In last night’s town-hall, Hillary Clinton said:
We had another unfortunate spate of rockets going from Gaza into Israel in 2012. I'm on the phone with the Israelis. They're trying to knock them out of the sky with their missile defense system. But they're still landing and everybody is really worried that, you know, one of them is going to hit a big group of people, take out a big building somewhere.
She’s talking about the March 2012 conflict which began when Israeli drones killed a number of Islamic Jihad and PRC (a Hamas offshoot) members. The Israelis claimed they were plotting an attack.
It made me think of other things Hillary has said about Palestine/Gaza recently.
In August 2014, Hillary Clinton granted a wide-ranging interview to Jeffrey Godlberg in The Atlantic. There were a number of illuminating statements I’ll quote. For instance, she had this to say about reports that Israeli aircraft had bombed a UN facility:
“it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.”
Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that summer led to the death of 547 children. It included an incident where four children were killed playing while football on the beach. Israeli spokesmen initially said this was a "legitimate" Hamas target but then decided was a “tragic accident”. No word yet on whether the dozens of children killed in their homes by precision bombs, along with their entire families were also “tragic accidents”. That must be the sort of “coverage” that Hillary believes makes it very difficult to get at “the truth”. Maybe the truth would be easier to get to if we just didn’t have this sort of coverage staring at us on the front-page.
By the way, the Obama administration called Israel’s shelling of that UN school “appalling” and “disgraceful”. Perhaps if Hillary Clinton had been in the State Department, we would have heard about how “difficult to sort through” all of this is.
It really shouldn’t be difficult, because Israeli forces have a long history of attacking UN staff and their facilities. Starting with the murder of Folke Bernadotte, UN mediator to Palestine in 1947. That was ordered by a man who went on to become Prime Minister. Another man ordered the shelling of a UN facility in 1996, killing 106 civilians. That charmer, Naftali Bennett has been a cabinet member for the past 4 years and boasts about how he has “killed lots of Arabs in my life, there’s no problem with that”.
But back to Hillary Clinton, who reminded us yesterday that she has a “40-year record of going after inequality”. Which might be why she failed to say a single word about the 50-year long military occupation in the long op-ed she penned for The Forward. That did not go unnoticed by the Palestinian women she claims she’s “fighting for”. But we should ignore that because Hillary tells us she has “a really long history of taking on all kinds of inequality”.
That must be why she also said this about the West Bank:
Hillary Clinton: “If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security, because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good conscience.”
I get it now. Israeli desires to “have control” over the West Bank trump Palestinian rights. Too bad for the Palestinians that their lives and careers are screwed while we tackle super-predators. They have only themselves to blame really, for not choosing the right leaders:
Hillary Clinton: “Bush pretty much ignored what was going on and they made a terrible error in the Palestinian elections [in which Hamas came to power in Gaza]”
Isn’t it weird how only brown people make “terrible errors” in their elections which require bombing them to correct? They should really consult Hillary before they vote. She knows who would be best for their countries, though she can’t spare a thought for them unless there’s a coup in the works.
Sorry, my bad, we don’t call armed overthrows of elected governments by generals with US support a “coup”. Silly me. The proper term is “replacement”:
Hillary Clinton: “But given the changes in the region, the fall of [former Egyptian President Mohamed] Morsi, his replacement by [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi...”
Which makes me think of something else. If Ted Cruz gets elected President, would Hillary Clinton support the violent overthrow of the US government by a foreign power because he isn’t a “moderate” or a “secularist”? I say that because, there was a recent example of brown people holding an election where Hillary concurred with the results:
Hillary Clinton: “It is not yet clear how the Libyans themselves will overcome the lack of security, which they inherited from Qaddafi. Remember, they’ve had two good elections. They’ve elected moderates and secularists and a limited number of Islamists, so you talk about democracy in action—the Libyans have done it twice—but they can’t control the ground.”
Here’s what John Cassidy had to say at the time in the New Yorker about the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:
As I said, the similarity to Blair’s recent call to arms is striking. If Clinton continues with this line of argument, she will inevitably be compared to Henry (Scoop) Jackson, the anti-Communist Democratic senator from the state of Washington who became a hero to the neocons.
But that isn’t what I dislike about Hillary Clinton’s views on foreign policy. No. It’s that she may start on the right side, but backs off right quick if there’s a cost to your convictions about “women and the children and all the rest of that”.