In her forthcoming memoir, Hillary Clinton generally aligns herself with President Obama but distances herself at the margins: She had a different take on Syria and the Bowe Bergdahl deal, she says.

But in at least one respect the former secretary of state faults herself and the Obama administration: We were wrong to draw a hard line on settlements.

By the way, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 in part by running to George H.W. Bush’s right on settlements. Bush had drawn a hard line against them. Not Clinton. He raised a lot of money on that basis.

Haaretz reports on Clinton’s flipflop:

Former U.S. Secretary of State claims in a new memoir that the American administration made a tactical error by demanding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze construction in the settlements in 2009.

“In retrospect, our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work,” Clinton writes in Hard Choices, to be released next week, AP reported.

Clinton, widely estimated in Washington to vie to the presidency in 2016, writes in her memoir that the demand for a construction freeze in the West Bank only hardened the stance of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who eventually rejected negotiations because the freeze did not include East Jerusalem… On the other hand, she discusses the tattered relationship between the Israeli prime minister and President Obama, and notes the latter’s fury when Israel announced new settlement construction during a state visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden.

Speaking of the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu, this is delicious/awful: it goes both ways, Netanyahu “loathes” Obama. And his enmity for the president is undermining Israel’s security, says the leader of the opposition Labor Party. From the Times of Israel: