Hillary Clinton supporters are eagerly circulating a leaked email from last week’s Wikileaks release — a message from former Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat detailing a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the Israeli leader said that she is “more instinctively sympathetic to Israel than the White House.”
The message is being mis-reported as if Netanyahu said that Hillary Clinton was more “sympathetic” than GOP nominee Donald Trump, who was not mentioned.
WorldJewishDaily.com, a sort of Drudge Report for news of interest to Jewish readers, led Tuesday with the misleading headline: “Bibi Prefers Hillary: Leaked email indicates that Israeli PM thinks Clinton will be more ‘instinctively sympathetic’ to Israel.”
The article, of course, provides no evidence that Netanyahu said anything about Trump. The first paragraph hedges a bit, reporting that Bibi “may well prefer Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential elections” (emphasis added).
The fact that Netanyahu prefers Clinton to Obama is hardly news, and has been written about extensively. Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, for example, wrote in his 2015 memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, that Netanyahu and Clinton had an “easy rapport,” as compared to the rest of the Obama administration. That rapport was sorely tested when Clinton berated Netanyahu on the telephone for about 45 minutes over a construction project in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem, carrying out President Barack Obama’s orders to create public “distance” with Israel.
In the Eizenstat email itself, there is evidence that Netanyahu is actually worried about what a Clinton administration might mean for Israel. In one paragraph, Eizenstat reports to the Clinton campaign:
He attended part of the Saban Forum and felt that most of the emphasis was on the Palestinian issue, and wonders if a Clinton Administration “will be a Saban Forum for four years”, due to “the people around her, but not her”. Her own speech was “95% good, although there was some moral equivalence language.”
The vast majority of American Jews vote Democratic, and Hillary Clinton enjoys a good relationship with many Jewish community leaders, as well as the support of key opinion-makers. However, she has no actual pro-Israel achievements to her name, even after decades of public life, and in fact has done several things to damage Israel’s cause.
Donald Trump recently had a successful meeting with Netanyahu in New York, focusing on shared interest in border security.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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