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Why Hillary Clinton sent a bizarre email about Gefilte fish
(REUTERS/Eric Thayer)
One day back in March 2010, Hillary Clinton sent a simple email to Richard Verma, then the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, and aide Jake Sullivan.
The subject line: "Gefilte fish."
The body of the email: "Where are we on this?"
(State Department)
Turns out they were somewhere.
Yair Rosenberg, a writer at Tablet Magazine, detailed the backstory. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, wrote in his memoir that Clinton, then the secretary of state, was trying to get Israel to sign off on a blocked shipment of Asian carp from the US. This type of carp is used to make Gefilte fish, a traditional Jewish dish mainly in Polish and Russian culture.
Oren wrote:
"America signed its first-ever free-trade agreement with Israel back in 1985, but the treaty exempted certain Israeli products liable to be eradicated by their cheaper American counterparts. Apples, avocados, and oranges fell into this category, and, so, too, did the carp cultivated by Galilean farmers. Which is why four hundred thousand pounds of the frozen fish were denied entry into the Promised Land.
"Still, in the view of the possible diplomatic damage, I thought Israel should make this one exception, and told that to the Ministers of Trade and Finance. ... 'You think finding Middle East peace is hard,' Secretary of State Clinton blithely told reporters. 'I'm dealing with carp!' Netanyahu called to question me, 'What's all this carp stuff?'"
After days of back and forth, Oren wrote, a compromise was eventually reached, and the nine containers were allowed into Israel on a one-time basis.
The email was one in thousands of pages released by the State Department on Monday night. Of those emails, 150 were retroactively classified.
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