation on public transportation. Both were accommodations made to the Orthodox communities in Israel.

She referred to the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where female soldiers were singing; she said it reminded her of the situation in Iran. It did? Wow! In Iran the women would have been lashed or executed. In Israel they sang, but the people who felt it was against their religious beliefs were allowed to walk out. Most senior officers in the IDF supported the women’s right to sing. It’s called personal freedom.

Clinton also spoke of her shock that some Jerusalem buses had assigned separate seating areas for women. “It’s reminiscent of Rosa Parks,” she said, taking the typical progressive position that faith should not matter outside a place of worship. Clinton’s statement was part of the continued attempt by the Obama administration/Clinton State Department to de-legitimize the Israeli democracy and destroy one of the reasons for American support of Israel, the fact it is the only democracy in the Middle East.

And then there was her book “Hard Choices” which included some anti-Israel passages:

When we left the city and visited Jericho, in the West Bank, I got my first glimpse of life under occupation for Palestinians, who were denied the dignity and self-determination that Americans take for granted” (pg 302).

She says nothing about terrorism, such as blowing up buses with school children, nothing about the fact that during he presidency of her husband Yassir Arafat turned down a deal that would have given him about 98% of what he wanted (at least that’s what Bill Clinton said).

“The sticking point would be Jerusalem. East Jerusalem had been captured along with the West bank in 1967, and Palestinians dreamed of one day establishing the capital of their future state there.” (pg 317).

Hillary’s statement is totally biased. Israel didn’t capture Jerusalem; Jordan did in 1948. Jews were the majority of the Jerusalem Population from 1844 through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 when they were kicked out by Jordan.  In fact, Muslims were the third largest religion in the city until about 1890.  The Palestinian’s want East Jerusalem as their capital because they don’t want Israel to have it.

Even after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE when the Romans punished the Jews for revolting by changing the name of their country from Judea to Palestinia (after the Philistines the ancient Jewish Enemy who no longer existed) and the name of the holy city from Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina (literally Capitoline Hill of the House of Aelius) ,  most of the world recognized the Holy Land and Jerusalem as Jewish. The truth of the matter is that even ancient Muslim writings recognized Jerusalem as a Jewish City.

“There has been nearly a decade of terror, arising from the second intifada, which started in September 2000. About a thousand Israelis were killed and eight thousand wounded in terrorist attacks from September 2000 to February 2005. Three times as many Palestinians were killed and thousands more were injured in the same period.” (pg 308).

Like many who are anti-Israel Hillary Clinton draws a false equivalency between the terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend herself.  To maintain her ridiculous logic, the US should be chastised because more al Qaeda terrorists died than Americans were killed on 9/11/01.

The second intifada was a horrible period of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians, bus loads of children blown up, pizza places bombed, even a hotel where families were celebrating the Passover Seder in peace. There is no equivalence between the attacks and Israel’s attempts to defend herself.

“Because of higher birth rates among Palestinians and lower birth rates among Israelis, we were approaching the day when Palestinians would make up a majority of the combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and most of those Palestinians would be relegated to second-class citizenship and unable to vote.” (pg 312)

The page 312 quote was reminiscent of  John Kerry’s apartheid remark (which he backed away from).  What Israel’s deputy defense minister Danny Danon said about Kerry’s remark applies here also.

To suggest that the Jewish people would ever establish an apartheid regime was particularly hurtful.

Equally hurtful was the implied double standard. Although the administration has from time to time chided the Palestinians for “unhelpful” steps, those comments have not come close to the pointed criticism that has been leveled at our government. This policy of sharing the blame for the collapse of the peace talks, which from the outset was deemed by most independent experts as a long-shot attempt at best, has created the illusion of parity between the two sides. The secretary’s comments make it seem that Israel’s decisions to issue housing tenders, or to exhaustively debate whether to release convicted murders who would have very likely received the death penalty in U.S. courts, were just as damaging to the peace process as the “unity” pact that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has now signed with Hamas, a virulently anti-Semitic terrorist organization.

And then there are the Clinton emails. While most of the media coverage of the emails from her close friend Sidney Blumenthal are about his recommendations about Libya. Blumenthal sent many emails about Israel.  Some of then consisted of forwarding articles from his anti-Semitic son, writer Max Blumenthal.  But others were recommendations of policy, generally one sided describing Israel as the oppressor. As reported by NRO:

Blumenthal sent dozens of e-mails advising Clinton on Israel in 2010. Before her March speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Blumenthal sent Clinton a breathless article from left-wing Israeli writer Uri Avnery accusing the Netanyahu government of “starting a rebellion” against the United States and defending interests that diverge from America’s. “I have to speak to AIPAC tomorrow,” Clinton responded. “How — and should I — use this [sic]?” Blumenthal promised to send another memo the next day.

In that memo, he instructed Clinton to “hold Bibi [Netanyahu]’s feet to the fire” on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “Perhaps most controversial,” he continued, would be for Clinton to “remind [AIPAC] in as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion. Bibi is stage managing US Jewish organizations (and neocons, and the religious right, and whomever else he can muster) against the administration. AIPAC itself has become an organ of the Israeli right, specifically Likud.”

Interestingly if you asked Likud, they would claim that AIPAC favors Israel’s leftist parties.

On May 17, Blumenthal forwarded Clinton an article on the Israeli government’s decision to deny professor and Palestinian activist Noam Chomsky access to the West Bank. “Barring him for his political opinions has created a needless PR disaster,” he wrote. “The US should not be a passive onlooker. . . . The US effort on his behalf to gain entry should be part of the story.” Clinton forwarded the memo to staff with instructions to “pls print 3 copies.”

Chomsky has been fierce in his opposition to Israel’s right to defend herself from terrorism (some even say he is an anti-Semite), and had been officially banned from the country since 2010

In an e-mail from May 31 entitled “Several observations on the Israeli raid,” Blumenthal blames Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s family inferiority complex for his decision to launch a raid on the so-called “Gaza Flotilla,” a group of ships seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “Bibi desperately seeks his father’s approbation and can never equal his dead brother,” Blumenthal wrote. He then hinted that the raid was deliberately orchestrated to kill the peace process and humiliate President Obama before his scheduled visit with the prime minister. Clinton forwarded the message to Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff at the State Department. “FYI and I told you so,” she wrote

Now Hillary Clinton is running for President. And she is campaigning on the basis that she is a friend of Israel, just as she did in the Senate, just as Obama did twice. As Secretary of State she was the architect of the policy of the most anti-Israel president since the rebirth of Israel in 1948. It was a policy which reflected views she has held her entire life, with the exception of the nine-year period where she ran for and held the office of U.S. Senator from New York State. Let’s hope the Republican who gets the nod will not let the former Secretary of State get away with hiding her true past.

Jeff Dunetz

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17862#.VkJMiL-zdds

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.