Cornel West: "We won't stand for annihilation" in Palestine

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60. Partial:

'At the beginning of her speech to 18,000 attendees at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in March, Hillary Clinton offered a short but telling anecdote.
“Since my first visit to Israel 35 years ago, I have returned many times and made many friends. I have worked with and learned from some of Israel’s great leaders – although I don’t think Yitzhak Rabin ever forgave me for banishing him to the White House balcony when he wanted to smoke.”
Aside from earning a smattering of laughter, Clinton skillfully made a number of points: She presented a tidy portrait of herself as a longtime champion of Israel, highlighted her intimacy with a beloved, peace-seeking prime minister, and reminded the audience that she’s already at home in the White House.
Of all of the presidential candidates, from both parties, who
cluttered this primary season until recently, Clinton had the longest public record of engagement with Israel, and has spent decades diligently defending the Jewish state. Jewish voters have rewarded her for her loyalty: In the New York primary in April, she appeared to have easily won the Jewish vote 2-to-1, besting her Jewish rival, Bernie Sanders.
Sanders, meanwhile, is the most successful Jewish presidential candidate in United States history and has the closest personal relationship to Israel, having lived on a kibbutz there for a brief stint in the 1960s. He is also the candidate offering the most critical views on the U.S.-Israel relationship of any mainstream political candidate in recent memory. . .


Clinton’s campaign website makes much of her three-decade public commitment to Israel, dedicating an entire page to her personal, diplomatic and legislative history with the country under the headline: “Hillary Clinton and Israel: A 30-Year Record of Friendship, Leadership and Strength.”

Samples of the policy priorities that follow include guaranteeing “Israel’s qualitative military edge to ensure the IDF is equipped to deter and defeat aggression from the full spectrum of threats,” “stand up against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement,” and “cut off efforts to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood outside of the context of negotiations with Israel.”
But Clinton has also found herself walking a tightrope as the former secretary of state under U.S. President Barack Obama, who has presided over a period of deteriorating U.S.-Israel diplomatic relations, owing in part to bad personal blood between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an Iran nuclear deal hugely unpopular with pro-Israel advocates.
Clinton helped lay the groundwork for that deal and now finds herself needing to both defend it and reassure its critics.

“We must maintain the legal and diplomatic architecture to turn all the sanctions back on if needed,” she said in her AIPAC speech. “If I’m elected the leaders of Iran will have no doubt that if we see any indication that they are violating their commitment not to seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons, the United States will act to stop it, and that we will do so with force if necessary.”
Heading into the 2008 presidential primaries, Clinton was favored by Jewish voters but ultimately lost to Obama. As his secretary of state, she was involved in a number of miscalculations that helped sour his relationship with the Israeli government, including supporting his call for a settlement freeze in 2009, which she later came to regret.

“In retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work,” Clinton wrote in “Hard Choices,” her 2014 memoir.
But she continued to criticize the policy, telling CNN that settlements were “my biggest complaint with the Israeli government.” She went on: “The continuing settlements which have been denounced by successive American administrations on both sides of the aisle are clearly a terrible signal to send if at the same time you claim you’re looking for a two-state solution.”
Clinton made this point at the height of the Gaza War in the summer of 2014, but was firm in placing the blame for that conflict with Hamas. “I have said publicly – and I believe it – that Hamas provoked Israel in order to actually cause what we are now seeing,” she said in the CNN interview. . .

Two weeks earlier, however, Sanders correctly cited the largely accepted United Nations figure of 1,500 civilian deaths during the Gaza War in a Middle East policy speech. The speech was noteworthy in part because of where it did not take place: at AIPAC, where Sanders had been invited, but declined to attend, offering instead to speak via video, which the conference declined.
Instead, he outlined his priorities at a high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, explicitly expressing his concerns for the Palestinian people.
“So when we talk about Israel and Palestinian areas, it is important to understand that today there is a whole lot of suffering among Palestinians and that cannot be ignored,” he said. “You can’t have good policy that results in peace if you ignore one side.”...

The balancing act reflects a long and complicated relationship with Netanyahu: She chewed him out in a 2010 phone call over a settlement embarrassment involving Vice President Joe Biden, and said, in the 2014 CNN interview, “I’ve known Bibi a long time and I have a very good relationship with him, in part because we can yell at each other, and we do. And I was often the designated yeller.”
Clinton now seems to be counting on the fact that her decades-old history with Israel and willingness to engage with that country’s leader will thaw the perceived cold war of the Obama years, soothe over the partisan cracks in the U.S.-Israel relationship and win over the conservative Jewish leaders who are simply too uncomfortable with Donald Trump to get behind him.
But while Sanders has succeeded in nudging Clinton to the left on certain economic policies over the course of the primary campaign, on Israel, she hasn’t budged.'