Hillary Clinton Is Lying About the History Between Hamas and Israel
Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton at the Great Hall in Swansea University Bay Campus in Wales on Nov. 16, 2023. Photo: Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images
The way Clinton blames Hamas for all the violence shows what’s wrong with the U.S. perspective on the Middle East.
by Jon Schwarz
ON TUESDAY, FORMER Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an opinion piece in The Atlantic headlined “Hamas Must Go.” Why does she believe this? The subhead explains: “The terror group has proved again and again that it will sabotage any efforts to forge a lasting peace.”
The article is the latest chapter of Clinton’s press tour following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, including an appearance on the daytime talk show “The View.” Both in The Atlantic and on “The View,” Clinton explained why a ceasefire in Israel’s current war on Gaza would be a terrible mistake.
Everything Clinton has said is part of a peculiar genre of self-defeating “liberal” propaganda on the topic of Israel–Palestine. Clinton is rational and informed and understands, as she writes in The Atlantic, that “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a secure, democratic, Jewish state is by achieving two states for two peoples. … There is no other choice.”
She cannot acknowledge, however, the historical events that have led to the present situation, which clearly show that the primary obstacle to a two-state solution is not any Palestinian faction: It’s the government of Israel.
She repeatedly claims that it’s been Palestinians who have stood in the way of any kind of permanent peace. Of course, this makes her call for a two-state solution appear like the worst kind of liberal naïveté — and is therefore a huge gift to the U.S. and Israeli right. After all, if even the extremely liberal Hillary Clinton admits that Palestinians don’t want peace, why should Israel even try?
The degree to which Clinton’s Atlantic essay is riddled with historical inaccuracies is startling, especially given that she brags about her “decades of experience in the region.” The article begins in November 2012 with a tale of her knocking on the door of President Barack Obama’s hotel room early in the morning during a visit to Cambodia. “Then, like now,” Clinton writes, “the extreme Islamist terror group Hamas
had sparked a crisis by indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians.” She and Obama debated whether she should fly to the Middle East and try to broker a ceasefire in what Israel had dubbed Operation Pillar of Defense.
This was a difficult decision, she writes, because she and Obama “knew Hamas had a history of breaking agreements and could not be trusted.” Nevertheless, they decided she should go. She succeeded in negotiating a halt to the conflict, after about 100 Palestinian and two Israeli civilians died, along with military personnel on both sides.
Clinton says she was left uneasy. “I worried that all we’d really managed to do was put a lid on a simmering cauldron that would likely boil over again in the future,” she writes. “Unfortunately, that fear proved correct. In 2014, Hamas violated the cease-fire and started another war.”
This is close to the opposite of reality.
Sparking a Conflict
Israel had, in collaboration with Egypt, imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza since 2007. Blockades are arguably acts of war, and one place you can find it argued is on the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: “The blockade is by definition an act of war, imposed and enforced through violence. Never in history have blockade and peace existed side by side.”
This is an excerpt from a June 1967 speech by Abba Eban, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, right after the end of the Six-Day War. Eban was explaining why Israel had not started the war, despite the fact that it had struck Egypt first. Because Egypt had imposed a blockade on the Straits of Tiran the month before, Eban said, it was actually Egypt who was responsible for the war.
In the years leading up to Operation Pillar of Defense, Hamas leaders said over and over that they were willing, at a minimum, to accept a long-term truce with Israel. Even the U.S. Institute for Peace, a think tank funded by federal government, acknowledged that Hamas had “sent repeated signals that it may be ready to begin a process of coexisting with Israel.”
This did not interest the Israeli government. On November 14, 2012, Israel assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’s military wing.