Diplomacy: WikiLeaks gives glimpse of Clinton-Israel warm and very positive relationship

Diplomacy: WikiLeaks gives glimpse of Clinton-Israel relationship

Stuart Eizenstat’s hacked emails provide a peep into how the Israeli government views Hillary Clinton, and also his own efforts at shaping the presidential candidate’s messaging on Israel.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange makes a speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy, in central London, Britain February 5, 2016.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Loathe WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange or love him, think that he is a Russian tool or one of freedom’s champions, believe that email hacking is an illegal and unethical invasion of privacy or a way to make politics and diplomacy more transparent, his website makes for riveting reading.

And the recent dump of thousands of emails hacked from John Podesta’s account is no exception.

Podesta is the chairman of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the emails that have appeared on the WikiLeaks website proved a fascinating, unfiltered look at the inner workings of the Clinton campaign.

They also provide a small peep into her thinking on Israel, how some Israeli leaders view her positions on Israel, and efforts to shape her Israel messaging.

Indeed, many of the emails dealing with Israel were written by Stuart Eizenstat, 73, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in Jimmy Carter’s administration as chief domestic adviser, and in Bill Clinton’s administration in a variety of roles, including ambassador to the EU and deputy secretary of the Treasury. Along with Dennis Ross, Eizenstat is currently the co-chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute’s board of directors. In the 2008 election he served as a surrogate for Clinton with Jewish audiences.

As he writes of himself to Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s chief foreign policy adviser and his main email interlocutor, “By way of background, I have very deep connections to the State of Israel and to its elected officials and leading academics. I go to Israel two to three times a year, perhaps 50 times since my first visit in 1965. My grandfather and great-grandfather are buried in Israel, and I have scores of relatives and friends there.”

Sullivan, who has been touted as a possible candidate for national security adviser if Clinton wins in November, indicated in the emails that Eizenstat’s comments and recommendations are taken seriously.

In a July 2015 email, during which he briefed Sullivan on a meeting he had with Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, Eizenstat wrote, “Let me premise this summary by telling you that we are so personally close to him that my late wife, Fran, and I went to his bar mitzva in Miami (tragically, his father, the mayor of Miami Beach, died of a heart attack two weeks before the event). We have been close ever since, although our politics are far apart. Also, I am fully and painfully aware of his role in the Romney- Obama election.”

That last sentence has to do with allegations that Dermer actively supported Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. No such charges have been leveled this time around in Clinton’s race against Donald Trump.

In fact, in a December 2015 email, Eizenstat writes of an unnamed senior Israeli official who “is very close to the prime minister, and knows his thinking,” who said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a good relationship with Clinton. This official is widely believed to be Dermer.

The official, Eizenstat writes, had a number of insights. The first one was the following: “The prime minister always had a ‘surprising good relationship’ with Hillary; she is ‘easy to work with,’ and [he believes] that she is more instinctively sympathetic to Israel than the White House.

“Even during their ‘famous 43-minute phone call, when he felt like slamming down the phone, he felt she was simply heavily scripted and reading from points prepared by the White House.’” That phone call refers to a telephone dressing down Netanyahu received from Clinton in March 2010 following the announcement of building in a Jerusalem neighborhood over the Green Line during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. Clinton was secretary of state at the time.

According to Eizenstat, the official did wonder if a Clinton administration “will be a Saban Forum for four years,” referring to the annual conference sponsored at the Brookings Institution each year by billionaire Clinton backer Haim Saban, and which Clinton addressed in 2015, as she has in the past. This concern, Eizenstat wrote, had to do more with the “people around her, but not her. Her [2015 Saban Forum] speech, in the eyes of the official, was ‘95% good, although there was some moral equivalence language.’” Asked by Sullivan in a follow-up email what the official meant by wondering whether a Clinton administration would be a four-year-long Saban Forum, Eizenstat replied: “What he meant was that they are concerned that the focus of an HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] administration would be on the Palestinian peace process and two-state solution rather than on the external threats to Israel (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas), and that the administration would be populated with officials of this bent. He was less worried about HRC’s own views.”

In an email from March 2015, Eizenstat wrote of a meeting with Dermer to discuss a recent JPPI meeting in Jerusalem. In that email he spelled out some of Dermer’s concerns. The ambassador, according to Eizenstat, said that the administration was “tone deaf” about the existential threat Iran posed to Israel, and that Clinton should “recognize and empathize with Israel’s concerns with the Iran deal.”

The email also shed light on how the Israeli government views J Street.

Dermer, according to Eizenstat, “distinguishes between liberal groups like Peace Now, which he supports, and J Street, which he does not. The reason, he said, is that although they are officially anti-BDS, they actively lobby against Israeli positions supported by a democratically elected government in Israel, and are constantly critical of Israel, rather than the Palestinians.

By lobbying Congress and the administration against Israeli positions, they are ‘denying Israel’s right to self-determination.’ They are lobbying to change what the popularly elected government of Israel supports.”

