Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s said some very interesting and revealing things in
her appearance at the Saban Center’s gala dinner, November 30. They
are, however, being quoted out of context. Let’s look at what she
actually said in some detail for a sense of how the Obama
Administration's highest-ranking foreign policy official and a future
presidential candidate thinks about this issue.
Let
me note also that the statement was made at an institution that might
be considered friendly to Israel and thus Clinton might have skewed her
remarks to be more fair to that country than she would in a regular
international forum.
In
answering a question, Clinton went into some detail about the problems
facing a two-state solution and peace. Remember she is speaking
extemporaneously.
“I
think Israelis have good grounds to be suspicious. And I would never be
one who tries to rewrite or dismiss history. The Palestinians could
have had a state as old as I am if they had made the right decision in
1947. They could have had a state if they had worked with my husband and
then-Prime Minister Barak at Camp David. They could have had a state if
they’d worked with
Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Livni.”
Here
Clinton is pointing out that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected
getting a state, that’s why they didn’t have one years ago. I cannot
imagine Obama saying this kind of thing.
“Now,
would it have been a perfectly acceptable outcome for every Israeli and
every Palestinian? No. No compromise ever is. But there were moments of
opportunity. And I will also say this. When Prime Minister Netanyahu
agreed to a 10-month settlement freeze I flew to Jerusalem. We’d been
working on this. George Mitchell had been taking the lead on it. And
when Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a 10-month settlement freeze, it
wasn’t perfect. It didn’t cover East Jerusalem, but it covered much of
the contested area in the West Bank.”
There’s
something important in this passage
that no one has noticed. For the first time ever, Clinton publicly and
explicitly acknowledged that the freeze did not cover East Jerusalem.
Why, then, did Vice-President Joe Biden throw a temper tantrum when an
Israeli zoning board cleared some future construction there? At the
time, the U.S. government repeatedly implied that Israel violated the
agreement, which it didn’t. Now Clinton admits that.
Incidentally,
the Obama Administration did nothing when the Palestinian Authority
refused to negotiate seriously despite the freeze on construction.
Clinton continued, and this is also revealing:
“And
I stood on a stage with him at 11 o’clock – Israelis always meet late
at night, I don’t understand it – (laughter) – but 11 o’clock at night,
midnight, and I said it was unprecedented for any Israeli prime minister
to have done
that. I got so criticized. I got criticized from the right, the left,
the center, Israeli, Jewish, Arab, Christian, you name it. Everybody
criticized me. But the fact was it was a 10-month settlement freeze. And
he was good to his word. And we couldn’t get the Palestinians into the
conversation until the tenth month.”
I
cannot remember anyone criticizing her for this statement. It was small
enough reward to Netanyahu for a major domestic political risk and a
concession which in the end brought no progress for peace and no
gratitude from the White House. But what Clinton says now does reflect
the
Western view that if you bash Israel it has no cost and if you praise
Israel it is going to hurt you. I wonder if this is also a hint that
Obama wasn’t happy with her praise for Netanyahu.
Thus
ran her praise for Israel’s efforts. So then, in the spirit of
evenhandedness embraced by recent presidents in place of a former
pro-Israel policy, she has to balance out this statement. When a
Democratic politician has to be hyper-sensitive about saying something
nice about Israel it tells you how much things have shifted in that
party and in the “liberal” context:
“I’m
not making excuses for the missed opportunities of the Israelis, or the
lack of generosity, the lack of empathy that I think goes hand-in-hand
with the suspicion. So, yes, there is more that the Israelis need to do
to really demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed
people in their minds, and they want to figure out, within the bounds of
security and a Jewish democratic state, what can be accomplished.”
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She makes four points:
Israelis
have missed opportunities. Really, like what? If she’s aware of real
ones Clinton can provide examples but while it is easy to list two dozen
Palestinian missed opportunities—i.e., Israel was ready for real peace
and they
weren’t—the effort to provide some opposite example always turns out to
be illusory.
Lack
of generosity: This is shameful. First of all, since when is generosity
an international diplomatic norm? Against what other country or people
would she dare make such a statement? On further consideration, if
generosity means being nice or making unilateral concessions to enemies
that wish to destroy you, then the Obama Administration is very
generous.
But
in fact Israel has been generous. It has freed large numbers of
Palestinian prisoners to get back kidnapped Israelis; it let around
200,000 Palestinians come to the territories after 1993; it has used
much less force than it might have; it has largely ignored continuous
incitement against itself and not responded in kind. The list is a long
one.
Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon, not exactly a
left-winger, even fully withdrew from the Gaza Strip and dismantled
Jewish settlements in large part to give the Palestinians a chance to
develop that area, see that Israel did not want the territories and
sought to provide an opportunity to build a basis for peace.
Who in the world has been generous toward Israel?
Lack
of empathy: This is really low on Clinton’s part. In schools, Israeli
kids learn about Palestinian
grievances. Israel television showed a multi-part history documentary
that showed the Palestinian viewpoint. In Israeli newspapers, and every
other medium Palestinians are interviewed and an honest attempt is made
to portray their standpoint, sometimes indeed with more sympathy than is
showed to Israel’s government.
Every
Israeli leader, except those on the right-wing fringe, is perfectly
aware of the Palestinian case and complaints. To cite only one example,
Ehud Barak once said that if had been a Palestinians he would have been a
fighter in Fatah. No country in modern history has shown more
empathy to its enemies.
Can anyone cite a single example—a speech, an article—on the Palestinian side that has shown any shred of empathy?
Finally,
“oppressed people” and this is the most important point. If the
Palestinians are an oppressed people who is oppressing them? Here we see
how the Obama Administration has, at best, accepted the European
version of the anti-Israel narrative. If the Palestinians keep turning
down peace offers how is Israel responsible for their “oppression”?
If they are oppressed it is by their own leaders. Who oppresses the population of the Gaza Strip.
And
once you have “the pain of an oppressed people” it is a short step
toward believing that terrorism and intransigence is just an expression
of that pain, rather than the cause of it.
Clinton concluded:
“And
I think that, unfortunately, there are more and more Israelis and
Palestinians who just reject that idea out of hand: Why bother? Why try?
We’ll never be able to reach an agreement with the other. But in the
last 20 years, I’ve seen Israeli leaders make an honest, good-faith
effort and
not be reciprocated in the way that was needed.”
But
here, too, there is a disproportionate idea. Relatively few Israelis
reject a two-state solution out of hand. The dominant idea today is: We
want a two-state solution but the other side doesn’t. On the Palestinian
side, virtually none of the leadership is prepared to implement an
achievable two-state solution. Indeed, they increasingly talk of a
one-state solution (total victory and Israel’s destruction), an approach
that is never heard among Israeli leaders.
What
is objectionable is not that she criticizes Israel—she could cite
various things like insufficient energy in dismantling outposts or being
too permissive toward settlements—but the criticisms she makes. They
all fall into the current dominant Western view that the world’s
problems are caused by greedy, aggressive, unempathetic white people who
oppress everyone else. Implied here is that the only solution is that
such people take risks, make unilateral concessions, pay money, and
continually apologize for their sins.
And that’s a formula for disaster, not only in U.S. policy toward Israel but everywhere else.
I
say all this not to complain about unfair double standards or even to
respond to Clinton. That is a waste of time. What’s important here is to
show how her mind works and that of a large portion of the Western
elite. Her remarks are not as bad as they sound when taken out of
context. She does try to be balanced—though an attempt at equidistance
is not exactly showing strong support for Israel—and also does—unlike
Obama—criticize the Palestinians. Yet in policy terms at the very
moment of culmination for a Palestinian Authority three-year effort to
wreck any peace process by unilateral independence and when Hamas has
decided the moment has come for a jihad backed up by the Islamist tidal
wave in the region, Clinton and the Obama Administration are obsessed
with Israel not making even more concessions.
“I
think Israelis have good grounds to be suspicious," Clinton said. But
what she didn't explain are all the good grounds for Israelis to be
suspicious of the Obama
Administration.
Barry
Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International
Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).
The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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