Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli writer and commentator closely associated with both U.S. and Israeli rightwing political activism. In January 2019, she joined a new far-right party in Israel to run for the Knesset.

A Chicago native who emigrated to Israel, Glick served in the Israeli Defense Forces and lives in the Israeli settlement of Efrat.[1] She is the deputy managing editor at the Jerusalem Post and a senior fellow for Middle East Affairs at Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP), a bastion of militarist policy advocacy and Islamophobia based in Washington, D.C.[2] In January 2018, she became a regular columnist at the alt-right Breitbart News.[3]

Glick’s experience also includes serving as a foreign policy adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1997-1998 and working as a reporter for a number of newspapers in the United States and Israel.[4]In 2003, Glick was an embedded journalist with the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq, reporting for several Israeli news outlets, including from Baghdad soon after it fell.[5]

The New Right

After Glick’s term in Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government in the late 1990s, Glick spent two decades in journalism and right-wing think tanks. But in 2019—as Israel geared up for early elections—Glick accepted an invitation to join the newly formed HaYamin HeHadash (The New Right) party. The party was formed when two prominent members of the outgoing government—Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked—decided to leave their Jewish Home party and form one that more closely adhered to their vision of a nationalist party that could appeal to both religious and secular Israeli Jews.

Glick and Bennett have both put forward plans for annexing all or part of the West Bank and integrating the Palestinians in the annexed lands into Israel, either as permanent residents or as citizens. Both are firmly opposed to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Shaked said that Glick was “a courageous fighter symbolizing the real, pure, conservative Right. She will be a great addition to the Knesset from our side.” While Bennett said of her “Caroline is a relentless Zionist fighter. With her, we are building today the dream team of the Israeli Right in order to expand the right-wing block – so that Israel can be triumphant again.” Glick had been considered in 2015 for a spot on Netanyahu’s Likud slate, but was passed over.[6]

Glick’s connections to the political right in the United States are important to Bennett and Shaked. The Times of Israel noted that Bennett “highlighted Glick’s background as an immigrant from the US, saying it ‘symbolizes the essence of Zionism and the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.’ … Glick could be the only American-Israeli to serve in the 21st Knesset.” This connection—not only to the U.S. Jewish community but to the right in general through CSP and Breitbart—could give the new party a distinct advantage.[7] As one observer noted, “Glick will expand the New Right’s profile significantly in the United States. Her association with Breitbart News will be particularly useful for tapping into reactionary U.S. forces that support Israel’s worst policies. If the New Right becomes a significant party in the next Knesset, it will certainly be a major contender in the post-Netanyahu era for the top spot.”[8]

A Taste for Satire

Glick’s distaste for “the left” spurred her to found the website “Latma” (“slap” in Hebrew slang) in 2009. A satirical website that was reported to have been a project of CSP[9], Glick said of the endeavor, “At Latma it is our belief that by exposing the media to ridicule, we will help to change the nature of public discourse.”[10] The website published a number of controversial videos poking fun at everyone from President Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel to the activists killed during the Israeli raid on the Palestinian aid flotilla in May 2010.[11] Though controversial, the site enjoyed considerable popularity among the mainstream Israeli right for a time. In 2015, shortly after launching a satirical newscast show on Israel’s Channel 1,[12] Latma ceased operations.[13]

The flotilla satire, titled “We Con the World,” portrayed pro-Palestinian “activists” singing a spoof version of “We Are the World” in which they claim to want to make “Hamas look like Mother Theresa” and trick the world into believing that those living in Gaza are suffering, “coz the billion bucks in aid won’t buy their basic needs like some cheese and missile for the kids.” According to Glick, “My team and I wanted to lash out to those people who dared to call our naval commandos murderers for defending their country and themselves from a lynch mob. Calling those on the flotilla ‘peace activists’ is a complete lie. They were just championing the rights of a terrorist organization.”[14]

The Israeli government’s press office briefly circulated the video before releasing a statement saying it had been a mistake.[15]

Books

In 2014, Glick published her second book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. In it, she argued that attempts to negotiate a two-state solution had failed for 80 years and that Israel’s best option is to annex the West Bank and grant the Palestinians there the status of permanent residents—much like the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem—with the option to become citizens of Israel.

