Yesterday’s Forward featured a pretty unusual op-ed, from Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. The piece was originally titled “How I Would Forge Better Ties to Israel — and Rebuild Bond with Benjamin Netanyahu.” This op-ed would seem to confirm what we have been told, beginning in 2011 by Dan Senor, and more recently by Michael Oren and even Dennis Ross — that Obama bears the responsibility for the deterioration in the US-Israel relationship.
Granted, editors often write titles and Clinton may not have written this one. And the editors at the Forward, apparently realizing the implications of it, have now changed it. But the fact that she felt the need to write this at all is evidence that Israel’s supporters in the US no longer trust the Democratic party on this issue. The piece itself, however, does not persuade me to change that view as it applies to Clinton.
Clinton writes that on her first visit to Israel in 1981, “Bill and I fell in love with Jerusalem as we walked the ancient streets of the Old City.” Yet, in 2010, as Secretary of State, she berated Prime Minister Netanyahu for allowing Jews to build houses in that city. She told him at the time that planned housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem sent a “deeply negative signal” about Israeli-American relations, and harmed “the bilateral relationship.”
Clinton may love the charms of Jerusalem, but like President Obama, she subscribes to the discriminatory notion that there are parts of the city in which Jews simply should not be permitted to live. As I’ve written before, such segregated housing practices have been banned in the US, and for good reason. The argument that demographic changes in a neighborhood will predetermine the outcome of any future negotiations for a Palestinian state is merely an endorsement of the racist proposition that the future Palestinian state must be Jew-free.
The notion that there are places that Jews should not be permitted to legally purchase or build homes merely because they are Jews goes far beyond the issue of support for Israel and is blatantly anti-Semitic. I’d like to hear Clinton denounce that policy, and affirm that Jews ought to be able to live in any part of Jerusalem in which they are able to purchase or rent property. If she is not willing to do that, then she is continuing an endorsement of policies that are not specifically anti-Israel, but that are more broadly anti-Semitic.
Clinton’s article in the Forward also fails to adequately address her role in the negotiations with Iran that ultimately lead to the JCPOA. Her promise to “vigorously enforce” that agreement rings hollow, as it does nothing to address the fact that the agreement itself permits Iran to build a nuclear bomb 13 years from now, and does nothing to prevent Iran from continuing to fund terrorism.
Nor does she assert that she will depart from Obama’s policy, to use Dennis Ross’s words, of giving Palestinians “a complete pass.” I have to wonder, therefore, whether her promise that “as president I will never stop working to advance the goal of two states for two peoples living in peace, security and dignity,” really just means that she will continue to push Israel for unilateral concessions, and continue to blame Israel when those concessions lead nowhere.
Finally, she fails to explain her enthusiasm for the mentally unstable anti-Semitic Jew, Max Blumethal.
A lot more than an op-ed in the Forward will be needed to convince me that she is, as she claims, committed to Israel’s security, as well as to convince me that she does not espouse anti-Semitic views.
