Look, I’ll tell you this up front: I’m leaving aside political correctness — a kind of coerced civility that the zeitgeist and one’s editors demand of columnists — and shall call Hillary Clinton phony, duplicitous and opportunistic. She will never get my vote even if she were to abase herself before me — and I’m a registered Democrat who has consistently voted the Democratic ticket for the last four decades.
Where does this animus towards the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and, as of early last week, her party’s presumptive nominee, come from? To be sure, ill-feeling, often bordering on outright hatred, is evinced by a great many of my fellow-Democrats against the tart-tongued politician, though each will cite a different gripe for holding it.
Hillary may have doggedly kept her eyes on the prize since January 20 this year, when she declared her candidacy, but she is not there yet — not by a stretch — for no one knows, come the general election in November, if she truly has the horses to pull the wagon that will get her to the White House. Donald Trump, vulgarian though he may be, appears to be touching a chord with countless American voters out there who could upend all pollsters’ expectations in that election.
“We are on the brink of a historic and unprecedented moment, but we still have work to do”, she told supporters in Long Beach, California, last Monday. She does. If she wins in November, she will indeed make history by becoming the first female president, though not the first female to run as presidential nominee, of whom there have been several in America’s relatively short history, from Victoria Woodhull in 1872, candidate of the Equal Rights Party, who fought for women’s rights and later went on to run her own newspaper, to Elizabeth Dole in 2000, when she resigned her position as president of the Red Cross to run for the republican nomination.
But it will decidedly be a historic first to see a female chief executive sitting behind that famous desk in the Oval Office — a gift to president Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 from Queen Victoria, who had ordered it built from the timbers of the British Arctic exploration ship Resolute — running the affairs of the most powerful nation on earth, and influencing the global dialogue of cultures in what is known in Eurocentric lingo as “the free world”. Certainly, it will represent a dramatic transformation of the White House since those halcyon, innocent days of the early 1950s, when no one winced after Mamie Eisenhower cooed, “Ike runs the country, I turn the lamb chops”.
So, back to my gripe about Hillary Clinton, which I’ll share with you at the cost of seeming to be a one-issue voter: The lunatic extremes she has promised to go to, were she to become president, in her effort to support the Israeli government’s drive to degrade Palestinians and sustain their status as a subjugated people.
Here’s a case in point. In late March this year, at the America Israel Public Affairs Committee annual conference, she adopted a brazenly hawkish — her aides prefer “muscular” — approach to the Palestine-Israel conflict, berating her former boss, President Barack Obama, for his not altogether warm relationship with the insufferable Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hollering, to piercing applause, “One of the first thing I’ll do in office is to invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House”. The kow-towing to Netanyahu came, it should be recalled, at a time when he had more aggressively opposed the American president than any other Zionist leader before him, a man who openly, and clearly undiplomatically, rooted against Obama’s election in 2012, and lobbied in the US, equally, undiplomatically, against his Iran nuclear deal.
About Israel’s land-grabbing enterprise in Palestine, a colonial enterprise that violates international law and is condemned by the international community, she said that “everyone has to do his part to avoid hasty actions”. She has promised to block the United Nations from moving the peace process forward, as United States Secretary of State John Kerry and European leaders are attempting to do these days.
And, yes, she has put the failure of that process on the Palestinians, the injured party in the dispute. “It is difficult to imagine progress in this current climate when many Israelis doubt that a willing and capable partner even exists”. In short, Hillary, if she ever becomes president of the US, will give Israel all it wants. Consider her retort to Trump’s observation not quite two months ago that “America will be neutral in the Arab Israeli-conflict”. She hit back, saying “America will never be neutral when it comes to Israel”.
And, yes, it’s time to go after Israel’s enemies, who lurk behind every lamppost in the region. “The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever, and more determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries, and to advance our shared values”, she averred, pledging to take the special relationship to the “next level” by giving Israel even more economic, military and diplomatic support once in office.
She wants to “send a clear message to Israel’s enemies that the United States and Israel stand together, united” — and that would be the Arab enemies who, since they reached out to it by passing the Arab League Peace Initiative in 2002, were spurned by successive Zionist governments.
Toadying to the Jewish American vote is one thing, disdaining the sensitivities of Palestinian Americans, and along with them the sensitivities of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, is another. What are we, a lower species of men and women? Thus, when I cast my ballot in November, I will, yes, shoot myself in the foot and cast it not so much for Trump — a buffoon as dumb as the day is long — but against a double-dealing, shifty Hillary.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
