In the interview, Sanders, who is Jewish, repeated some of the expansions on his Israel views that he delivered earlier in the day in a foreign policy speech.
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“We need steady hands, not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who-knows-what on Wednesday”, Clinton said.
While Trump assured the crowd that he “didn’t come here tonight to pander to you about Israel”, saying, “that’s what politicians do”, he did note that in 2004 he served as the grand marshal of the 40th Salute to Israel Parade in NY.
Though the theme of the conference was “come together”, the incident had “the potential to drive us apart, to divide us”, Pinkus said.
Presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have presented sharply different views on how the United States should deal with the Middle East and its relationship with Israel. “We are disappointed that so many people applauded a sentiment that we neither agree with or condone”, she said.
Donald Trump speaks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s Policy Conference in Washington on Monday.
Trump quickly backtracked, saying that Israel, which is locked in sensitive negotiations with the Obama administration over a new multi-billion-dollar 10-year military assistance package, “can help us greatly”.
Describing Israel as ready to negotiate a peace agreement, Mr Trump said the Palesti-nians would have to be willing to accept that Israel will forever exist as a Jewish state and able to stop attacks on Israelis.
“What President Obama gets wrong about dealmaking is that he constantly applies pressure to our friends and rewards our enemies”, Trump said reading from a prepared speech that he peppered with ad-libs.
The United States has traditionally vetoed resolutions at the UN Security Council opposed by Israel. Sanders said continued settlement expansion is “absurd” and argued that Palestinian suffering under occupation can not be ignored if there is to be a solution to the conflict.
Regardless of party, presidential candidates seeking their party’s nomination sought to out-show their competitors Monday on one area: their unwavering pro-Israel bona fides.
Ms. Clinton, Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich all thought peace was elusive in region because of Palestinian positions.
A week before she took office, the Dallas resident told the Texas Jewish Post that she believed that AIPAC must “grow the number of people who are involved in AIPAC and we need to grow the number of people that are involved in pro-Israel politics”.
Trump complained that the USA had built and rebuilt schools in Iraq as many as three times as they were bombed over and over, “and yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn”.
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“We spent billions of dollars on Saudi Arabia and they have nothing but money, and I say ‘why?'”.
