Joe Lieberman’s view of Hillary is plain wrong

During a speech at a Mount Vernon shul reported in last week’s Jewish Star, former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman tried to reassure the Jewish community about Hillary Clinton’s Israel credentials. 

“As for Clinton,” he said, “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.”

Lieberman is correct about Ms. Clinton’s Senate career. But except for the time she needed New York’s Jewish voting bloc, Hillary Clinton has never been pro-Israel.

Negative reports about Hillary and Israel even predate her marriage to Bill Clinton. For example, on page 49 of the book “American Evita,” Christopher Anderson wrote that while at Yale, Ms. Clinton told friends of her “sympathy” toward the PLO and her admiration of Yasser Arafat: “When Arafat made his famous appearance before the U.N. General Assembly in November 1974, wearing his revolutionary uniform and his holster on his hip, Bill ‘was outraged like everybody else,’ said a Yale Law School classmate. But not Hillary, who tried to convince Bill that Arafat was a ‘freedom fighter’ trying to free his people from their Israeli ‘oppressors’.”

On page 50, the author relates a 1973 incident in which Hillary refused to enter a home because it had a menorah on its door and Bill Clinton explained to a friend that “Hillary’s really tight with the people in the PLO in New York. They’re friends of hers, and she just doesn’t feel right about the menorah.”

As first lady, in May 1998, she became the first person attached to any presidential administration to call for a Palestinian State. Think about that: In the two most anti-Israel Administrations before Obama — the Carter and Bush #41 presidencies — no one ever called for a Palestinian state. It took Hillary Clinton to “break the ice.”