Hillary Clinton has a recent piece in The Forward entitled, How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite her role in the most anti-Israel administration in American history, Clinton wants us to believe that she cares about Israel, has an "enduring emotional connection" to the land and its people, and has done all sorts of good work in supporting the Jewish state.She tells us:
I have stood with Israel my entire career. As a senator, I fought to get Magen David Adom accepted to the International Red Cross when other nations tried to exclude the organization. I wrote and co-sponsored bills that isolated terror groups, and pushed to crack down on incitement in Palestinian textbooks and schools. As secretary of state, I requested more assistance for Israel every year, and supported the lifesaving Iron Dome rocket defense system. I defended Israel from isolation and attacks at the United Nations and other international settings, including opposing the biased Goldstone report.Although I do not distrust Hillary's intentions toward Israel, you know what they say about good intentions and the direction of its paving. It is her foreign policy ideology that I do not trust. It is her unwavering belief in the ongoing failed Oslo nonsense.
It is the likelihood that after eight years of Obama's antics we will get more of the same from Hillary.
She reminds us that "in 2012 I led negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza to stop Hamas rockets from raining down on Israeli homes and communities."
The is sort-of true. Clinton did lead the cease-fire effort at the time, but its primary effect, whatever its intention, was to save Hamas from Israeli retaliation. If Clinton was interested in preventing Hamas rocketeers from ruining the lives of Israeli children then she might not have waited until the moment that Israel started shooting back before interfering. Hamas sent thousands of rockets into southern Israel in the years preceding that engagement and if Hillary was so opposed she might have used her influence to see about de-funding the Jihadi organization.
She didn't.
Aside from outlining the various ways that she has been allegedly friendly to Israel in the past, she also assures us that she will be friendly to Israel in the future.
And while no solution can be imposed from outside, I believe the United States has a responsibility to help bring Israelis and Palestinians to the table and to encourage the difficult but necessary decisions that will lead to peace. As president I will never stop working to advance the goal of two states for two peoples living in peace, security and dignity.This is the big problem.
And it is why no one who cares about the well-being of the Jewish State of Israel, or the well-being of Jewish people, in general, should support Hillary's campaign for president. Hillary, like Barack Obama, is a devotee of the Oslo Delusion. We already know how this movie is going to end because we have seen it many times before.
It looks something like this:
1) The US and the EU demand negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
2) The parties agree to talk and then the PA, the US, and the EU demand various concessions from Israel for the great privilege of sitting down with the PA's foremost undertaker.
3) Israel fails to meet all the concessions, thus causing the PA to flee negotiations, which they never had any intention of concluding to begin with.
4) The PA and the EU and the left-leaning American administration place the blame for failure at Jewish feet.
5) The EU and various European countries announce additional sanctions, thereby essentially joining the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist BDS movement.
6) Jihadis seek to murder Jews.
We are in phase number six of the current round at this particular moment... as anyone who cocks their head out the car door window in Jerusalem, and listens to the screams, will attest. Young Arab-Muslim men are running around Israel stabbing old Jewish ladies and young Jewish children and many in the West believe Israeli Jews richly deserve it. Part of the reason that many in the West, particularly on the Left, think that Arabs have every right to kill Jews is because people like Barack Obama and his administration constantly blame Arab violence on their Jewish victims.
For years, Barack Obama - and people who think like him - have essentially told the world that the real problem is that Jews are so arrogant that they think that they should have the right to build housing for ourselves in Judea... not to mention Samaria. Thus, suddenly, the word "settler" begins to gain evil connotations and the Jewish people are encouraged to split between those of us who oppose these evil settlers and those of us, being evil ourselves, support the evil settlers.
I support the evil settlers.
That land and those hills represent the very heartland of the Jewish people and no one is going to tell me that Judea belongs to the Arab conquerors of Jewish land. Since at least the Peel Commission of 1937, the Jewish people in the Land of Israel have, over and over again, demonstrated their willingness to share what little bit of Jewish land there is with their hostile neighbors.
Time and again they were rebuked.
What Hillary Clinton needs to understand, and what Barack Obama never learned, is that this is not a war over land. It is a centuries-long Arab-Muslim imposition of imperial supremacy upon all non-Muslims, most particularly those that they call the children of orangutans and swine, i.e., the Jewish people.
What Hillary Clinton needs to understand is that while Israeli-Jews are not victims, because they refuse to be victims, this does not mean that they are oppressors, either. It is the Arabs, not the Jews, who have turned that particular human tendency into an art-form.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
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