Hillary Clinton’s emails, now being released to the public in batches, contain correspondence with her longtime adviser and confidant Sidney Blumenthal—whose son, Max, is the author of a book of anti-Israel libels that calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The emails, argues Jonathan Tobin, suggest that the U.S.-Israel alliance is unlikely to flourish if Clinton were to become president:

[W]hat wasn’t clear until today was the extent to which the person whom [Hillary Clinton] has publicly described as a close personal friend was counseling her to distance herself from pro-Israel groups and filling up her email account with anti-Zionist and other left-wing screeds by his son Max that she had printed out for further reading. . . . [T]he Clinton White House political hit man had plenty to say about just about every foreign-policy issue, and the former first lady was eager to hear all of it.

Yet the topic about which [Sidney] Blumenthal seemed to have the most passion was his attempt to steer Clinton away from the sort of pro-Israel stands that she had established while in the Senate. Blumenthal urged her to give “tough love” to Israel. That’s a nice way of saying that he wanted her to lecture and threaten it to bow to the Obama administration’s dictates even if they undermined the alliance between the two countries and Israel’s security. . . .

The assumption has been that if Clinton were elected, the damage done to the U.S.-Israel alliance by Obama would begin to be undone. . . . But so long as Sidney Blumenthal, and by extension his son Max, are going to be treated as valued voices within the Clinton camp, Hillary’s pose as a defender of Israel is no longer credible. She may not go as far as they would like in distancing herself from the pro-Israel community. But the notion that she will restore the closeness Obama wrecked is obviously untrue.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.