In its review of the book, the neoconservative Commentary magazine expressed skepticism of Glick’s ideas, but would not dismiss them outright. “Israel has a supreme interest in doing the additional research necessary to determine whether Glick is right about a one-state solution’s demographic feasibility,” wrote their reviewer. “For if she is, that would be a real game-changer.”[16]

Another reviewer opined, “If Glick is right that the root cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, then under her one-state solution West Bank Palestinians, who would constitute approximately 20 percent of Israel’s population, might well refuse Israeli citizenship and the associated right to vote. This would transform the ugly slander that Israel is an apartheid state into an ugly reality. Alternatively, Palestinians will demand citizenship, the better to make good on their oft-expressed ambition to create a single non-Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”[17]

The anti-Zionist web site, Mondoweiss also discussed the book, stating that Glick—despite her American background—has a religious view of Middle East history. “Glick generally puts the word ‘Palestine’ inside quotations too,” they wrote. “It has never existed as a political entity, she asserts, just a geographical one. And so there could be no Palestinian refugees from the land of Israel, because they were interlopers.”[18]

One Palestinian political analyst opined that the Israeli government had already been gradually enacting a plan like Glick’s proposal for some time. “Actions by successive Israeli governments in the occupied lands since 1967 suggest they are thinking in the direction of Glick’s Greater Israel plan: the establishment of a one Jewish majority state within the borders of the 1922 British Mandate and maintain its Jewish character,” he wrote. “The 600,000 settlers that Israel has transplanted in the West Bank and Jerusalem with their networks of freeways, roads, electricity and water suggests that Israel is in the process of creating the state which Glick proposes.”[19]

Other reviews noted Glick’s aggressive tone and often confrontational attitude. The Kirkus review of her book, for example, opines, “Even if Glick’s were indisputably the right course of action, the constant aggressiveness is off-putting. The choir won’t mind the preaching, but the arguments here aren’t likely to sway many other readers.” They were not swayed, either, writing, “Can peace ever come to the Middle East? Not with the implacable parties involved, one wing of which informs this unyielding polemic.”[20]

In Glick’s first book—Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad (2008)—she promotes the notion that Israeli and U.S. strategic concerns are the same in the face of the purportedly existential threat posed by “radical Islam.”[21]

“The shackled warrior is Israel,” said Glick in an interview with the conservative National Review magazine. “Between the Israeli peace movement, the local and international media, the U.N., Europe and the U.S., Israel is both forced to fight the war being waged against it with both hands tied behind its back and to believe that it bears responsibility for the genocidal anti-Semitism that has taken over the Islamic world.” Arguing that the United States has kept Israel from victory, Glick said, “For the U.S. to support an Israeli victory over its foes, Washington would have to acknowledge that the war against Israel and the war against the U.S. are one and the same. Such a U.S. move would also necessitate an acknowledgment of the nature of the war that is being waged against the U.S. Yet as the experience of the past seven years has made clear, the U.S. prefers to ignore the identity of its enemy. It is due to this stubborn denial of the nature of the war that the U.S. has preferred to refer to the war as a ‘war on terror’ instead of a war on jihad.”[22]

Glick’s Worldview and Her Journalism

On her personal website (http://www.carolineglick.com/), Glick describes her experience growing up and studying in the United States: “I grew up in Chicago’s ultra-liberal, anti-American, and anti-Israel stronghold of Hyde Park. Hyde Park’s newest famous resident is Barack Obama. He fits right into a neighborhood I couldn’t wait to leave. I made aliyah to Israel in 1991, two weeks after receiving my BA in Political Science from Beir Zeit on the Hudson—otherwise known as Columbia University. I joined the Israel Defense Forces that summer and served as an officer for five and a half years.” [23]

Asked by an interviewer whether she thought Europe had “betrayed” Israel, Glick said, “I think that the root of Europe’s refusal to support Israel is Europe’s refusal to accept the true lessons of the Holocaust. The lesson that Europe took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad. This of course, is absurd. Nationalism is neutral. Its relative badness or goodness is a direct function of how any specific nation behaves. The true lesson of the Holocaust is that nations and individuals have a responsibility to distinguish between good and evil and to support good and fight evil. Israel’s struggle against its neighbors, who refuse to accept it as a sovereign state just as Europeans refused to accept Jews as individuals in the 20th century, constitutes a moral challenge to Europe. And since Europe has refused to discard its moral relativism for moral choice, Europeans project their own moral blindness and weakness on Israel.”[24]

Glick’s opinions closely reflect the neoconservative worldview, as described by observers like Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service. Commenting on one of her media interviews, Lobe writes, “What comes through. …is how hard-liners like Glick see the relationship between the U.S. and Israel (‘the war against Israel and the war against the U.S. are one and the same’); the Manichean nature of the world (‘freedom’ versus ‘the forces of slavery and jihad,’ ‘good’ versus ‘evil’); how they conflate different threats (‘al Qaeda and Iran’ as a single ‘enemy’ whose ‘ultimate aim …is global domination and the destruction of the U.S.’); their contempt for Europe (its ‘refusal to accept the true lessons of the Holocaust’); their Islamophobia (‘genocidal anti-Semitism. …has taken over the Islamic world’); and their need for an ‘enemy’ to give order to their world.”[25]

