In the middle of a meeting with 15 rabbis in Boca Raton, Fla., last week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. took a punch meant for his boss.
One of the rabbis asked why Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy convicted in 1986, was still in prison. Mr. Biden, on a mission to shore up support for President Obama, replied forcefully, according to several people at the meeting.
“President Obama was considering clemency, but I told him, ‘Over my dead body are we going to let him out before his time,’ ” Mr. Biden said. “If it were up to me, he would stay in jail for life.”
Yet in 2007, Biden said that he supports leniency for Pollard:
This is not the only recent public about-face done by an Obama 2008 presidential opponent turned employee.In Hillary Clinton's position paper on Israel in 2007 it says:
Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.This was a restatement of what she said during her 1999 Senate campaign: "I personally consider Jerusalem the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel."
But last week she was singing a decidedly different tune:
We believe that this morning's announcement by the government of Israel approving the construction of housing units in east Jerusalem is counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties. As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side.Which means that she no longer believes in an undivided, Jewish Jerusalem, and she thinks that Israel must let all new Jewish neighborhoods built over the past 44 years that "everyone knows" will end up in Israel under any peace agreement must remain stagnant indefinitely, lest a Jew adding a bathroom to his house be considered "provocative."
(h/t Avi Mayer tweet via JW)