Hillary Clinton’s top campaign advisers agreed privately that she shouldn’t flaunt her support for Israel during the Democratic primaries for fear of angering the left, according to hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.
In an email exchange in May 2015, as Clinton’s team was preparing the speech that would launch her presidential campaign, the former secretary of State’s senior aides showed they were nervous about Clinton being seen as overly supportive of Israel.
{mosads}As Clinton’s team discussed edits to the speech, foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan suggested adding “a sentence on standing up for our allies and our values, including Israel and other fellow democracies.”
Media adviser Mandy Grunwald pushed back against the idea.
“I though[t] this was largely for her TP [talking points] with public events not fundraisers,” she wrote, “do we need Israel etc for that?”
Clinton’s pollster Joel Benenson and campaign manager-in-waiting Robby Mook backed up Grunwald.
“I’m w Joel,” Mook wrote. “We shouldn’t have Israel at public events. Especially dem activists.”
Replied Sullivan: “I won’t fall on sword over Israel but we need more than climate [change] in that paragraph.”
Clinton’s top speechwriter Dan Schwerin finally weighed in, with a suggestion that Clinton avoid discussing Israel in her campaign launch speech and instead use lines about Israel in private with her donors.
“What about this as a base,” Schwerin wrote to the group, sending a recommended block of foreign policy text for the speech that made no mention of Israel.
“Then she can drop in Israel when she’s with donors,” Schwerin added.
Many of Clinton’s top donors — including Los Angeles entertainment tycoon Haim Saban, who with his wife has given at least $10 million to the main super PAC supporting Clinton — are staunch supporters of Israel.
Shortly after announcing her candidacy, Clinton released a letter she’d sent Saban in which she promised to work with him to fight the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement, “a global effort to isolate the State of Israel by ending commercial and academic exchanges.”
Support for Israel’s policies is far from universal within the Democratic party, however.
Some on the left distrust Clinton because they view her as a pro-Israel hawk. As the WikiLeaks emails reveal, Clinton’s team sought to soothe the far left by not talking too much about Israel.
The issue of Israel being politicized so intensely in the Democratic Party’s liberal wing is partly a product of the personal animosity between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The feud has exacerbated longstanding beliefs on the left that America is too generous with Israel and one-sided regarding its conflict with the Palestinians.
Sanders and his supporters made an issue of the party’s stance on Israel during the debates over the Democratic platform preceding the convention.
In 1999, as a first lady preparing to run for statewide office in New York, Clinton said she considered Jerusalem to be the “eternal and indivisible capital of Israel” and that if elected to U.S. Senate, she would advocate to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, according to CNN.
Such rhetoric is common among candidates on the stump; however, U.S. presidents from both parties have declined to move the embassy because they believe doing so would kill any remaining hopes for a two-state solution.
Clinton is less forthcoming on the subject of the Jerusalem embassy these days.
GOP nominee Donald Trump has sought to make an issue of the embassy during this campaign, contrasting Clinton’s recent reticence on the subject against his full-throated support for moving the diplomatic office.
The Clinton campaign declined to respond to questions about this WikiLeaks thread, in line with its longstanding policy not to credit documents likely obtained by Russian hackers.
Regarding Jerusalem, an aide said Clinton supports the 2016 Democratic platform, which states, “While Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations, it should remain the capital of Israel, an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.”
In Clinton’s thinking, taking the next step and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem would have to be part of a two-state solution.
Clinton ultimately did make a brief mention of Israel in her campaign launch speech in New York.
“I’ve stood up to adversaries like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” she said, “and reinforced allies like Israel.”