Clinton to Israelis: Don’t trust Trump, be alarmed by him

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton warned Thursday that her rival Donald Trump could not be trusted by Israel, saying the Republican nominee is constantly flip-flopping on the Jewish state based on what he thinks will be popular with voters.

“There is no rhyme or reason to his comments on Israel,” Clinton told Channel 2 News in an interview.

“It depends on what day he’s talking. He has said that we should be neutral on Israel on Monday. Then on Tuesday he has said that, oh he’s really supportive of Israel. Wednesday he might say Israel should pay back the defense aid it’s received over the years.”

Trump’s statements on Israel were “ill informed,” Clinton went on, and were mostly the result of “people whispering in his ears, ‘Say this, maybe that will be popular with some people.’ He has no grounding, he has no feeling.

“The best I can tell, his only experience is marching in the Fifth Avenue Israel Day parade,” she quipped.

Trump himself, she said, was “a very untrustworthy spokesperson about where he stands from day-to-day on Israel. His understanding of the broader dangers of the region should alarm any Israeli, no matter where that person is on the political spectrum.”

Clinton continued, “Using nukes against ISIS? Not caring whether other countries in the region — including Saudi Arabia — get nuclear weapons? How does that in any way help Israel?

“Giving a full carte blanche to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to do whatever he seems to want to do right on Israels’ doorstep? Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas?”

The Democrat maintained that she was far better placed to deal with the Middle East conflict, given her track record as secretary of state, as well as her decades-long front-row view of the difficulties of regional peacemaking.

In a likely appeal to Israeli and Jewish American public opinion, she said she was well aware of the gestures made over the years by Israeli leaders in efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, and maintained that Palestinian actions had often thwarted an agreement.

Still, she noted, the responsibility lay with both sides. “There were problems on the Palestinian side, some of which were of their own making and some of which were, frankly, caused by others,” she said.

Asked about the Obama administration’s famously rocky relationship with the Netanyahu government, Clinton claimed “the headlines may be much more tantalizing than the reality.

“I honestly believe no administration has done more for the security of Israel than the Obama administration,” he said. “I have said that shortly after being inaugurated I would invite the prime minister to Washington for meetings. I would send my joint chiefs and intelligence experts to Israel to meet with their counterparts — what we need to do first and foremost to be sure that [Israel’s] qualitative military edge is unmatched.”

Clinton said she despised Trump’s “associations” with racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic elements in the American far-right.

And she lambasted the “very explicit incitement to violence that has been a part of the Trump campaign from the very beginning.”

Trump serving the cause of ‘radical Islam’

Clinton said Islamist extremists were praying for a Donald Trump presidency.

Responding to a question about why she does not use the term “war on radical Islam” favored by Trump and other conservatives, Clinton said: “Bringing Islam into the definition of our enemy actually serves the purpose of the radical jihadists and there’s a lot of evidence of that,” she said, citing a Time magazine op-ed by Matt Olsen, formerly a director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Barack Obama.

Said Clinton: “I found it even surprising how clear and compelling the case was, where he quoted ISIS spokespeople rooting for Donald Trump’s victory because Trump has made Islam and Muslims part of his campaign, and basically, Matt Olsen argues, that the jihadists see this as a great gift. They are saying, ‘Oh, please, Allah, make Trump president of America!”

“I’m not interested in giving aid and comfort to their evil ambitions,” she said. “I want to defeat them, I want to end their reign of terror, I don’t want them to feel as though they can be getting more recruits because of our politics.”

That statement, which aired Thursday prior to the release of the full interview, earned an enraged rebuke from the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.

The Trump campaign addressed the clip in its daily email to reporters, taunting Clinton for her relative paucity of news conferences.

“It’s no surprise she’s resorting to unhinged and dishonest attacks, including claiming on Israeli TV that terrorists are praying for Mr. Trump to win,” Jason Miller, a campaign spokesman, said in the email.

In praise of the Iran deal

Also in her Channel 2 interview, Clinton said Iran was “weeks away” from the bomb last year, but the US-led nuclear agreement “put the lid” on its weapons program and undoubtedly made Israel safer.

Clinton, who served as Obama’s first secretary of state, dismissed Trump’s recent assertion that the year-old nuclear deal is so dangerous that it “is going to destroy Israel — unless I get elected.”

Said Clinton: “I believe with all my heart that putting a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has made Israel safer, has made the region safer, prevented a nuclear arms race.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been bitterly and publicly opposed to the agreement, and Jerusalem firmly denied a recent assertion by Obama that Israeli security officials now supported it.

Saying that her approach to enforcing the deal was one of “distrust and verify,” Clinton vowed to hold the regime in Tehran “to every single element of the agreement that they have reached.”

She said that she had no illusions about Iran’s continued threat to regional peace, and said the accord “does not in any way excuse the behavior that Iran is still engaging in.”

But, she stressed: “I would rather be dealing with Iran’s continuing aggressive behavior without them (also) being weeks away from breakout (to the bomb), which is where they were.

“Iran was able to master the nuclear fuel cycle, build covert facilities and stack them with centrifuges when George W. Bush was president. When Obama came in and I accepted to be secretary of state, we faced the very real potential of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

That was why she spent the first two years of her tenure as secretary of state “putting together an international coalition to impose the sanctions that drove them to the negotiating table, which finally led to the agreement,” said Clinton.

“We have to go after any violations on ballistic missiles,” she added. “We’ve got to work much harder to contain the threat that they continue to pose because of their very aggressive support of terrorism — whether it is Hezbollah, Hamas. But we are in a stronger position than we would have been to deal with this other malicious behavior, because of the nuclear agreement.”

JTA contributed to this report.