A few months earlier, in March 2015, soon after Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and after his reelection and hints from sources close to US President Barack Obama that the administration may take a new look at the US-Israel relationship following comments Netanyahu made about two states and Arab voters, Eizenstat wrote that “the Obama White House-Bibi relationship is obviously deteriorating to the point of no return.”

Eizenstat said the relationship was “more poisonous” than at any other time in his lifetime, and that there has never been the “public personal animosity that exists now” between Netanyahu and Obama. “Olive branches have been spurned,” he wrote.

He said this “obviously places Hillary in an extremely difficult position,” and suggested she make the following points: First, the need to “lower the temperature level” of rhetoric on all sides, stressing that “the overall political, military, defense relationship with Israel is too important to allow personal differences to intrude on the future direction of US policy.”

Second, he suggested she stress the “enduring commitment of the United States to Israel’s security interests,” including battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. He also suggested she “express a strong feeling that Israel MUST remain a bipartisan issue, as it has been since its formation.”

In another email three months later he writes of a weeklong visit to Israel during which he was struck “not only among Israeli officials, but among my friends across the political spectrum (most are former officials) and apolitical relatives, at the depth of antipathy and distrust of President Obama as ‘weak,’ ‘pro-Muslim’ and ‘anti-Israel.’” This theme appeared in an email written a month earlier about a JPPI conference in the US attended by a number of Israeli officials, past and present; former US officials, such as Henry Kissinger; academics, rabbis and leaders of organized American Jewry.

“Most troubling was the pervasive feeling that the US has withdrawn from a leadership position in the Middle East, leaving our allies in the Arab world, and Israel, to fend for themselves. The level of vitriol against the president was striking, to such a degree that one participant urged that he was being unfairly demonized.”

Eizenstat wrote that he hoped his report of the two-day conference, during which he spelled out the concerns across a wide range of issues, “is helpful in shaping Hillary’s positions on these difficult issues.

But more broadly, she needs to understand the great angst in the Jewish community over the cascade of challenges I have described. The empathy and appreciation she can demonstrate would itself be important and reassuring.”

In Your Face again Donny T , Hillary Clinton names Merkel as her favourite World Leader . Democratic candidate praises 'extraordinary Chancellor.Hillary Clinton trolled two White House opponents with a single response, dinging Gary Johnson and Donald Trump by naming Angela Merkel as her favorite world leader.

In Your Face again Donny T , Hillary Clinton names Merkel as her favourite World Leader . Democratic candidate praises 'extraordinary Chancellor.Hillary Clinton trolled two White House opponents with a single response, dinging Gary Johnson and Donald Trump by naming Angela Merkel as her favorite world leader.

The Democratic presidential nominee on Thursday joined the discussion about politicians’ favorite world leaders, a topic that went viral when Johnson, the Libertarian nominee, drew a blank when asked Wednesday to name a world leader he looks up to and respects.

“Oh, let me think. Look, I like a lot of the world leaders,” Clinton said, bursting into laughter initially when asked about her favorite world leader during a gaggle with reporters aboard her campaign plane in Chicago. “One of my favorites is Angela Merkel because I think she’s been an extraordinary, strong leader during difficult times in Europe, which has obvious implications for the rest of the world and, most particularly, our country.”

Clinton praised the German chancellor’s “leadership and steadiness on the Euro crisis,” while adding that “her bravery in the face of the refugee crisis is something that I am impressed by.”

Clinton said she and Merkel have known each other since the 1990s and spent a lot of time together. “And I hope I’ll have the opportunity to work with her in the future, but we could talk about lots of different leaders if you want to sometime,” she quipped as she walked away with a smile.

Her seemingly innocuous response could be interpreted as a two-pronged attack against Johnson and Trump, though.

When first asked the question, Johnson admitted that he was having another “Aleppo moment,” a reference to an embarrassing interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” earlier this month in which he asked, “What is Aleppo?” in response to a question about the city that represents the center of Syria’s civil war and refugee crisis, prompting serious questions about his acumen to be commander in chief.

Trump has frequently attacked Merkel on the campaign trail, panning her for Germany’s intake of refugees, and will likely use that line against Clinton in the final stages of the campaign.

“Hillary Clinton is running to be America’s Angela Merkel, and we’ve seen how much crime and how many problems that’s caused the German people,” Trump said in a speech he delivered last month in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Oy Vey God Save America from Donny T. What a Fertummelt Fercockt Shmendrik Trump’s incoherent, inconsistent, incomprehensible foreign policyp: 'You cannot have foreign policy without diplomacy'

Trump’s incoherent, inconsistent, incomprehensible foreign policyp: 'You cannot have foreign policy without diplomacy'

WHAT WAS supposed to be a rare set-piece speech by Donald Trump on foreign policy Wednesday resembled a pastiche of his off-the-cuff postulations from the campaign trail, cobbled together under the slogan “America First.” Like the previous rhetoric, his proposals were loose, frequently contradictory and embedded in a bucket of falsehoods. Of these, the biggest was Mr. Trump’s claim that he could somehow reverse the historical tides that have created a globalized economy and remedy the complex security challenges of the 21st century with a simple “plan for victory with a capital V.”

