It may not be a glass ceiling, but Hillary Clinton's appointment as secretary of state has put a much-needed floor under the risky business of engaging the Arab-Israeli conflict in search of a lasting peace deal.
Rarely do you feel, from six thousand miles away, the smile evaporate from the faces of Israel's enemies. But that's exactly what many in the pro-Israel community experienced when the home page of the Sunday, Nov. 23 edition of the Washington Post Web site offered its candidate for Understatement of the Year with this headline: Some in Arab World Wary of Clinton.
Who's smiling now? Hint: not Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, who recently told a U.N. conference that Jerusalem is holy to two religions - Islam and Christianity, making it clear that there is no room for Jews in Jerusalem.
And I bet not North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, who may sorely miss the time he spent together with former Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in North Korea in 2000. Upon leaving, Albright presented Kim - a huge fan of the NBA - with a basketball signed by Michael Jordan.
"It showed him we went through some effort to get the signature," Bob Carlin, a former North Korea analyst for the State Department who accompanied Albright on that trip, later told the San Diego Union-Tribune. "They realized it wasn't just an ordinary ball."
It's hard to believe Kim had the audacity to push forward with his nuclear ambitions. After all, "it wasn't just an ordinary ball" we brought him.
But more to the point, there are two main reasons that Clinton is a good pick for secretary of state: Israel and Joe Biden.
First, Israel. The U.S. State Department is made up of, generally speaking (and excepting people like John Bolton, of course, the finest U.N. ambassador by a long shot and true friend to Israel) career bureaucrats who are experts on Russia and convinced of the coming war with China. Then they go to Israel to negotiate a peace deal between Jews and Arabs. They don't speak Arabic, because they only deal with communist powers. And they don't speak Hebrew, although they have memorized the expression they use almost constantly during their trips to the Mideast, "oy vey."
Current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is book-smart brilliant. Unfortunately, the only kind of "settlement" she's aware of is part of a plea bargain. Albright knew her stuff - when it came to solving the age-old puzzle, "Why a basketball makes a great gift for someone who can barely dunk it in his kitchen sink?"
There was James Baker, whose stated philosophy concerning Israel was the clear, but clumsy, "F--- the Jews." (Hey, sometimes that kind of honesty is all we ask.) And of course we had Warren Christopher, last seen pushing Rice to force Israel into a cease-fire with Hezbollah in 2006 before Israel had the chance to get the Lebanese terrorists out of range of northern Israeli population centers. "Every day America gives the green light to further Israeli violence, our already tattered reputation sinks even lower," Christopher opined in the pages of the Washington Post.
Let's be honest. It's a low bar, but it's one that, say, John Kerry couldn't clear.
Will Clinton be tougher on our enemies than the dim bulbs of administrations past? Probably, and here's why: Clinton has an understanding of the Mideast negotiation process that is nearly unparalleled outside Israel. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine in January 2007, Clinton said this about getting those mythical concessions from Arab negotiators: "You do not get people into a process or to the table to make any kind of tough decisions, including compromises, unless the other side knows that your commitment to Israel is unshakable."
The phrase "unshakable commitment to Israel" may be common enough to be meaningless at this point, but Clinton wasn't declaring her unshakable commitment to Israel. She was making it clear that in order for negotiations to be successful, the Arabs must understand that they will not, under any circumstances, succeed in driving a wedge in between Israel and America. President George W. Bush knows this and has expressed the same sentiment - that while America will try to arbitrate Arab-Israeli negotiations, it is not on equal terms with the two parties.
Israel is one of America's closest and most important allies in the world. The Arab leaders want all Americans dead. Having clarity on that issue is what gave Bush his high approval ratings among Israelis. It wasn't simply saying he likes Israel; it was that he knows that support for Israel is absolutely necessary for successful negotiations. Clinton seems to know that too.
And as former New York Sun reporter Eli Lake notes, "Clinton has described the teaching of anti-Israel views in Palestinian textbooks as 'child abuse,' and held hearings on the topic in an effort to get the Bush administration to do more on the issue." No moral equivalency there. In fact, Lake reminds us, since becoming a senator, Clinton has criticized the Palestinians' anti-Semitic education and media, often loud enough for even the State Department - who were holding their hands over their ears like the "hear no evil" monkey - to hear.
Bill Clinton spent most of his Mideast-related energy attempting to drive Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's career into the ground. Surprise! Guess who might be the next Israeli prime minister. That may seem to be a conflict, but Hillary isn't Bill. And she's isn't Barack Obama, who said this: "I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel." The Jerusalem Post's Shmuel Rosner correctly noted the outrage that would follow if Bibi had said something similarly disparaging about supporters and policies of the Democratic Party.
The other reason to cheer Clinton's appointment is Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who has vowed (threatened?) to be in on every foreign policy-related decision Obama makes as president.
Biden has spent 35 years in the U.S. Senate, and in that time has accumulated an almost perfect record on foreign affairs: he has, by any honest account, never been right. He opposed helping anti-communist and anti-Soviet groups during the Cold War. He called the surge in Iraq a "tragic mistake," and advocated splitting Iraq into three states, thus offering the state on a silver platter to Iran. And during his vice presidential debate against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, he said this: "When we kicked - along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said… 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know - if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel."
It took days to figure out what he meant to say, because he couldn't have meant what he said. It's preposterously wrong - and embarrassing, for the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's possible Biden just uses the word "Hezbollah" whenever he refers to "the bad guys." For example, while Biden was at law school at Syracuse, he may have cheered, "Go Syracuse! Beat the Georgetown Hezbollahs!" Who knows?
Biden also famously, three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, offered this at his committee meeting: "Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran." The New Republic's Michael Crowley recalled the immediate reaction of the room to this idea.
"He surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face," Crowley described. Then, according to Crowley, one by one staffers begin to point out the obvious flaws in that idea: it's a transparent publicity stunt; the Iranians would send it back, embarrassing us; that day the Iranians were in Moscow negotiating an arms deal to which the U.S. was strongly opposed. "But Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. He's already moved on to something else."
A State Department career diplomat would defer to Biden. So would Obama, in some cases. So would most pushover bureaucratic underlings.
Clinton's confirmation can't come soon enough.
This originally appeared in the Dec. 5, 2008 issue of The Jewish State.
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