Opinion | In praise of Hillary Clintons defense of Israel

Alfred Dreyfus is one of those figures from history about whom many have heard a bit, but relatively few know in much detail. By contrast, millions were once familiar, in exhaustive detail, with the “Dreyfus Affair” after the Jewish French army captain was charged with espionage in 1894.

Newspaper coverage was feverish and an enormous amount of literature about Dreyfus’s prosecution and persecution was published in the years that followed. He was accused of selling military secrets to Germany, France’s hated foe, in a case marked by faked evidence and an explosion of antisemitism sparked by rage over Jews’ supposed disloyalty to France.

Today, it is hard to miss how another historic event, Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, has similarly made countless antisemites feel liberated to freely spew their hatred. And, just as with the Dreyfus Affair, the eruption of antisemitism has revealed both villains and heroes.

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Dreyfus, who pleaded his innocence, was convicted of treason in a closed trial, sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony off the coast of French Guiana in South America. The risible case against Dreyfus gradually fell apart as forged documents were revealed and suppressed documents discovered.

One prominent Frenchman, a non-Jew, stood up and denounced the state conspiracy against Dreyfus: In 1898, novelist and journalist Émile Zola penned what became the famous open letter with the simple headline “J’Accuse…!,” on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore. The paper’s publisher, Georges Clemenceau, the future French prime minister and savior of the nation in World War I, pleaded Dreyfus’s case in more than 600 articles as he was retried and convicted again in 1899 before being granted clemency and, ultimately, in 1906, exonerated.

Zola and Clemenceau were two heroes of that sordid episode, setting an inspiring standard for non-Jews to stand by Jews amid swelling antisemitism. It is an example that ought to be remembered and heeded today.

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Moments of national crisis bring forth those who rise to the moment and those who fail. We are in such a moment now, as Israel counterattacks Hamas terrorists in Gaza, to the south and engages in a deadly duel with Iran’s other puppets, Hezbollah, to the north, while the ultimate menace to the Jewish state bides its time in Tehran.

This moment has already revealed many villains and heroes in the United States, but I want to take my hat off for one person in particular right now: former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

In every public appearance I have seen, Clinton has stood resolutely with Israel and its righteous cause. She has never lost sight of the victims in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, doesn’t equivocate or descend into word salads, doesn’t muddy her declarations by engaging in absurd whataboutism. You won’t catch her indulging the idea that Israel is a “colonizer” or is engaged in “genocide.” Her smackdown of calls for a Gaza cease-fire was uncompromising; at Columbia University, she has fearlessly continued to teach even as antisemitic, sorry, “anti-Zionist,” protesters disrupt her classes.

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Clinton has a strong history of fighting antisemitism, as in 2016 when she said, “At a time when antisemitism is on the rise across the world, especially in Europe, we must repudiate all efforts to malign, isolate and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.” Two years earlier, when another Israeli counterattack against Hamas drew intense global criticism, she defended Israel’s response and noted of the criticism: “You can’t ever discount antisemitism.”

Clinton is a role model for every public person with a platform, and unlike Republicans for whom standing with Israel is relatively cost-free, she and Democrats like her must deal with blowback every day.

Some of that blowback comes in indirect form, as when former Obama administration officials take aim at Israel. Consider Ben Rhodes, ex-deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House, who last week wrote in the New York Times that “in Gaza the United States has supported an Israeli military operation that has killed civilians at a pace that has once again suggested to much of the world that we are selective in our embrace of international laws and norms.”

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Then again, Rhodes’s old boss, and Hillary Clinton’s, let his moral-equivalence flag unfurl briefly last month. Former president Barack Obama, only weeks removed from the Oct. 7 slaughter, urged people to “take in the whole truth,” asserting that Hamas’s attack was “horrific,” but “the occupation, and what’s happening to Palestinians, is unbearable.” Oh, and “all of us are complicit to some degree.” Obama appears to have gone quiet since then, perhaps in a nod to his party’s mainstream.

Clinton does not have the literary skills of a Zola or the platform of a Clemenceau, but she is following in their path. I say bravo, and I hope more of her allies on the center-left join her.

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