patrick.net

TEL AVIV – Former president Bill Clinton confessed to Israeli television that he tried to help Shimon Peres defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 1996 general elections.
In an interview on Channel 10 news that aired Tuesday, Clinton admitted that he tried to help Peres win the election in a way that didn’t “overtly” implicate him, and that he did so because Peres was more committed than Netanyahu to the so-called peace process, which had suffered a huge blow with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin six months earlier.

“I tried to do it in a way that didn’t overtly involve me,” he said, without expanding on exactly how he intervened.

“I did try to be helpful to him [Peres] because I thought he was more supportive of the peace process. And I tried to do it in a way that was consistent with what I believed to be in Israel’s interest, without saying anything about the difference in domestic polices, without anything else.”

Despite polls indicating a victory for Peres, Netanyahu ended up narrowly winning the May 1996 vote, with many analysts saying a slew of Palestinian suicide bombings that hit the country turned the electorate toward the right.