In her new book, Hillary Clinton picks out a
few foreign policy topics on which she thinks it now safe, even
helpful, to express disagreement with the course taken by the Obama
administration. She wanted to arm and train the Syria rebels, while
Obama did not. She thought it unwise to call for Hosni Mubarak to step
down immediately, while Obama wanted him gone.
She acknowledges that the Obama
administration's demand for a settlement freeze from Israel as a
precondition to talks with the Palestinians “didn’t work.” Yet she also
seeks to exculpate herself from this failure by claiming that she was
against the policy from the beginning. According to the Washington Post,
she "disagreed with Obama and then-White House chief of staff Rahm
Emanuel on a demand that Israel halt all new settlement construction. 'I
was worried that we would be locking ourselves into a confrontation we
didn’t need,' she writes."
A
confrontation indeed ensued – a long and nasty one that continues to
this day and has been perhaps the most consistent feature of the
administration’s foreign policy. Yet for all her alleged opposition to
the policy that launched the confrontation, no one save President Obama
himself played such a prominent role in provoking it, amplifying it, and
prolonging it.
Immediately after Obama first
issued the demand for a freeze, Clinton took the lead in making
indignant, confrontational public statements that were clearly intended
to intimidate the Israelis and gratify the Palestinians. The freeze,
Clinton said, was the only way to get Abbas and the Palestinians to
talk.
Yet as we now know, they never
had any intention of talking, were never pressured by the Obama
administration to talk, and instead sat back and enjoyed the spectacle
of Obama and Clinton beating up on Netanyahu in public. And what a
spectacle it was.
Clinton used an appearance on Al Jazeera on May
19, 2009 to continue the public lecturing of Netanyahu that Obama had
commenced the day before – Al Jazeera being a TV station owned by a
regime that doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist and that has a
sordid history of championing Israel's terrorist enemies and
propagandizing against the Jewish state. Said Hillary:
"We want to see a stop to settlement
construction, additions, natural growth – any kind of settlement
activity. That is what the president has called for."
She reiterated her comments a few days later at a press conference alongside the Egyptian foreign minister:
"With respect to settlements, the president was
very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here. He wants to see a
stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not natural
growth exceptions."
When Netanyahu eventually announced the imposition of a settlement freeze he remarked,
referencing the Obama administration, that “We have been told by many
of our friends that once Israel takes the first meaningful steps toward
peace, the Palestinians and Arab states would respond.” The Palestinians
and Arab states did not respond – and yet Clinton, so vocal about the
Israelis, issued no public criticism of the Palestinians for refusing to
talk after the freeze took effect. She was in full compliance with an
unwritten administration policy: No public criticism of the Palestinians
– ever.
Her role in all
of this was not confined to being Obama's lead enforcer on the
settlement freeze. After an ill-timed construction planning announcement
by the Jerusalem municipality during Vice President Biden's visit to
Israel in March 2010, Clinton made a now-infamous phone call to
Netanyahu in which she berated and threatened the prime minister for 45
minutes, issued a list of demands he would have to meet to salvage the
U.S.-Israel relationship, and then instructed the State Department press secretary to boast to the press of just how harshly she had treated Netanyahu.
After the Clinton phone call, then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren commented that relations between the two countries had hit their lowest ebb in 35 years.
A few weeks
later, in April 2010, Clinton gave a speech at a dinner that was
attended by Ambassador Oren and several ambassadors from Arab countries,
and once again attacked Israel.
She accused Israel of engaging in “unilateral statements and actions”
that had undermined the peace process and she laid blame for
humanitarian problems in Gaza on Israel, rather than the terrorist group
Hamas that controls the territory and uses it to launch attacks on
Israel. She even claimed that the lack of progress in the peace process –
Israel’s fault, naturally – was strengthening Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. She offered no criticism of the Palestinians.
Clinton today is
attempting to recast herself as a more sensitive and evenhanded figure
on these matters. She would have us believe that her role in the
administration's campaign of criticism, pressure, and crisis-creation
against Israel was one of reluctant participant, a loyal official
carrying out her duties despite having tried to dissuade the president
from a mistaken policy.
It is very
difficult, looking at her record during this period, to conclude that
the presentation of her role in her book is accurate. There is a simple
and likely explanation for this revisionist history: She knows that her
prominent role in the past five years of acrimony between the Obama
administration and Israel is unhelpful to her presidential ambitions,
and so she is attempting to distance herself from the administration's
record by downgrading her involvement in its Israel policy. There is too
much evidence to the contrary for her to get away with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment