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Hillary Clinton Tries to Reason With Progressives on Hamas
Will it work?
“Hamas Must Go,” begged former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in an op-ed for The Atlantic yesterday.
The Atlantic, a decidedly left-leaning publication, caters to an audience of younger progressives. That former Secretary Clinton chose The Atlantic to make her impassioned plea serves as a stark reminder of how sharp the leftward divide over the Israel-Hamas conflict has become in recent weeks.
“One morning in November 2012, I knocked on the door of President Barack Obama’s suite in the Raffles Hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, so early that he was barely out of bed,” recalled Clinton, in a clear bid to remind young readers of her foreign policy bona fides.
“I had an urgent question that could not wait for the president to finish his morning coffee: Should we try to broker a cease-fire in Gaza?” Clinton relayed. “Then, like now, the extreme Islamist terror group Hamas had sparked a crisis by indiscriminately attacking Israeli civilians. Israel had responded with air strikes, and a ground invasion of Gaza appeared imminent.”
“The president and I debated whether I should leave Asia, fly to the Middle East, and try to negotiate a halt to the fighting before the situation escalated further,” she remembered. “The reason to go…