WASHINGTON — A former top US diplomat suggested Washington foment Arab Spring-style Palestinian protests as a method of pushing the Israeli leadership into making moves, a new batch of emails from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton shows.
On December 18, 2011, Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to Israel who also served as undersecretary of state for political affairs under former president Bill Clinton, emailed Clinton a recommendation to spark Palestinian demonstrations, led by female protesters, to push Jerusalem into talks.
Upon receiving the message, Clinton asked an aide to print it out.
Without detailing how the US would spark these protests, Pickering noted that the US could not be seen to have had a hand in fomenting the rallies, instead suggesting that Washington employ non-governmental groups and third parties to “help.”
Pickering’s proposal, which included parallel protests by Israeli Jews and Arabs, called for the rallies to be female-only as a way to keep the demonstrations from becoming too violent.
“On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force,” Pickering wrote. “Palestinian men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.”
Palestinian protesters hurling stones at Israeli troops (not seen) during riots near the Jewish settlement of Bet El, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, October 10, 2015. (Flash90)
The demonstrations within Israel proper, Pickering insisted, must also be driven exclusively by women.
“If the Palestinians see men engaged they will jump in and the soldiers of the IDF will sooner or later use force,” he wrote. “This comes from several former senior Israeli military officers I have spoken with. The soldiers are fearful, nervous, outnumbered, insecure and brought up on a severe distrust of Palestinian males whom almost all of them have never spoken to except at roadblocks.”
Pickering said the Palestinian leadership was willing to go along with the idea, and the use of females could “counteract” fears that protests could get out of hand and endanger Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s rule in Ramallah.
“They must develop growth and momentum, just like Tahrir Square, and attract more women to participate and thus gain world attention,” he wrote. “Their leadership has shied away from this idea because they can’t control it; they too are afraid of being replaced by a Tahrir Square style action.”
In this Feb. 11, 2011 file photo, Egyptians celebrate the news of the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, who handed control of the country to the military, at night in Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, Egypt.(AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
Citing a need to see “a game changer in the region,” Pickering described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the impediment to reaching a two-state accommodation.
“Netanyahu is not going to move for anything that the Palestinians can offer him which they can deliver,” he wrote. “He cannot deliver anything the Palestinians can accept without our help. He is much more satisfied with the status quo than with the risks of change.”
“What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts,” Pickering added, “and use that to influence the political leadership. This is far from a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless.”
Pickering’s email was unveiled after the State Department released just under 3,000 more pages of Clinton’s emails last Thursday night, which included 66 that were deemed classified.
According to the State Department, however, those emails were not marked as classified at the time they were sent.
Since March 2015, when it was discovered that Clinton used her family’s private email server for official State Department communications, she has maintained that, as secretary of state, she neither sent nor received such emails on her personal account.
Clinton also received an email, on September 28, 2010, from former State Department director of Policy Planning Anne Marie Slaughter proposing the launch of a “Pledge for Palestine” campaign that would emulate Warren Buffet’s “The Giving Pledge,” an effort that encourages wealthy people to donate to charitable causes.
Nearing the end of Netanyahu’s 10-month settlement freeze, launched in November 2009, Slaughter suggested the campaign could shame Israel into supporting and advancing Palestinian statehood.
“Such a campaign among billionaires/multi-millionaires around the world would reflect a strong vote of confidence in the building of a Palestinian state and could offset the ending of the moratorium for Palestinians,” she wrote. “There would be a certain shaming effect [regarding] Israelis, who would be building settlements in the face of the pledge for peace.”
Upon receiving this email, which was also sent to Cheryl Mills and long-time Clinton advisers Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, Clinton responded to Slaughter, “I am very interested–pls flesh out. Thx.”
Slaughter, now the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, recommended that by “tapping into the Clinton fundraising network it should be possible to generate a substantial … amount quickly enough to capture the public imagination” and to “serve as an expression of global solidarity with the Palestinians.”
She also stressed that making “a meaningful promise of material improvements for Palestinians on the West Bank” could “significantly bolster Abbas in a way that could help him stay in the talks.”
“This is what diplomacy beyond the state should mean,” she added.
WarSclerotic 
January 12, 2016 at 1:32 PM
The E-mail .
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
RELEASE IN PART
B6
From: H
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 8:15 PM
To: ‘monica.hanleY
Subject: Fw: A note for Secretary Clinton
Pls print.
From: Mills, Cheryl D [mailto:MillsCD©state.gov]
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2011 06:05 PM
To: H
Subject: Fw: A note for Secretary Clinton
From: Pickering, Thomas R [mailto:
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2011 10:58 AM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: FW: A note for Secretary Clinton
This text has been cleaned up of typos and omissions and should be the one to be forwarded. I apologize for loading
your in box. Tom
Cheryl:
I would be grateful if you would pass this to the Secretary.
“Dear Madam Secretary:
It was a pleasure to sit beside you last evening.
I particularly enjoyed your speech and the key points it made. All that day and for many days previously I had been
engaged with senior Palestinians and other Arabs and Israelis talking about the peace issue.
Your remarks raised a new and very important point for me which I would like briefly to set out for you.
Our group concluded rightly that we need to see a game changer in the region to make any progress.
Netanyahu is not going to move for anything that the Palestinians can offer him which they can deliver.
His coalition is too hard over and likely to divide on the key issues.
