Hillary Clinton’s Legacy

No doubt Secretary Clinton is going to try to spin her trip to the Middle East as a victory for President Obama and for peace, but as American Jews sat down for their Thanksgiving there was a rapidly widening sense that the denouement of the Gaza crisis is a loss for Israel. The secretary managed to wrest from the situation a truce that makes a winner out of the president of Egypt and Hamas in Gaza and, for that matter, their backers in Iran. For Israel and those who are invested in the survival of the Jewish state, it is hard to see anything in the Obama administration’s intervention for which to be thankful.

Oh, it is true that throughout the crisis the President and the State Secretary have been asserting that Israel has a right to defend herself. The President has pointed out that no country would tolerate the kinds of shelling and rocketing out of Gaza that Israel has had to endure. That has been so plain that even the New York Times was making the point. When push came to shove, however, the goal of Mrs. Clinton turned out to be, as it was put in USAToday on November 20, “Avoid an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza.” What is the difference between that goal and the goal of Hamas?

An early signal that things were heading in that direction came over the weekend when our erstwhile colleague, Eli Lake, who has an ear for the nuances of the story, reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu “gave private assurances” to President Obama that Israel “was not planning at that moment to launch a ground invasion of Gaza.” Why in the world would the American president be demanding assurances from Israel? The fact is that in the current war, the administration has seen its role not as standing behind Israel but between Israel and her enemies.

This is going to be Hillary Clinton’s legacy. It will be President Obama’s, too, but his political career is over. That is, he’s run his last political race. Mrs. Clinton is only gearing up for a campaign in 2016. There is already a broad sense that her tour at State has produced a diplomatic shambles, from Bengazhi to Communist China to Russia. It now includes a Hamas that is more powerful than ever and an Egypt with a role in Gaza. We’d like to think that in the coming years the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the best historians, and alert journalists will be untangling and publishing this legacy for all to see.