Joe Lieberman: Hillary's not so bad

Hillary Clinton’s track record on Israel is a good one, former Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman told a Westchester shul on motzei Shabbos.

To be clear, Lieberman wasn’t dishing out an endorsement — he emphasized that all of the Republican candidates have sold pro-Israel credentials — but his remarks on Clinton were in contrast to widespread skepticism about the sincerity of her support for the Jewish state. 

The only presidential hopeful whose position on Israel worries Lieberman is Clinton’s Democratic rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Lieberman said Sanders would not necessarily be bad, “but I don’t have confidence because he doesn’t have a track record.”

As for Clinton, “You can point to times when she’s done things about Israel that you’ll wonder about, but overall, certainly when I worked with her most closely when she was a senator from New York, she had pretty strong positive feelings about Israel,” he said. 

“She’s certainly an internationalist,” he added.

While support for Israel used to be largely non-partisan, there is now an overall difference in emphasis between the parties, Lieberman said.

“I say this painfully as a Democrat: The Republicans know, mostly because of the Christian evangelicals who constitute such a large part of the Republican Party, that they can go to a Republican rally pretty much anywhere in the country and make a strong statement of support for Israel and there will be loud applause.”

“There’s a lot of empathy among the average American toward Israel and its plight, [but] we’re beginning to see a difference of favorable feeling toward Israel between the two parties,” although not yet in Congress, he said.

Lieberman regretted the bad feeling generated during debate over the Iran nuclear deal, and said it should not have been decided on partisan lines. It’s not rational that party loyalty would be “more important than the substance of the argument,” he said.