Thomas Friedman’s boyhood infatuation with Israel following the Six-Day War quickly faded. During his undergraduate years at Brandeis in the mid-Seventies he belonged to the steering committee of a “Middle East Peace Group” affiliated with the notoriously anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, organization Breira.
Posted in Beirut by The New York Times during the first Lebanon War, his unrequited love turned to fury after the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982. “Boiling with anger” at Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon, and determined to “help get rid of them,” Friedman wrote the four-page Times article that won a Pulitzer Prize. A week later, after an interview with the Israeli commanding officer, he proudly “buried” the general on page one and “along with him every illusion I ever held about the Jewish state.” Even Friedman subsequently admitted: “I was not professionally detached.”
Nor was he detached once he left Beirut for Jerusalem. As the Times bureau chief during the mid-Eighties his primary instructors were Meron Benvenisti, the former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who castigated Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and advocated a bi-national state; political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, who lacerated Zionism for disregarding liberal democratic values; Rabbi David Hartman, whose rabbinic and academic commitment was to building “a more pluralistic, tolerant, and enlightened Israeli society”; and Ari Shavit, columnist for left-wing Ha’aretz. It was not exactly a representative sampling of the Israeli political spectrum.
Friedman returned to the United States, he wrote, believing that Israel was “a Jewish South Africa, permanently ruling Palestinians in West Bank homelands.” And, as he memorably described it in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Israel had become “Yad VaShem with an air force.” Arrogantly certain that he knew the solution for Middle East peace, he presented Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah with the Friedman peace plan in 2002. In this “simple, clear-cut proposal,” as he described it theTimes (February 17, 2002), Friedman urged “a total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines, and the establishment of a Palestinian state, in return for “full peace” with “the entire Arab world.” It came to naught, predictably, but Friedman was not deterred.
Seven years later he tried again, drafting a proposal for now King Abdullah to send to the new American president, Barack Obama. Friedman warned that “Zionist settlers would devour the rest of the West Bank and holy Jerusalem” if nothing was done to stop them. The solution, once again, was an Israeli agreement “to withdraw from every inch of the West Bank and Arab districts of East Jerusalem.” Egypt and Jordan would “maintain order,” while Saudi Arabia would fund Friedman’s “5-State Solution.” Like the previous Friedman plan, it went nowhere.
Fast forward to the most recent Friedman column (November 17), imagining a conversation between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu about Israel’s double strategic dilemma – trading settlements for peace with the Palestinians and trading sanctions on Iran for nuclear restrictions. Friedman recommended a new book for them to read. Entitled My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, its author is his old Ha’aretz friend Ari Shavit, “one of the handful of experts whom I’ve relied upon to understand Israel” for thirty years, once a committed leftist who has moved to the center since the Oslo failure.
It is evident why Friedman is such an admirer. Shavit grasps the double truth of Zionism that Friedman finds so compelling: a miracle of national restoration for the Jewish people that produced the “nightmare” of Palestinian defeat and exile. The centerpiece of his story of Jewish triumph and Palestinian tragedy is “Lydda, 1948,” recently excerpted in The New Yorker (October 21). The mass expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from that strategically vital city, located only a few miles from Tel Aviv, near the international airport and on the road to Jerusalem, was tragic. But it was an Israeli response dictated by the decision of Arab governments to ignore UN truce proposals and renew their effort to exterminate the fledgling Jewish state within any borders.
Shavit understands that “Lydda does not make Zionism criminal.” But “it is my moral duty as an Israeli to recognize Lydda and help the Palestinians to overcome it” by working for a Palestinian state. He remains convinced that post-1967 “occupation was a moral, demographic and political disaster.” Friedman chimes in: the Jewish state “must find a way to separate from the West Bank . . . otherwise the spreading Jewish settlements there will be the virus that kills the original Israel.” To remain democratic, Israel must terminate “an endless occupation [that] will lead to Jews being a minority in their own home.”
But the demographic warning issued by Shavit and Friedman is erroneous. Jews comprise two-thirds of the population between the Jordan River and Mediterranean, while Jewish birth rates rise and Palestinian rates decline. Neither journalist mentions the ninety-year-old international guarantees to Jews, never rescinded, for “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. But Shavit, at least, still marvels at the “miracle” of Zionism. That is one lesson of history that Thomas Friedman still seems reluctant to learn.
Jerold S. Auerbach is author of the forthcoming Jewish State/Pariah Nation: Israel and the Dilemmas of Legitimacy.
I have friends who are good people who perceive, or rather mis-perceive Thomas Friedman as a reasonable and fair-minded commentator on the Middle-East who has Israel’s ultimate and long-term interests at heart. Like other leftist commentators, he believes that he knows the “truth” that the obtuse right-wing Israelis cannot or will not grasp. The reality is that Friedman and his ilk are very uncomfortable with their own Jewishness, fearing that should Jews be perceived as on the wrong side of political correctness, their own comfortable positions in secular society would be jeopardized. Consequently they completely ignore the realities that the Jewish State was facing from before it’s official inception in 1948. They disguise their malevolence with duplicitous opening platitudes about being “Israel’s friend” so that naive, well-intentioned but superficial fair-minded readers accept the slanted analyses that follow as “balanced.” Friedman doesn’t call his readers’ attention to the historical and legal rights that Jews have to it’s historical homeland far predating the United Nations 1948 declaration of Israeli independence, the complete absence of any Palestinian national entity, the Palestinian charter calling for the destruction of Israel by both gradual diplomatic means and, if possible, all out war. Friedman and his leftist confreres fail to contextualize the Israel-Palestinian conflict within the larger Islamicist push for world domination that has the effect of obscuring the common struggle that the west shares with Israel, but on the contrary, isolates Israel, making it more vulnerable to the same genre of lies (racist Apartheid State, etc.) that Jews were falsely subjected to (blood libels, rapacious financial manipulators, etc.) in Europe from both left-wing (Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and right-wing (Mein Kampf) antisemitism. Ironically, across the Muslim world today, both of these vile distortions are celebrated best sellers. Context is everything and Friedman sees only the plight of those who, for 65 years have refused to accept the reality and legitimacy of a single Jewish homeland, along with their incredibly wealthy 56 related Muslim states. Sort of makes the notion of objectivity in the United Nations an absurdity.
I imagine that readers of this set of comments might view my analysis as possessing a “right-wing” bias. I give those skeptics the following empirical challenge. Assemble your 100 favorite Thomas Friedman articles and count the number of concessions that he demands of Israel and the corresponding number of concessions that he demands of the Palestinians. Given that the PA has kept scant few if any of their commitments under the Camp David or the Oslo accords (little things like dropping the destruction of the State of Israel from their charter or incitement to violence, immersion of their children in within a virulently antisemitic educational milieu), one might expect somewhere near a 50/50 split. Your empirical results will speak for themselves. However, the utility of a Jew condemning Israel is trumpeted by the antisemites who then justify their “criticisms” of Israel as not antisemitic…after all, the Jew Friedman says the same thing.
Friedman’s history as an unrepentant Leftist makes it impossible at this stage in his life to consider other possibilities to the Conflict.
He, like all Liberals past a certain age, would be unable to change his world view without having to repudiate his politics of a lifetime.
This would be too traumatic and painful to contemplate. It also makes him a totally biased reporter who must be discounted unconditionally.
It is unfortunate that his reputation is so high among American Jews but then again it is no surprise since he is prominently featured in their “Bible”, the NYT. Hopefully most Israeli’s can see beyond his “star” quality and view him in the proper perspective, taking his pronouncements with a ton of salt.