Robert Fulford, a columnist at the National Post, has described Glick admiringly as a “ferocious Zionist hawk among Israel’s journalists and a vehement enemy of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.”[26] Glick, like many Israelis, was profoundly dismayed by Olmert’s handling of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. Her opinions are far more in line with those of Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, which has opposed Palestinian statehood. “She believes we should stop defining the Arab-Israel conflict as a territorial dispute and instead see Israel as the front line in the struggle against jihad. She thinks Benjamin Netanyahu (she once worked as his assistant) understands this reality, and, if elected prime minister at the head of Likud, will lead Israel in a more sensible direction.”[27]In 2011, Glick used her Jerusalem Post column to attack the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, accusing it of fabricating evidence. She described the group and others like it as “subversive foreign agents.”[28] B’Tselem’s then-executive director, Jessica Montell, responded by saying that Glick “is a hack of a journalist, who parrots any drivel that suits her extremist ideological agenda without having the basic journalistic integrity to check her facts.” She goes on to point out that Glick “cited a false report” and relied on a “government-apologist” group for her allegations against the group.[29] One journalist following the controversy opined that Glick had spun a tale of falsehoods. “Whether they were the result of willful lying or inexcusable negligence, they are the very essence of a reporter violating every professional ethic.”[30]

Controversial filmmaker Wayne Kopping featured Glick in two documentaries, including the 2005 film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West, which sparked a heated debate on U.S. college campuses regarding Islamophobia. Reported the New York Times, “The documentary has become the latest flashpoint in the bitter campus debate over the Middle East, not just because of its clips from Arab television rarely shown in the West, including scenes of suicide bombers being recruited and inducted, but also because of its pro-Israel distribution network. When a Middle East discussion group organized a showing at New York University recently, it found that the distributors of Obsession were requiring those in attendance to register at IsraelActivism.com, and that digital pictures of the events be sent to Hasbara Fellowships, a group set up to counter anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses.”[31]

Obsession presented interviews with others besides Glick who are associated with militarist or neoconservative political groups. Interviewees included Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and Brigitte Gabrielle of American Congress for Truth and advisor to the Intelligence Summit.

In Obsession, Glick argues that nearly all terrorist activities across the globe are part of a single movement, an argument that despite being frequently debunked has reappeared in neoconservative discourse since the early 1980s, when writers like the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen championed the theory that Moscow was behind all terrorist attacks worldwide. Said Glick in the film, “Every single country is dealing with this on one level or another. You see that the Thais are dealing with it, the Filipinos are dealing with it, the Europeans are dealing with it in Madrid, the Russians are dealing with it in Chechnya, the British are dealing with it in London and Manchester. And of course, you see it in the Middle East, whether it is in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and of course, Israel and Saudi Arabia. And then you go to Africa, and you see that jihadis are operating from Djibouti to South Africa. All of these areas that we refer to as separate wars, the Palestinian war in Israel, the Iraq war—they see all of these not as specific wars but as fronts in a global jihad.”[32]

Glick was also featured in Kopping’s 2003 documentary, Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in Israel, a film critical of the Oslo Peace Accords.[33] Relentless gives a largely one-sided view of the history and trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, focusing much of its assessment on Arab hostilities while ignoring abuses committed by Israelis. The right wing media group HonestReporting.com, founded in 2000 because of what its founders saw as the European media’s “twisted” version of the conflict in the Middle East that branded “Israel as the bad guy,” distributed Relentless.[34] Showings of the film have been sponsored by several groups that support militarist Israeli and U.S. policies, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Zionist Organization for America.[35]

 

SOURCES

 

[1] “About Caroline B. Glick,” Carolineglick.com, https://carolineglick.com/caroline-b-glick/

[2] “The Center for Security Policy Staff,” Center for Security Policy, http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Home.aspx?CategoryID=47&SubCategoryID=115; Eric Martin, “Israeli reporter, editor gives insider’s view of Middle East coverage,” Inside Medill News, April 20, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20070527202839/http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/medill/inside/news/israeli_reporter_editor_gives_insiders_view_of_middle_east_coverage.html.

