The Clintons and Israel

- by Bernie Quigley

- for The HIll on 3/19/10

Diplomatic relations with Israel in the 1990s should be comprehensively reviewed from top to bottom as it has become clear since that the President at the time was on the take. That his wife is now Secretary of State is simply ludicrous.

The Clinton leisure class era was every day in every way an age of appeasement. But it is not the casual million dollar bribes – one to get an Israeli businessman out of jail – that will bring Bill to historic infamy. Not the 50 gold watches. Not the white trash adolescent sexuality unabashedly pioneered by him, customary now among governors of all races and creeds, but the signing of the Oslo Agreements with Yasser Arafat on September 13, 1993.

The Empire State hates it when one of its distant provinces like China or Israel speaks up without permission and relations with Israel took a turn these last weeks with Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. The NYTs had a rapid response to the kerfuffle, floating a header above their op-ed page on March 19 with a picture of Arafat, a “classic op-ed” and the headline, “Israel’s best friend.” But not everybody’s; those on the receiving end of the intifada, like his Romanian communist handlers who supplied him with homosexual prostitutes, were disgusted with him. And it is astonishing that anyone today would be charmed and would see him as anything other than a terrorist. War changes people. It makes them less accommodating. Less cowardly. So did 9/11. And anyone who thinks the giddy treaties offered by Nantucket liberals in the silly season of Clinton/Arafat will hold up today is still lost in the Cloud Coocoo Land of Clinton world.

Best observation is this, by the Times’ Roger Cohen.: “I had lunch the other day with Ron Nachman, the mayor of Ariel, one of the largest West Bank settlements. He told me breezily that there ‘can be no Palestinian state,’ and that ‘Israel and Jordan should divide the land.’ I liked his frankness. It clarifies things.” Welcome to post-9/11. Welcome to the millennium.

In the mid 15th century, Prague Jewry had come to a crossroads. Times were getting good. Shipping in Amsterdam led Christian entrepreneurs to kehillah – Jewish benevolent societies – for financial advice and aid. But Prague’s great Rabbi Loeb had dreamed of a Golem. It could mean the light was going out of Europe. Jews began to leave Prague and later Stalingrad, then Cherry Hill, NJ and Brooklyn Hieghts, on the most astonishing inner journey in the human chronicles, known as “the return” and meeting unimaginable horrors along the way. They are almost there. They are five feet away from the center; the “center of the universe” – the Temple Mount. Anyone who thinks that getting yelled at now by Hillary will stop them is misguided.