Bill Clinton: Netanyahu ‘not the guy’ to make peace in Middle East

Video from the Harkin Steak Fry shows former President Clinton saying “I agree with that” to a man on the ropeline who says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is not the guy” to make peace.

“If we don’t force him to make peace, we will not have peace,” the man says. The conversation came on Sunday after the Clintons made a high-profile return to Iowa and spoke at Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) Democratic fundraiser.  

{mosads}”First of all, I agree with that,” Clinton replies. He then makes a point defending the Israelis, saying: “But in 2000, [then-Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak, I got him to agree to something that I’m not sure I could have gotten [former Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin to agree to, and Rabin was murdered for giving land to the Palestinians.”

“I agree, but Netanyahu is not the guy,” the man on the ropeline replies. 

“So, they got …” Clinton begins to respond, before stopping and saying, “I agree with that.”

Clinton then continues by saying that Palestinians walked away from a deal while he was president. 

“He would have gotten 96 percent of the West Bank, a land swap in Gaza, appropriate water rights, and East Jerusalem, something that hasn’t even been discussed since I left office,” Clinton said.

“And by the way, don’t forget, both Arafat and Abbas later tried to say they would take it. They said, ‘We changed our minds, we’ll take it now,’ and by then they had a government that wouldn’t give it to them,” Clinton added, referring to Palestinian leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

Clinton’s comments were enough to spark the headline “Bill Clinton strays from Hillary’s Israel script and knocks Netanyahu” in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported the video.

Hillary Clinton defended Netanyahu in an interview with The Atlantic in August.

Asked about her views on him, Clinton began by referring to the previous negotiations where, she said, “Ehud Barak offered everything you could imagine being given under any realistic scenario to the Palestinians for their state, and Arafat walked away. I don’t care about the revisionist history. I know that Arafat walked away, OK?

“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 added.

Using Netanyahu’s nickname, she concluded, “Dealing with Bibi is not easy, so people get frustrated and they lose sight of what we’re trying to achieve here.”