Hillary Clinton Goes Anti-Israel In 'Hard Choices'

Yid With Lid

Posted here last week was an article called Hillary Clinton's Anti-Israel History. Almost as if she was trying to back up the research in the above post the former Secretary of State's new book that at best could be considered one-sided, at worst down right Anti-Israel.  Below are four examples:

1) Occupation/Dignity “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). 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).

2) Jerusalem “captured” “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. 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 is even a Koranic passage which indicates that Jerusalem is not be so holy to Muslims, and is passed on to the Jews  "

(Koran, Sura 2:145, "The Cow")

"...They would not follow thy direction of prayer (qiblah), nor art thou to follow their direction of prayer; nor indeed will they follow each other's direction of prayer..."  

Commentators explain that "thy qiblah" (direction of prayer for Muslims) clearly refers the Ka'bah of Mecca, while "their qiblah" (direction of prayer for Jews) refers to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

This Koranic passage appears to show that the holiness of Jerusalem a Jewish concept, and should not be confused with an Islamic concept. 

The 13th-century Arab biographer and geographer Yakut noted: "Mecca is holy to Muslims, and Jerusalem to the Jews."

3) Second Intifada/disproportionate/equivalency “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 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.

4) Palestinians/second class citizens “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.” (p312) This is the same as 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.

What Kerry's apartheid gaffe ignores, Danon explains, is that beyond the fact that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, it is the only pluralistic society in the region:

All citizens of Israel, including the more than 20 percent of the population who are non-Jews, enjoy the same democratic freedoms as well as full human and civil rights. Minorities in Israel participate in our vigorous democracy, are elected to parliament, have served as ministers and preside at all levels of our judicial system, including the Supreme Court. Even the Palestinians of Judea and Samira enjoy full autonomy via the Palestinian Authority.

This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the Middle East, where Christian minorities are persecuted and women and homosexuals routinely oppressed. This includes, of course, Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Hillary Clinton is running for President. She will campaign on the basis that she is a friend of Israel, just as Barack Obama did in 2008. The truth is 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. Those views are repeated in her book "Hard Choices."