Strange Bedfellows

Update: I have an even better bedfellow now. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Rob Delaney crapped on Hillary Clinton on his Twitter page and, for reasons you'll see if you read further, I clapped back and he, unbelievably, responded to me. A sputtering nobody. Cut to this second: He just posted the same link to the same incredible reporting from two US doctors who were in Gaza in March at the same time I did. And, before that, his outspokenness on behalf of the children of Gaza has been incredible. Not now gonna kick him off the Sleep Number Smart Bed for eating salty crackers, and if you read just one story on the children in Gaza read the one that blew us both away.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election there was no bigger Hillary Clinton fan than I was. Hillary, I believed, was a deeply good person who had quietly helped people all her life only to be kneecapped by misogyny and made to suffer for the sins of her husband once she got the success—though not the capstone—she had rightly earned. Lock her up. But her emails. She deserved so much better. And in that way, she was all of us. Women who had been the target of cheap shots from men simply for daring to be more capable than they were and who were then forced to endure it all with a smile like she did for 11 hours during the Benghazi hearings.

She called Trump voters “deplorables,” but they were. She wasn’t at her core an elitist, right? She was decent and principled and smart and fought for disadvantaged women and children all over the world. I bought an I’m With Her t-shirt. I joined the Pantsuit Nation Facebook group. I mourned what could have been when the election was stolen from her.

A Turning Point: the War in Gaza

Flash forward seven years to the war in Gaza, launched on October 7th 2023, when Hamas murdered and kidnapped Israeli civilians and Israel responded by bombing Gazan civilians with what would eventually be more tonnage than had been dropped on Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the entirety of World War II. I knew Hillary, a skilled diplomat and compassionate to her core, would understand the horror of the situation and respond in a way that made me proud.

Sure, she’s a hawk and a staunch supporter of Israel and up to her caftan collar in AIPAC baksheesh, but she couldn’t rationalize genocide, could she? It turns out, she could. By blaming Palestine for ignoring a cease-fire (which Israel actually broke) and by also blaming Palestine for refusing the best deal in history, one that was brokered by her husband (it wasn’t—oh, Hillary, your unwavering love for the dud who is your husband is both admirable and painful to behold).

And it wasn’t just that she justified the genocide. She sneered at those who didn’t. She subsequently called the student protesters morons, the ones peacefully asking the universities who charge them upwards of $80,000 a year to be taught by adjuncts to please stop investing in a country that blows the heads off babies. They “don’t know very much about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world, including our own country,” she claimed in an interview on Morning Joe.

OK, Boomer. Does that include USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a South Asian American Muslim who majored in biomedical engineering and minored in resistance to genocide? Two Harvard Rhodes scholars, Asmer Asrar Safi and Suhaas Bhat, who were suspended from that university for participating in the encampments there?

The Truth of the Matter

As the wonderful Elizabeth Spiers wrote in the New York Times, “It’s as though some older adults simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea that college students, who are old enough to marry, have families and risk their lives for their country, are capable of having well thought-out principles.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think Hillary was even worse—a horrible snob who lacked all compassion for both Gen Z and for those even younger babies getting their heads blown off in Gaza. Like Joe Biden, who is currently kicking an air football and falling on his fanny while Lucy van Netanyahu laughs his off for the eleventy millionth time, she has had very little empathetic or even truthful to say about all of this.

New Friends

It’s something a lot of people were pointing out on social all along, people who I’d typically ignored for being Hillary haters. Now that we are on the same side on the issue of Palestinian genocide, I am paying more attention to them, particularly those who had been canceled like me for doing so. Of them, the one who was most famously sacked—by The Hill, for supposedly rolling her eyes at the sister of a 10/7 victim—was Briahna Joy Gray*, the Harvard-educated lawyer and former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders.

If you had told me eight years ago I’d be commiserating with Gray on her Twitter page, sharing my story with her when she asked me to and fending off the same people she had who were now calling me scum and the c-word for daring to defend children with their brains scooped out of their skulls like soft-boiled eggs, I’d have said you were crazy. But right now there’s only one litmus test when it comes to my comrades-in-arms. Do you rationalize killing children or do you make like Alex Jones and say it’s all make-believe?

Same Enemies

Yes, I realize there are a lot of crazies masking anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism for their own gain. Nick Fuentes is a douchesquirt no matter what he says about Palestine. But I have more respect for someone like Gray than I once thought I would, particularly given how much more she’s had to endure than I have for speaking out. The ugly racism hurled at her by Zionists is truly sickening.

One day, I hope Hillary shows half the courage she has and that she speaks out against the genocide in Gaza, a shame so deep that I truly wonder if this country will ever live it down. To remain silent or to sneer at those stating the obvious is to be complicit. To refuse to demand accountability for the crimes committed by the only democracy in the Middle East is more odious than to be accused of crimes you didn’t commit while trying to further the aims of democracy in the Middle East. Hillary is smart enough to know this. But until she shows us, the I’m With Her t-shirt stays at the bottom of the drawer.

*My other pro-Palestine girl crushes: Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, and author Arundhati Roy. Both will be remembered for their bravery and intelligence on this issue. Also Isabella Hammad, who wrote a great essay recently in The New York Review of Books called Acts of Language. She closes with these words: “The weight of the dead breathes life into the action of the living. Amid this horror, what continues to encourage me is the bravery of writers, artists, and most especially students—people of all kinds dissenting together, standing together, working together, refusing together. The professors of NYU holding hands, using their bodies to protect their students from the police. To protect their speech."