He cannot deliver anything the Palestinians can accept without our help. He is much more satisfied with the
status quo than with the risks of change.
The Palestinians are divided and in the same position — nothing they can do politically can meet even their
minimal needs as they see them and attract the Israelis to the process much less move them
We have little we can offer to break the stalemate; for years it has been clear that the curse for the Middle East
peace effort is that it is never more than two years away from a major American election.
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
You may not agree with my points above, but I see no signs that there is a different conclusion possible. We are
stuck and maybe for a long time
A stalemate has its own dangers. Things never get better on their own — the reverse is always true. There is no status
quo possible in this region.
In the pasta game changer put us in a position to help both parties and gave them incentives.
We have tended to see game changers as a war—the Yom Kippur-Ramadan War in 1973, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in
1990.
No one can wish a war on the region, even or especially with Iran — it much too dangerous, particularly with all that is
happening there – despite the fact that it might be a game changer,
Your speech suggested a different kind of game changer.
It would be a slow roller and hard to catalyze for us and others, and maybe one in which it will be a struggle to develop
confidence.
Your spoke of the power and capacity of women to move events and noted the Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire model.
The Middle East is not West Africa — I have lived and worked in both – but I have always believed that a
Gandhian approach might work in the region and particularly with Israel.
After listening to you, I am more convinced that it may be the one hope we have slowly but necessarily to see the region
move to the point where both sides will come again to want a deal and seek our help. But it has to come from them and
their own people.
What will change the situation is a major effort to use non-violent protests and demonstrations to put peace back in the
center of people’s aspirations as well as their thoughts, and use that to influence the political leadership. This is far from
a sure thing, but far, in my humble view, from hopeless. Women can and ought to be at the center of these
demonstrations. Many men and others will denigrate the idea. I don’t and I don’t think that was your message.
Several thoughts about how.
It must be all and only women. Why? On the Palestinian side the male culture is to use force. Bedouins were for years
tribal raiders and bride stealers from other tribes. It defined the male being and the Arabs invented ‘macho’. Palestinian
men will not for long patiently demonstrate — they will be inclined over time and much too soon to be frustrated and use
force. Their male culture comes close to requiring it.
The Palestinian women have to begin this. Some few already have. They should use peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins
in their own territories calling for peace and seeking to get their own leadership — which is more than willing — also to
support them if they look successful. They must develop growth and momentum, just like Tahrir Square, and attract
more women to participate and thus gain world attention — not easy to do in their area and under their conditions. Their
leadership has shied away from this idea because they can’t control it; they too are afraid of being replaced by a Tahrir
Square style action. Women acting alone could help counteract that thinking.
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
The Palestinian women should also stimulate a supporting, parallel and congruent effort by women in Israel, both Jews
and Arabs, to do the same thing on their side of the dividing line. They too should keep the men away. If the Palestinians
see men engaged they will jump in and the soldiers of the IDF will sooner or later use force. This comes from several
former senior Israeli military officers I have spoken with. The soldiers are fearful, nervous, outnumbered, insecure and
brought up on a severe distrust of Palestinian males whom almost all of them have never spoken to except at
roadblocks.
Finally, the women must have a strategy. It must be long term and find a way to bring continuing pressure to change
minds at the top. There should be no effort physically to cross dividing lines, but there might be peaceful
demonstrations against all aspects of the occupation on the Palestinian sides — roadblocks, land confiscations, new
settlement activity, around military government installations and perhaps in Area C which they do not control. This
ought to be done with care but it could help to create the kind of action which no army can easily use force to deal with.
There would be a chance force would be misused against them. With all and only women demonstrating peacefully
under the eyes of the world the chances are much less force will be used against them, since that action has its own
consequences. But in truth, I cannot minimize the fact that the dangers are not small.
On the Israeli side, it must be public demonstrations and show growth as well. Outside the Prime Minister’s office and
the major squares and parks in Jerusalem and elsewhere have been the traditional places for demonstrations like this
for peace and change to begin and persevere. Rabin Square in Tell Aviv would be right. The Peace Now organization
(Shalom Akshav), despite its decline, is one starting point.
Most of all the United States, in my view, cannot be seen to have stimulated, encouraged or be the power behind it for
reasons you will understand better than anyone. I believe third parties and a number NGOs on both sides would help,
particularly if there were an outline of a peace document with parameters which, like those at the end of the Clinton
administration, promised a fair and lasting peace and which the women on both sides could agree to support.
You may well think this is too far out, with too many moving parts, and it may well be and that there are better ideas. If
so, I would be the first to understand. But the dangers of doing nothing are real too — conflict, certainly change and not
for the better, and with a certainty as well of no progress. If it is as the President has said peace in this part of the world
is a vital interest for the US, then something like this may fit the need.”
Tom
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05790860 Date: 10/30/2015
January 12, 2016 at 1:33 PM
Foreign donations to foundation raise major ethical questions for Hillary Clinton
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/02/18/foreign-donations-to-hillary-clintons-foundation-raise-major-ethical-questions/
January 12, 2016 at 1:34 PM
http://pamelageller.com/2016/01/hillary-email-bombshell-clinton-considered-secret-plan-to-spark-palestinian-intifada-against-israel.html/
January 12, 2016 at 1:38 PM
The E-mail and a lot more .