The Kamala Harris presidential campaign on Wednesday put forward a powerful, if inept, surrogate – former Democratic President Bill Clinton – to explain away Palestinian deaths to Arab Americans and other voters in the state of Michigan.

It did not go well.

This would come as no surprise to those who recall that in 2002 Clinton declared, “The Israelis know that if the Iraqi or the Iranian army came across the Jordan River, I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch and fight and die.”

He has declared no intent to fight Israeli apartheid or the current genocide decimating Gaza and would surely argue those facts. The Democratic Party, which eventually moved against apartheid in South Africa, is currently rejecting any meaningful policy to stop the Gaza genocide or support Palestinian freedom and equal rights.

Apartheidsplainer Clinton made the case in the key battleground state of Michigan with its significant Arab American population for why it’s understandable Kamala Harris’ chartreuse genocide continues and, for good measure, emphasized that Muslims – ignoring Christian Palestinians – got to “Judea and Samaria” second.

Speaking of both Hamas and ancient “Judea and Samaria,” the name Clinton surely knows right-wing Israeli settlers use to refer to the occupied West Bank, the former president asserted that Jews “were there first before their faith [Islam] existed.”

Patronize, patronize, patronize

“I understand why young Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan think too many people have died, I get that,” Clinton said to the audience in Muskegon Heights, Michigan.

He declared the Israelis living in kibbutzim right next to Gaza to be “the most pro-friendship with Palestine, most pro-two state solution of any of the Israeli communities … and Hamas butchered them.”

The former president added, “So then the people who criticize [Israel’s attack] are essentially saying, ‘Yeah, but look how many people you’ve killed in retaliation. So how many is enough for you to kill, to punish them for the terrible things they did?’”

Spinning out a fantasy vision of Israelis working night and day for Palestinian rights – and entirely ignoring Palestinian dispossession, shunting refugees into Gaza and decades of anti-Palestinian violence – Clinton asked, “What would you do if it was your family, and you hadn’t done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians, and one day they come for you and slaughter the people in your village?”

Answering his own question, Clinton declared: “You would say, ‘Well, you have to forgive me, I’m not keeping score that way. It isn’t how many we’ve had to kill, because Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded by civilians that’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.’”

That is excuse-making for Israel’s Gaza genocide and war crimes. He is turning genocide into a game, one where it is somehow possible to keep score. If Clinton set out to lose votes for today’s Democratic war party, he couldn’t have said it better.

According to CNN, Harris’ political advertisements are playing both sides of the Gaza genocide to reach Arab American voters in Michigan with one message and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with a different message. Arab American voters are being told that Harris “will not be silent about the human suffering occurring in Gaza,” while Jewish voters in Pennsylvania are hearing that she will “stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Last month a Democratic canvasser for Harris rightly fretted at my door that 90 percent of Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and then when two more canvassers arrived days later they openly agreed with me that Palestinians are facing genocide in Gaza. Yet there is apparently no red line for the most committed Democrats.

“Stop”

Democratic Dearborn, Michigan Mayor Abdullah Hammoud was irate over Clinton’s words, though they appear to represent well the position of the Democratic Party’s leadership which time and again has provided cover for Israel’s war crimes.

Hammoud tweeted, “Do us a favor – stop sending surrogates who have no respect or regard for this community. You’re only inflicting more damage.”

“Bill Clinton’s callous and dishonest attempt to justify the Israeli government’s attacks on civilians in Gaza was as insulting as it was Islamophobic. It is completely unacceptable to dismissively reference Islam and falsely claim that every Palestinian man, woman and child killed by Israel was a human shield. Even President Biden admitted months ago that the Israeli government has engaged in indiscriminate bombing in Gaza. Prominent leaders like Bill Clinton should be upholding Palestinian human rights, not rationalizing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.”

Clinton spins

“I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,” Clinton insisted in 2016.

But that’s not the way even his own negotiators remember it.

Josh Ruebner, then the national advocacy director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (known today as the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights), in a 2011 op-ed in The Los Angeles Times cites US peace process negotiator Dennis Ross, no friend of the Palestinian people, as admitting profound negotiating shortcomings in his 2004 book, The Missing Peace.

Ross wrote: “‘Selling’ became part of our modus operandi – beginning a pattern that would characterize our approach throughout the Bush and Clinton years. We would take Israeli ideas or ideas that the Israelis could live with and work them over – trying to increase their attractiveness to the Arabs while trying to get the Arabs to scale back their expectations. Why did this pattern emerge? The realities dictated it.”

Fellow peace processor Aaron David Miller wrote in a 2005 Washington Post op-ed titled “Israel’s lawyer” of “the Clinton administration’s effort in 1999-2000 to broker final deals between Israel, Syria and the Palestinians.”

Miller wrote: “With the best of motives and intentions, we listened to and followed Israel’s lead without critically examining what that would mean for our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall success of the negotiations. The ‘no surprises’ policy, under which we had to run everything by Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility required for serious peacemaking. If we couldn’t put proposals on the table without checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable to both sides but what would pass with only one – Israel.”

Putting the lie to Clinton’s long-running insistence that all blame rested with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians, Miller wrote: “If we knew the gaps were too large (and we suspected they were), we should have resisted [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Barak’s pressure to go for a make-or-break summit and then blame the Palestinians when it failed. What we ended up doing was advocating Israel’s positions before, during and after the summit.”

Nearly a quarter of a century after the ignominious end of Clinton’s two terms in office, he’s still lying about Palestinians: this time in the middle of a genocide backed militarily by the candidate he’s supporting for president.

When this chapter of history is written, the complicity of current and former Democratic leaders (and Republicans) in war crimes and genocide in Gaza will be plain to see, provided that Congress is not successful in running over the independence of universities and the First Amendment.

Tags

• Bill Clinton
• Kamala Harris
• Democratic Party
• israeli apartheid
• Judea and Samaria
• Donald Trump
• Abdullah Hammoud
• Joe Biden
• Josh Ruebner
• US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
• US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
• Dennis Ross
• Aaron David Miller
• Yasser Arafat
• Ehud Barak
• Gaza genocide
• Gaza war crimes

• Michael F. Brown's blog

• Facebook
• Twitter