Hillary Clinton, who is almost certain to be the Democratic Party candidate in the next US presidential election, hinted yesterday that the US approach to Israel under an administration led by her would be different from the approach taken by the current president, Barack Obama. Clinton thus broke a long silence over the strain in relations between Washington and Jerusalem, after a comment by a senior White House official that the cool attitude to Israel was liable to spill over from the current administration to the next one.
After a telephone conversation with Clinton, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a statement, “Secretary Clinton thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to a constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests, including a two-state solution pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians." Hoenlein said that Clinton told him “We must ensure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue.”
Hoenlein himself commented, “Secretary Clinton’s views are of special importance and timeliness given recent issues in the US-Israel relationship. We note her call for direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, which, we believe, is the only possible route to a true peace.”
Clinton, who is expected to announce her presidential candidacy officially in April, has avoided commenting on the hostility of the Barack administration towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it appears that she decided to break her silence following comments from a White House source quoted by the "Wall Street Journal" that people in the administration felt "personally sold out" by Israel, and that many of those people might be around in the next administration.
The broad hint that a possible Clinton administration would be liable to turn its back on Israel compelled the presumed candidate to take a stance, but she did so only to the minimum possible extent. What does she think about Israeli settlements over the 1967 border? What is her view of the Obama administration's veiled threat to remove from Israel the protection of the US veto in the UN Security Council? She did not say.
The dysfunctional state of US-Israel relations puts Clinton in a bind. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which has built up momentum in recent months, and some party supportersare furious with Netanyahu for what they see as his attachment to the Republicans and his contemptuous attitude to Obama. They support pressure on Israel to force it to change its stance towards the Palestinians and to come into line with Obama. The Democratic Party's more moderate wing does support Obama in a general way, but opposes his willingness to compromise in the negotiations with Iran over the latter's nuclear program, and finds the verbal blows that the White House has been raining down on the Israeli prime minister hard to take.
The Politico website revealed yesterday that twelve Democratic members of the House of Representatives, all of them Jewish, met deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes last week and told him that while they were angered by Netanyahu's speech in the US Congress, they were also upset by the Obama administration's behavior towards him, and that the administration had to stop acting as though Netanyahu's declarations were the only thing holding up the peace process.
A White House official is quoted as saying in response, “We’ve made our point. The message has clearly been received. The next move is theirs, presumably after the new government has been formed.”
On the negotiations with Iran, Politico quotes one of the congressmen as saying, “You want us to go out and say the administration’s got Israel’s back. How are you going to get us to say that when our constituents believe that the administration is stabbing Israel in the back?”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 30, 2015
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