In
her new memoir, the former Secretary of State is
calculating, cautious, and balanced—and that’s what’s
wrong
By Noah
Pollak
Hillary
Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, November
2012. (Baz Ratner-Pool/Getty Images)
The End of the Jewish Left
Political
theorist Michael Walzer and others argue about the
death of the century-long Jewish-Leftist alliance
By Adam
Kirsch
Left For Dead
The
Israeli left has collapsed in the last decade. But
the right, despite its successes, is dying, too,
brought down by Russian-imported maximalism and
American-imported political consultants.
Why
hasn’t the Obama Administration been able to reach a
peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians?
Reading Hillary Clinton’s new memoir,Hard
Choices, you’d think the blame should be
apportioned about equally between the two parties, with
a little falling on the administration as well. It’s
nice to be evenhanded—to downplay differences, to be
charitable and high-minded, to preserve future options.
But it also can be wrong, especially when doing so
implicitly casts opprobrium on someone undeserving of
blame.
The
sections of Clinton’s book that deal with the peace
process are full of such blame, and it is not always so
implicit.
She
begins these sections with an anecdote from September
2010, placing her at Prime Minister Netanyahu’s
residence with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for
their first meeting, weeks before a 10-month settlement
freeze will expire. “It had taken nearly two years of
difficult diplomacy to get these two leaders to agree to
negotiate face-to-face,” she remarks.
The
reader will take from this passage that both Netanyahu
and Abbas had refused to meet in person, yet this could
not be further from the truth—Netanyahu had been calling
for direct negotiations the entire time, and before
global audiences no less.
In
his landmark June 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University—it
was the first time he formally endorsed the creation of
a Palestinian state—Netanyahu declared: “I turn to you,
our Palestinian neighbors, led by the Palestinian
Authority, and I say: Let’s begin negotiations
immediately without preconditions.”
In
his 2010 speech to
the AIPAC Policy Conference, Netanyahu said: “My
government has consistently shown its commitment to
peace in both word and deed. From day one, we called on
the Palestinian Authority to begin peace negotiations
without delay. I make that same call today. President
Abbas, come and negotiate peace.”
In
his speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress in
May 2011, he said: “Now again I want to make this clear.
Israel is prepared to sit down today and negotiate peace
with the Palestinian Authority. … So I say to President
Abbas: Tear up your pact with Hamas! Sit down and
negotiate!”
Clinton
was Secretary of State throughout the period in which
Netanyahu made these declarations, and she surely knows
that he had called for Abbas to negotiate on numerous
occasions. No matter: Evenhandedness requires
apportioning blame equally, and so Israel is accused of
doing something—refusing to negotiate—of which it is
entirely innocent.
A
few pages later, attempting to further build her case of
Israeli reluctance to participate in negotiations, she
claims that “Settlers were the political base of
Netanyahu’s main coalition partner, the Yisrael Beiteinu
Party…[party head Avigdor] Lieberman viewed negotiating
concessions as a sign of weakness and had a long history
of opposition to the Oslo peace process.”
This
is also false. Yisrael Beiteinu is not a settler
party—it is largely comprised of secular Russian
immigrants, including Lieberman himself. Its platform
explicitly endorses the creation of a Palestinian state,
including land swaps from Arab areas of Israel to a
Palestinian state in exchange for Israel retaining
Jewish communities in the West Bank. Yisrael Beiteinu’s
party platform is explicit: “Israel is our home;
Palestine is theirs.”
Later,
Clinton says that after Abbas left the 2010 meeting in
the prime minister’s residence, she conveyed to
Netanyahu that “Surely he didn’t want to be responsible
for halting these talks now that they were under way. …
Could he agree to a brief extension of the [settlement]
moratorium to allow us to press ahead and see what could
be achieved?” Netanyahu had imposed the settlement
freeze after a brutal campaign of public criticism by
Clinton and the Obama Administration—explicitly on the
grounds that it was needed in order to convince the
Palestinians to talk.
Yet
after it was imposed, Abbas still refused to talk, and
instead of fixing her ire on him, it was once again
Netanyahu who was facing demands. “Over the following
weeks we launched a full-court press to persuade Bibi to
reconsider extending the freeze,” Clinton says. At no
point does she consider launching a full-court press to
persuade Abbas to talk after the freeze, and at no point
did Clinton consider launching a full-court press to
persuade Abbas to talk during the freeze. Yet still the
dissolution of the talks, she insists, was owed to
Netanyahu’s inflexibility. It was easy being the
Palestinian president when Hillary Clinton was Secretary
of State.
A
few times in recounting all this Clinton allows that the
administration was “exasperated” with the Palestinians
and found Abbas “frustrating,” and she does acknowledge
Israel’s traumatic experience of Palestinian terrorism.
One doesn’t come away from her story feeling that her
failures were all Israel’s fault—just that they were
half Israel’s fault, perhaps a little more.
So,
why does Clinton tell the tale this way? Leaving aside
the question of her inner feelings about Israel and the
Palestinians, it is likely a matter of political
calculation. The division within the Democratic Party on
Israel has grown in recent years, now split between
progressives who side with the Palestinians and seek to
downgrade the U.S.-Israel relationship, and more
mainstream liberals who are either ambivalent or
pro-Israel. If you’re a Democrat with national political
ambitions, the issue puts you in a bind as you seek to
maintain centrist credibility while not alienating the
leftist base for whom hostility to Israel has become an
important emotion.
This
is Clinton’s predicament on Israel, and she likely
reasons that the best way to handle it is to engage in
the kind of calculated evenhandedness that we see in her
memoir. Given the political stakes it is probably too
much to ask that she stand up to the anti-Israel
progressives in her party. Yet her unwillingness to do
so represents one more retreat by the Democratic Party
from its traditional support for Israel.
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