After so many years of being wrong about the Palestinians being ready to make peace with Israel, it is difficult to take New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s Middle East advice columns seriously. But his latest effort in this genre contains some whoppers that got our attention even if they only provide more proof the veteran writer is still hopelessly out of touch with reality.
Today’s “twofer” of Friedman gems starts out with praise for imprisoned Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Friedman gives a testimonial to Barghouti as an “authentic leader” and describes his call from prison for a new campaign of “non-violent” protest against Israel as just the ticket to bring peace. But what Friedman doesn’t understand is what makes Barghouti “authentic” to Palestinians is his role in the murder of Israeli civilians (for which he is currently serving five life sentences), not his notions about a switch to Gandhi-style activism.
Friedman advises Palestinians to take up Barghouti’s plea for “non-violence” (which according to Friedman includes the throwing of lethal rocks at Israelis as well as a campaign of economic warfare against the Jewish state) but to accompany it with specific maps showing what peace terms they will accept from Israel. On the surface that makes sense, because as Friedman says, Israel would then be faced with a tangible peace proposal that it would likely accept. Yet Friedman ignores the reason why the Palestinians have never made such a practical proposal and are unlikely to do so now.
The problem from the Palestinian point of view with Friedman’s advice to throw rocks wrapped in maps showing possible territorial swaps is that to do so means recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state. And that is something no Palestinian leader has ever had the courage to do no matter where Israel’s borders would be drawn or how many settlements would be uprooted.
Let’s remember that Barghouti’s mass murder spree took place in the immediate aftermath of an Israeli peace offer that was not much different from the scheme Friedman now thinks the Palestinians will accept. PA leader Yasir Arafat turned down Ehud Barak’s offers of a state in 2000 and 2001 and answered it with a terror war that cost more than 1,000 Israelis their lives courtesy of killers like his Fatah cohort Barghouti. Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas walked away from another such offer in 2008. With the Islamists of Hamas now joining Abbas in a new coalition, the odds that the PA will be able to accept a similar offer are zero.
Yet Friedman still thinks the Palestinians can make Israelis “feel morally insecure” about holding onto territory by another bout of rock throwing. But the reason why Israelis don’t “feel morally insecure” is because, unlike Friedman, they aren’t prepare to ignore the results of two decades of Middle East peace processing during which they have traded land and received terror instead of the peace pundits like the columnist promised. He’s right that Prime Minister Netanyahu believes the Palestinians won’t make peace because he “thinks it’s not in their culture.” The problem for Friedman is they have already proven many times that it isn’t.
What makes this discussion so pointless is that the Palestinians don’t need a change in tactics. They don’t have to throw rocks or promote boycotts even if those activities are more attractive to their foreign supporters than suicide bombings. All they have to do is negotiate. Netanyahu has already said he’d accept a two-state solution and, as Friedman understands, the vast majority of Israelis would support him if he were presented with a deal that ended the conflict. Just as in 1977 when Egypt’s Sadat went to Jerusalem, the Israelis are ready to deal. The problem is not whether the Palestinians realize how best to make Israelis “morally insecure” — a point that is as meaningless today as it was 35 years ago — but that, unlike Sadat, they aren’t actually willing to live in peace alongside the Jewish state.
The other whopper in Friedman’s column is his second suggestion: a proposal that Israel assist in the creation of a viable secular Palestinian state in the West Bank that would promote a free-market economy that would be a model to the Middle East. He thinks this is essential, because if violence erupts, the new Islamist leadership in Egypt will exacerbate it.
For years, Friedman has been promoting Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and “Fayyadism” as the coming wave of Palestinian politics. But Fayyad’s name isn’t mentioned once in Friedman’s column. That’s because the moderate, who is a favorite of both the U.S. and Israel, has no constituency among his own people and is being chucked out of office by Abbas to appease his new Hamas partners. Israel would like nothing better than a free market-trading partner in the West Bank led by a man such as Fayyad as opposed to another Islamist wasteland such as currently exists in Gaza. The problem is the Palestinians prefer Hamas to Fayyad or the advice of the clueless Friedman.
n nHe's jealous of all the attention Beinart has been getting, and had to come up with something, anything, to get back in the limelight. n
Here’s my crack at influencing Obama, Friedman style: n n“I was on the way back from a UN sponsored conclave in Thailand, on the holocaust native shrimp populations are suffering as a result of deep see drilling in the South China Sea, and met a dual citizen Bangladeshi-American software engineer at the Dubai airport lounge, telecommuting to his job in Shanghai, where he designed medical imaging software for a Korean company selling equipment into the South American market our own medical equipment makers were not aggressive enough to take advantage of as they refused to learn and speak Spanish. He had his Swedish-born social worker wife along with him, who worked with autistic African children in Zimbabwe, arranging occupational therapy for these different but very special kids way across the continent at the Namibia General Hospital. These two international citizens of the modern world felt that the current Israeli government was far too independent vis a vis what humane liberal policies should be. Right then and there, I felt that if we could have a Chinese style dictatorship for one day in the US, free of interference from a congress beholden to, if not outright coerced and threatened by AIPAC and the Likud, we could demand Israel establish a Palestinian State with technocrat Fayyad at its head, and its capitol on the Temple Mount. THAT is how this problem could be solved, in our interconnected, wireless world.
