I’m at my parents’ place and my mother got a copy of the The Clinton Tapes, by Taylor Branch, published in 2009. Very flattering. In February 1996, Branch was in the White House to hear Clinton fulminating about Benjamin Netanyahu.
At the time Netanyahu of Likud was running against Shimon Peres of Labor. Clinton wanted Peres to win. And Netanyahu was undermining Clinton in the U.S. Here’s Branch, paraphrasing Clinton:
“While he legitimately attacked Peres in the Israeli campaign–emphasizing the danger of potential concessions to Syria–his Likud agents in the United States joined Republicans eager to stir up suspicion against Clinton’s Middle East diplomacy. So far, said the president, they had not made much headway with Jewish voters, but he called it scandalous electioneering by and with a foreign political party.”
This is code for the Israel lobby. The foreign agents Clinton is so upset about were, no doubt, American neoconservatives (a word not in Branch’s extensive index). Neoconservatives disturbed by George H.W. Bush’s opposition to settlements had helped elect Bill Clinton four years earlier, and neoconservative outrage toward Camp David, four years later, would help propel George W. Bush into office. These same Likudnik foreign agents have been undermining Obama since he got into power. In a word, AIPAC. And Clinton’s friends in Labor are not available to Obama. Because Labor’s a tiny party.
