Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide

Jimmy Carter, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is widely regarded as the classic example of someone who performed exceptionally well as an ex-president.  No-one could accuse Bill Clinton of aiming for a similar accolade.  Indeed with a single deranged pro-genocide speech, he may have just destroyed his reputation as both a president and ex-president forever.  That might seem like an overstatement, but you have to remember that the only reason there is even any debate over whether what Clinton said was acceptable is that we're currently in a sort of antechamber where it's still possible to maintain the fiction that genocide is not occurring because Israel isn't allowing access to journalists to actually document the atrocities.  But that situation won't last forever - eventually journalists and academic researchers will get into Gaza and reliable estimates of the death toll will emerge.  It'll almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands, taking into account both those directly murdered by the Israeli military and those who died of starvation and disease due to Israel depriving them of the essentials of life.

Once that happens, the discussion will move on to how on earth the genocide was permitted to occur.  And as with previous genocides such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, there will be a lot of focus on the way in which genocidal language was normalised, for example Israeli officials suggesting that all residents of Gaza are legitimate targets because they are 'human animals' or because they supposedly all support Hamas.  Or an equally good example is Clinton stating that large numbers of innocent people "have" to be mass murdered by Israel because Hamas is hiding behind them.  That evades the obvious point that if one Hamas fighter is hiding behind 400 civilians, you actually have the option not to massacre the 400 civilians because you have the moral sense to know that in doing so you'd be committing a war crime every bit as grave as the one you claim to be avenging.  Always assuming, of course, you actually believe that the Hamas fighter is hiding behind the 400 in the first place, and that you aren't using that as a flimsy excuse because your real and sole aim to is to massacre the 400 as part of a step by step plan to drastically reduce the Arab population of Gaza.

And just as the Nazis prepared the ground for genocide by advancing pseudoscientific gibberish about racial superiority, it'll be considered highly significant that Clinton prayed in aid a mythology of racial entitlement to the land, with the Israelis' actions justified on the ahistorical basis that they were there in the time of King David, long before the Palestinians' own religion was created.  In truth, historians are sceptical as to whether King David actually existed, but even if he did, using the events of thousands of years ago as the basis for a racial hierarchy would undoubtedly give Native Amerìcans free license to do to Bill Clinton and millions of people like him exactly what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians.

Last but not least, Clinton tried to resurrect his own equivalent of Hitler's "stab in the back" myth by arguing that he has inside knowledge from the Camp David talks at the end of his own presidency that all the ills of the region, including the lack of a Palestinian state, had nothing to do with the Israelis, but were instead the fault of Yasser Arafat, who supposedly torpedoed the most generous offer in the history of the known universe because he was so hellbent on eradicating Israel and having a Palestinian state on 100% of the territory of historic Palestine.  The reality, of course, couldn't be more different.  Arafat conceded before the 2000 talks even began that the 1967 boundaries were the baseline, meaning that Israel would be keeping 78% of historic Palestine, a position far closer to Benjamin Netanyahu's lebensraum fantasy than to the total destruction of Israel. But that, of course, was not enough for the Israelis, who demanded -

* Just over one-tenth of the West Bank, recognised by the international community as indisputably Palestinan territory, would be confiscated by Israel.

* There would be no proper compensation for this land grab.  There would be a nominal "land swap", but the amount of Israeli territory transferred to the Palestinian state would be little over one-tenth the size of the confiscated Palestinian land.

* The land grab would split the Palestinian sovereign territory in the West Bank into three non-contiguous segments.  Adding in the fourth segment of the state in Gaza, this would make Palestine one of the most non-contiguous states in the world, evoking an obvious comparison with "Bantustans".

* The Palestinian state would be demilitarised and Israel would have a veto on any alliances it entered into.  Its airspace would also be controlled by Israel - an absolutely absurd demand that no self-respecting sovereign state would ever agree to.

* Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel, even though they were violently and illegally displaced by Israeli forces.

* The vast bulk of the conquered Arab-dominated East Jerusalem would be annexed by Israel.  At best, Palestine would be allowed to cobble together some of the newer outlying suburbs, artificially call it "the city of East Jerusalem" and make it the capital.

* Most crucially, Arafat was told that any agreement required him to permanently renounce any further "demands". More than anything else, this made agreement utterly impossible, because the Israeli proposals on issues like Jerusalem and airspace were so inherently unfair and so obviously justified only by blackmail due to Israel's present-day military strength that the only way Arafat could ever agree to them in good conscience was on a provisional basis subject to a review.

Really the only mistake Arafat made in 2000 was to wrongly take Clinton for an honest broker.  Clinton was playing an each-way bet - he was happy enough to pose as peacemaker if he bullied the Palestinians into accepting a deal that would permanently stitch them up.  But just as good for him was for the Palestinians to sensibly walk away, allowing him to self-righteously "stand with Israel" and to spend the next few decades lying through his teeth about what had just happened and who was to blame for it.