Former US Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will participate in the first Israel Hayom summit in New York on Tuesday, December 2 at the Hilton Midtown hotel. The summit, the first of its kind, will be held with the participation of Israel Hayom publisher Dr. Miriam Adelson and will focus on US-Israel relations, planning for the day after the war, and the role of Diaspora Jewry in shaping Israel's future.
Clinton, 78, is one of the most prominent figures in American politics in recent decades. She served as secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, after eight years as a senator from New York. In 2016 she became the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major party, but lost the election to Donald Trump due to the American electoral system after winning more votes than he did.
Although she lost the election, Clinton already knew the White House well from her husband Bill Clinton's two terms as president in the 1990s. Bill Clinton was deeply involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, hosted the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House in 1993 and the Clintons attended the 1995 funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
After her husband left office, Clinton was elected to the Senate from New York, where she served eight years and became one of Israel's strongest advocates in Congress. In 2008 she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and lost to Barack Obama, who appointed her secretary of state after his victory.
As secretary of state she arrived in Israel in March 2009, two months after the Obama administration took office, and expressed support for a two-state solution, in contrast to the position of incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time. The Obama administration sought to recalibrate US policy toward the Muslim world, culminating in Obama's Cairo speech in June 2009.
Ten days later Netanyahu delivered his Bar-Ilan speech, in which he expressed for the first time an in-principle acceptance of a demilitarized Palestinian state. The speech was widely seen as a result of American pressure. During negotiations, the terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out a series of attacks intended to derail the talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The talks eventually collapsed in October 2010 when the Palestinians accused Israel of refusing to extend a freeze on construction in Judea and Samaria.
In November 2012, during Operation Pillar of Defense, Clinton traveled to Jerusalem and Cairo and helped mediate a ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization that ended the fighting. At the same time she advanced security cooperation between Israel and the US and supported the development of the Iron Dome missile defense system.
Her tenure as secretary of state was overshadowed mainly by the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Republicans accused Clinton of failing to secure the facility and of misleading the public about the circumstances of the attack. A congressional committee investigation revealed that Clinton had used a private email server throughout her tenure, a controversy that followed her throughout the 2016 campaign and contributed, in her view, to her loss to Donald Trump.
After a primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton won the 2016 Democratic nomination, becoming the first woman to run for the world's most powerful job on behalf of a major party. Facing Republican candidate Donald Trump, she campaigned as the experienced and stable choice but struggled to put the email controversy behind her and to shake off perceptions that she represented the political establishment.
Although she received about 3 million more votes than Trump, she lost the Electoral College 304 to 227, a bitter defeat that shook the Democratic Party.
After her loss Clinton largely withdrew from public life, returning in September 2017 with a memoir titled What Happened that analyzed the failure. The book became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Clinton took responsibility for the loss but also pointed to factors she said contributed to it, particularly FBI Director James Comey's announcement of a renewed investigation shortly before Election Day and Russian interference in the election.
Following the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023, Clinton voiced unequivocal support for Israel. In a December 2023 appearance on the program The View she rejected calls for a ceasefire and said that those calling for one did not understand Hamas. She noted that there had been a ceasefire on October 6 and Hamas broke it in a barbaric attack on civilians. She emphasized that Israel, like any country, had the right to defend itself.
After the signing of the agreement that ended the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2025, Clinton praised President Trump in an interview with CBS. However, Clinton stressed that she did not believe Hamas had undergone reform or was ready to seek a better future for Gaza's residents.
At an event of the podcast Unholy in New York this past October, Clinton addressed the protests against Israel on American campuses and said that we have done a lousy job teaching young people history. Clinton, who teaches at Columbia University, described confrontations she had with students and blamed the social media platform TikTok for spreading anti-Israel misinformation. "All these people shouting 'from the river to the sea.' When asked which river, which sea, they had no idea," she said.
