Israel Matzav

Oh my... Hillary tells Dem donors she'll be better for Israel than Obama

It's come to this: Hillary Clinton has told a closed door meeting of prominent Democratic Jewish donors that she will be better for Israel than Barack Hussein Obama. Okay, that's not saying much, is it?

Hillary Clinton is privately signaling to wealthy Jewish donors that — no matter the result of the Iranian nuclear negotiations — she will be a better friend to Israel than President Barack Obama.

But, even as donors increasingly push Clinton on the subject in private, they have emerged with sometimes widely varying interpretations about whether she would support a prospective deal, according to interviews with more than 10 influential donors and fundraising operatives.

Clinton’s private responses in some ways resemble a foreign policy Rorschach test; donors who see a deal as important to world peace have come away thinking that Clinton shares their perspective, but so, too, do donors who oppose any prospective agreement as compromising Israeli security.

Publicly, she’s expressed support for the negotiating process, which she secretly initiated during her time as secretary of state, but has also said “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Part of the problem is that Clinton doesn't really think Obama is so bad for Israel.

And, at a Manhattan fundraiser last week featuring a largely Jewish group of donors, Clinton defended Obama against charges he had weakened the U.S.-Israel relationship, asserting that such criticism stemmed from a “perception” problem, according to a donor who was present. But she also suggested that if she were elected president she could correct that problem and bring the two nations closer.

“Diplomacy is all about personal relationships, and I’ve got my own relationships,” she said, referencing her two-decade association with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ardent opponent of the Iran deal and, occasionally, of Obama. Clinton even cited her rapport with former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, who last week published a book that was brutally critical of the Obama administration and was timed for release to try to stymie the Iran deal. “I know Michael well, but I haven’t read the book,” she said.

At a fundraiser last month at the Long Island home of Democratic donor Jay Jacobs, Clinton was asked by an Orthodox rabbi about threats to Israel’s security. “She did stress in no uncertain terms her full and fervent support of the state of Israel and the defense of the state of Israel,” recalled Jacobs. “And the people in the audience who heard it seemed to be comfortable with her answer.”

Likewise, donors at a different New York fundraiser seemed to fully accept her answer to a slightly different question about the U.S. interest in the deal, said billionaire hedge fund manager Marc Lasry, a leading Clinton donor. “She said ‘I’m going to do what’s in the best interest of the U.S.,’ and that was the end of it,” Lasry said.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iranian nuclear threat, US presidential campaign 2016, US-Israel relationship

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:04 AM