Former President Bill Clinton says he agrees that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “not the guy” for a peace deal.
“Netanyahu himself said that he does not want peace. If we don’t force him to make peace, we will not have peace,” the man told Clinton in the video.
“First of all, I agree with that. But in 2000, [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak, I got him to agree to something that I’m not sure I could have gotten [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to agree to, and Rabin was murdered for giving land to the Palestinians,” Clinton responded, referring to Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts he brokered during his administration.
“But Netanyahu is not the guy,” the unnamed person told Clinton, cutting in.
“I agree with that,” Clinton responded. “But they would have gotten 96 percent of the West Bank, land swaps in Gaza, appropriate water rights and East Jerusalem, something that hasn’t even been discussed since I left office. And by the way, don’t forget, both [former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat and [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas later tried to say they would take it. They said, ‘We changed our minds, we want it now.’ But by then, they had a government that wouldn’t give it to them.”
The former president and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, headlined Harkin’s 37th and final steak fry in Indianola, Iowa. At the event, Hillary Clinton — the likely front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, should she choose to run — again said she was considering a bid.
The Obama administration and Netanyahu have tried to downplay reports of increased animosity between the U.S. and Israel. Reports indicated that Israel was unhappy with John Kerry, Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, and his attempt to broker a peace deal along with Turkey and Qatar. The White House, for its part, criticized Israel for at least one shelling of a United Nations facility in Gaza and expressed concerns about the high number of civilian casualties in the conflict.
In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary Clinton praised Netanyahu for his flexibility in trying to compromise on a peace deal. “I saw Netanyahu move from being against the two-state solution to announcing his support for it, to considering all kinds of Barak-like options, way far from what he is, and what he is comfortable with,” she said.
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