[3] Joel B. Pollak, “Jerusalem Post Columnist Caroline Glick Joins Breitbart News,” Breitbart News, January 17, 2018, https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2018/01/17/jerusalem-post-columnist-caroline-glick-joins-breitbart-news/

[4] “About Caroline B. Glick,” Carolineglick.com, https://carolineglick.com/caroline-b-glick/

[5] “About Caroline B. Glick,” Carolineglick.com, https://carolineglick.com/caroline-b-glick/

[6] Lahav Harkov, “Caroline Glick Joins Hayemin HeHadash ‘Dream Team,’” Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Caroline-Glick-joining-Bennett-Shakeds-new-party-576092

[7] Raoul Wootliff, “Bennett taps journalist Caroline Glick for New Right’s Knesset slate,” Times of Israel, January 2, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/bennett-taps-journalist-caroline-glick-for-new-rights-knesset-slate/

[8] Mitchell Plitnick, “Drama Starts Early In Israeli Elections, Lobelog, January 7, 2019, https://lobelog.com/drama-starts-early-in-israeli-elections/

[9] Robert Mackey, “Israelis Explain, and Mock, Flotilla Clash,: New York Times, June 4, 2010, https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/israelis-explain-and-mock-flotilla-clash/

[10] Elise Cooper, “NRB Interview: Caroline Glick: We Con the World,” NewsRealBlog, July 2, 2010, http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/07/02/caroline-glick-we-con-the-world/.

[11] CarolineGlick.com, “What Israelis Think of Rahm Emanuel,” August 28, 2009, http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2009/08/what-israelis-think-of-rahm-em.php.

[12] Nir Har-Zahav and Ari Yashar, “Right-Wing Satire Latma Finally Will Be on TV,” Arutz 7, May 11, 2014, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/187058#.VQWmFFdMKzQ

[13] “About Caroline B. Glick,” Carolineglick.com, https://carolineglick.com/caroline-b-glick/

[14] Elise Cooper, “NRB Interview: Caroline Glick: We Con the World,” NewsRealBlog, July 2, 2010, http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/07/02/caroline-glick-we-con-the-world/.

[15] Mondoweiss.com, ” We aren’t the world,” June 3, 2010, http://mondoweiss.net/2010/06/we-arent-the-world.html.

[16] Evelyn Gordon, “State of the State: The Israeli Solution, by Caroline B. Glick,” Commentary, June 2014, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/state-of-the-state/

[17] Peter Berkowitz, “A One-State Mideast Solution? It Won’t Work,” Real Clear Politics, April 3, 2014, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/04/03/a_one-state_mideast_solution_it_wont_work_122137.html

[18] Philip Weiss, “Caroline Glick says there were no Palestinian refugees,” Mondoweiss, December 27, 2014, https://mondoweiss.net/2014/12/caroline-palestinian-refugees/

[19] Hasan Afif El-Hasan, “The Israeli Solution,” Palestine Chronicle, October 18, 2014, http://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-israeli-solution/

[20] Kirkus Review, “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” February 6, 2014, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/caroline-glick/the-israeli-solution/

[21] For an assessment if neoconservative views, see Jim Lobe, “What is a Neoconservative Anyway?” Inter Press Service, August 12, 2003, http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=19618; Glick offers a pithy account of her views in “Interview: Shackled Warrior: Israel in Bondage,” National Review, June 17, 2008.

[22] Katherine Jean Lopez, “Interview: Shackled Warrior: Israel in Bondage,” National Review, June 17, 2008.

[23] “About Caroline B. Glick,” Carolineglick.com, https://carolineglick.com/caroline-b-glick/

[24] Katherine Jean Lopez, “Interview: Shackled Warrior: Israel in Bondage,” National Review, June 17, 2008.

[25] Jim Lobe, “Neocon Rage,” Inter Press Service Lobelog.com, June 22, 2008, http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=160.

[26] Robert Fulford, “The Zionist Hawk Among Israeli Journalists,” National Post, September 30, 2006.

[27] Robert Fulford, “The Zionist Hawk Among Israeli Journalists,” National Post, September 30, 2006.

[28] Caroline Glick, “Column One: Agents of Influence,” Jerusalem Post, January 7, 2011, https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-Agents-of-influence

[29] Jessica Montell, “B’Tselem chief: ‘Caroline Glick a hack who parrots any drivel,’” +972 Magazine, January 21, 2011, https://972mag.com/btselem-chief-caroline-glick-is-a-hack-journalist-who-parrots-any-drivel/

[30] Mitchell Plitnick, “Post Hacks: Jennifer Rubin and Caroline Glick, Separated at Birth?” Rethinking Foreign Policy, January 22, 2011, https://mitchellplitnick.com/2011/01/22/584/

[31] Karen W. Arenson, “Film’s View of Islam Stirs Anger on Campuses,” New York Times, February 26, 2007.

[32] Quoted in Patrick Poole, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West,” FrontPageMag.com, July 28, 2006.

[33] “Caroline Glick,” Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2070334/.

[34] “Our History,” HinestReporting.com, http://www.honestreporting.com/a/history.asp.

[35] “Relentless Highlights,” HonestReporting.com, http://www.honestreporting.com/relentless/new_version/frames/aboutFrame.html.