Hilarious!
Window into Friedman's mind: n n" . . . the Likud is forever tainted by the sin of being in power when the Lebanese Christians slaughtered Palestinians, for which the Likud is responsible because they bought and paid for the Phalangists just like they bought and paid for Congress. And this was almost as bad a sin as the Likud coming to power in the first place, displacing the enlightened Labor socialists because democracy be damned – that’s only for other people, after all, not Israel, which has a constitutional requirement to be governed by PC socialists who are apologetic for the wars they win, always give back the territory, and who in any case must take their orders from the White House because Israel is not a real country, just an extension of socialist Jewish summer camps I went to as a child, except with real camel rides and a very salty lake you can read a newspaper in while floating on your back as your counselor gets you a falafel sandwich. Except I didn't want to read a newspaper, I wanted the attention of the hot Israeli chick with the gun, or is it a rifle? Anyways, she's not interested in me at all, damn. Some day I'll get even. "
Of course Friedman ignores the slaughter of Lebanese Christions by Arafat and his PLO during the 70s after getting a safe haven there from King Hussein’s bloody expulsion of them from Jordan.
In Friedman’s novel the Phalangists were not allowed to reactbut were supposed to play Gandhi.
Those were absolutely BEAUTIFUL! I loved it — especially the first part — just like his writing too — and you nailed the love of the "internationalist" — it was luscious reading!
Here are a few serious questions for the NYTIMEs' McSage: n nHas Israel not been trying to help the Palestinians have their state? If you think not, how so? n nDo they give the Palestinians their state on any terms whatsoever? Or should a few basic things be settled first, such as, oh, I don’t know, perhaps ‘Palestinians must give up telling their young kids, who will grow up into adult Palestinians some day, that Jews are not descended from monkeys and pigs (or is it dogs and hamsters – I forget), and that they can’t teach math by saying ‘I have 10 Jews and I blow up 4 – how many are left?’. n nDo they insist that the Palestinians can’t have anti-aircraft missiles and mortars, or do they say, ‘that’s OK, we trust you not to fire them at our jumbo planes landing at Ben Gurion, because that would kill a lot of people and destroy our economy and then we would have to wipe you out or expel you to Jordan and Egypt and maybe even Burkina Faso and the world will hate us even more." n nAnd what if the Palestinians don’t agree to these conditions? Then what? n nPlease tell, oh wise one, because that is exactly where we are now.
What is more important, independence or virtue? The Palestinians have rejected independence time and again for the sake of virtue. What does virtue mean? It means dying in a jihad while killing Jews. n
The real question is why you bother reading Friedman anymore? He has had nothing insightful or interesting to say in the last 15 years.
He is a pompous what U know! nThe Pal will not accept a solution that does allow them to destroy Israel.
New Yotk Times, Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen. Self hatred Jews. All The Biased News Anti-Israel Fit To Print.
What the author is missing is that the negotiations are all one sided. The more Israelis occupy the West Bank the less possibility of peace. It really is that simple. Israel, after all, is a creation of the UN using lands that the Palestinains had resided on for 2,000 years. It was given a territory to use as its own to form a state. If you look at any map you will see what the Zionists did with that land. They expanded and expanded until they usurped almost all of the Palestinian ancestral lands. no wonder there is no peace in the area. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, it is not solely Israeli, it is also Palestinian and is held sacred by three great religions. It should be designated an international city with all parties using it.
"…lands the Palestinians had resided in for 2,000 years." O.K. Robert, tell me in what year the Palestinians took over or self-invented or were created. Was it in 48 A.D.? Who was there founding father(s)? The name of an early king or ruler?
Does Tom really think that the palestinian Arabs are ready for a "secular" state? Their constitution is Islamic & stipulates apartheid against Jews. Arab Christians in Bethlehem are harassed. n nAs to a "free market" economy, does Tom know that arafat set up a system of state monopolies when he organized the palestinian authority in 1994? Did Salim Fayyad change that system? Not to my knowledge. Is Tom going to descend in his rocketship from outer space & rejoin us on earth?