It’s not clear whether Mr. Trump intended to associate himself with the original America Firsters, who campaigned to prevent U.S. entry into World War II and, in some cases, played down Nazi crimes and spun anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But to the extent they had any coherence, his nostrums evoked the isolationism of Robert A. Taft or the mercantilism and fondness for authoritarian regimes of Pat Buchanan — Republicans who were resoundingly rejected by the party in the 1940s and 1990s, respectively. Among other things, Mr. Trump promised to “quickly” eliminate the U.S. trade deficit with China, force U.S. allies to pay for their own defense, and end “this horrible cycle of hostility” with Vladi­mir Putin’s Russia. He did this while excoriating President Obama as a leader who “picked fights with our oldest friends” and “bows to our enemies.”

Those weren’t the only contradictions. Mr. Trump said the United States had “no choice” but to abandon defense commitments to allies because of the allegedly weakened state of the U.S. economy. But minutes later the candidate was lamenting the shrinkage in the U.S. armed forces and declaring, “We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest single investment we can make.” What’s more, he said, “your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them.”

“Fixing our relations with China is another important step,” said Mr. Trump. But his remedies were preposterous. He claimed that U.S. “economic power” over China could be used to force Beijing to “rein in” North Korea, “which is totally out of control” — a notion that would be laughed out of a high school foreign relations class. “We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways,” he said of Sino-U.S. relations; we pity the China analysts charged with making sense of that.

Mr. Trump blamed previous administrations for making a mess of the Middle East — a reasonable claim, but one he littered with false assertions. He again claimed, against the known record, to have opposed the Iraq War well before it began. He said, falsely, that the Islamic State was exporting oil from Libya. Then there were the flagrant lies that “there are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism” and that “for every case known to the public, there are dozens and dozens more.”

One line in Mr. Trump’s speech did have the ring of truth. Having elsewhere stressed the need for consistency and reliability in U.S. foreign policy, he blurted: “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” It’s a good bet that the United States under a President Trump would be just that — to the peril of itself, and the rest of the world.

Oy Vey God Save America from Donny T. What a Fertummelt Fercockt Shmendrik Trump’s incoherent, inconsistent, incomprehensible foreign policyp: 'You cannot have foreign policy without diplomacy'

Trump’s incoherent, inconsistent, incomprehensible foreign policyp: 'You cannot have foreign policy without diplomacy'

WHAT WAS supposed to be a rare set-piece speech by Donald Trump on foreign policy Wednesday resembled a pastiche of his off-the-cuff postulations from the campaign trail, cobbled together under the slogan “America First.” Like the previous rhetoric, his proposals were loose, frequently contradictory and embedded in a bucket of falsehoods. Of these, the biggest was Mr. Trump’s claim that he could somehow reverse the historical tides that have created a globalized economy and remedy the complex security challenges of the 21st century with a simple “plan for victory with a capital V.”

It’s not clear whether Mr. Trump intended to associate himself with the original America Firsters, who campaigned to prevent U.S. entry into World War II and, in some cases, played down Nazi crimes and spun anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But to the extent they had any coherence, his nostrums evoked the isolationism of Robert A. Taft or the mercantilism and fondness for authoritarian regimes of Pat Buchanan — Republicans who were resoundingly rejected by the party in the 1940s and 1990s, respectively. Among other things, Mr. Trump promised to “quickly” eliminate the U.S. trade deficit with China, force U.S. allies to pay for their own defense, and end “this horrible cycle of hostility” with Vladi­mir Putin’s Russia. He did this while excoriating President Obama as a leader who “picked fights with our oldest friends” and “bows to our enemies.”

Those weren’t the only contradictions. Mr. Trump said the United States had “no choice” but to abandon defense commitments to allies because of the allegedly weakened state of the U.S. economy. But minutes later the candidate was lamenting the shrinkage in the U.S. armed forces and declaring, “We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest single investment we can make.” What’s more, he said, “your friends need to know that you will stick by the agreements that you have with them.”

“Fixing our relations with China is another important step,” said Mr. Trump. But his remedies were preposterous. He claimed that U.S. “economic power” over China could be used to force Beijing to “rein in” North Korea, “which is totally out of control” — a notion that would be laughed out of a high school foreign relations class. “We can both benefit or we can both go our separate ways,” he said of Sino-U.S. relations; we pity the China analysts charged with making sense of that.

Mr. Trump blamed previous administrations for making a mess of the Middle East — a reasonable claim, but one he littered with false assertions. He again claimed, against the known record, to have opposed the Iraq War well before it began. He said, falsely, that the Islamic State was exporting oil from Libya. Then there were the flagrant lies that “there are scores of recent migrants inside our borders charged with terrorism” and that “for every case known to the public, there are dozens and dozens more.”

One line in Mr. Trump’s speech did have the ring of truth. Having elsewhere stressed the need for consistency and reliability in U.S. foreign policy, he blurted: “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” It’s a good bet that the United States under a President Trump would be just that — to the peril of itself, and the rest of the world.