Blogger

Doubting Thomas - Statement of purpose

David's Israel Blog

IsraPundit

 
Here's Tommy
In yesterday's column Friedman asserts:

As long as Iraq loomed as a major threat, one could hear three arguments in Israel. One said no withdrawal from the West Bank and Jordan River was possible because Israel needed a security buffer. Another said withdrawal was essential to maintain Israel as a Jewish democracy. Because if Israel kept control of the occupied territories, there would soon be more Arabs than Jews living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel. A third said that no withdrawal was tolerable because the Jewish state needed to control all the Jewish land, including the Biblical West Bank.

Friedman brings three arguments concerning the disposition of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Two of them (the first and third) are body issues. They are the issues that mostly concern those who worry about the physical existence of Israel (and the Jewish people.) The second, the fear of Palestinian population growth, is a spiritual issue. It is the approach favored by the Israeli (and American) left. It supposes that Israel must cede a significant amount of land to the PLO in order to avoid losing its Jewish character or "becoming an apartheid state." The "spirit" argument is made in exclusion of the body arguments.

Well yes, Israel may not, now, face a threat from Iraq. But if the occupation is going as badly as Friedman carps, wouldn't that change? Besides as we've seen over the past decade, the PA may not have the capability of destroying Israel by itself, but it can use violence to extract a high price from Israel as a country.

In a sobering assessment, MK Dr. Yuval Steinitz pointed out a few years ago that the PA may indeed present an existential threat to Israel, especially in conjunction with another Arab army that wishes harm upon Israel.

Finally, targeting the military is not the only means by which a broad series of Palestinian commando attacks could contribute to an effective Arab assault. Terrorist raids on residential neighborhoods or the seizure of national television and radio stations might serve to promote widespread demoralization and civilian flight.

Another set of potential objectives consists of technical installations: the electric power plant in Hadera, the oil refineries of Haifa, the chemical tanks of Gelilot, or the switchboards, transformers, and distribution boxes of the Bezek national telephone company. Power outages, huge blazes near Israel's large cities, and temporary interruptions of communication lines would all serve to paralyze if not cripple Israel in the early phases of a war.

Even if one shows concern for the demographic problem, Former MK, Moshe Arens, recently concluded that:

Would a unilateral withdrawal by the IDF, leaving the terrorists in control of the abandoned areas, strike a blow against terrorism or expose Israelis to additional dangers? Some people seem to have forgotten that Israel had already withdrawn from much of Judea and Samaria after the Oslo agreement and that the IDF reentered the Palestinian towns in order to stem the tide of terrorism that was sweeping over Israel. This was never a question
of demographics.
The idea that the IDF can be withdrawn and Israelis can settle down to live peacefully behind the security fence, while terrorism reigns on the other side of the fence is an illusion. Nobody would suggest that having once withdrawn and continuing to suffer from terrorism, Israel would refrain to use of the IDF beyond the Green Line for "demographic considerations."
Demographic considerations play no part in the battle against terrorism. It is a battle for the life of Israel and its citizens. Demographic consideration are valid and legitimate once the permanent borders of Israel are being negotiated. We're not there yet.

In other words, Dr. Arens states what is obvious to most of us who remain undeluded by the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Israel must first tend to it's body; when the body is safe, it can worry about it's soul. By skipping the step of peace, Friedman once again ignores the fact that Israel's good faith has produced nothing but a greater Arab appetite to destroy the Jewish state. Right now Israel must focus on winning its war. When it is, it's body will be secure and only then can Israel afford to consider helping its soul.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
A Charming Friedman Story
Thanks to LGF there's an article in Jewsweek telling how short tempered Thomas Friedman is. He doesn't take questions too well.

The recent Geneva Peace Accord exists in some sort of alternate dimension: Representatives from two sides in a conflict hack out an agreement without actually representing either side, or coming to agreement on many of the more pressing issues; a document that will guarantee peace has no provisions for stopping violence. An event last Thursday featured the authors of the Accord; adding to the paradox, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who always tells us that peace can be achieved no matter what failed to contain his rage when criticized. So step inside this house of mirrors, where seeing a distorted reality is believing emphatically in it, and you'll find yourself taken away by the trip, if only for a while. Dig it.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Fanatic is Correct
Thomas Friedman in his paean to Yossi Beilin seems to have forgotten that a definition of a fanatic is one who, when he sees that his way has failed redoubles his efforts. While I agree that Beilin is a fanatic, he's hardly a "moderate." He couldn't win a seat in Labor's Knesset delegation. He couldn't even get in on the Meretz list. That's about as far left as you can get in Israel society.

Once again Beilin, having been voted out of office because he could not win in the marketplace of ideas has decided to subvert the democratic process by going outside of the government to negotiate with foreign entities. This is what brought the Oslo Accords and the many associated deaths to Israel. Beilin and friends who represent no one are participating in talks with officials of another government.

This accomplishes little other than bringing out the Chamberlain wannabes like Friedman to blame Israel for preventing peace. It casts Israel as obstructionist, while rewarding Arafat and his thugs for the violence they instigated. Why doesn't the PA have to prove its worthiness as a state before it receives land? Why does Israel have to prove that it is not an Apartheid state to the satisfaction of its enemies in order for Friedman to pronounce Israel legitimate?

Aside from the problem of how to define Yossi Beilin, Friedman asserts:

By 2010 or so, there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza put together. "We will fairly soon be losing the Jewish majority," added Mr. Beilin. "This may not interest President Bush, but it interests me and should interest Sharon. If we don't do something to create a border with the Palestinians, we're going to put an end to the Zionist dream."

Asserted with the certainty of a ... fanatic. But as Arutz-7 recently pointed out demographic projections are notoriously difficult to make.

*In 1900, the leading Jewish historian and demographer, Dubnov, cautioned Herzl against the establishment of a Jewish State: "By the year 2000 there will be only 500,000 Jews in the land of Israel." In 2000 there were 5 million Jews in Israel.
*In 1948, Israel's Chief Statistician, Prof. Bakki, lobbied Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to postpone the establishment of the Jewish State: "By 1968 there will be an Arab majority in Israel (Green Line)." In 1968 there was a 17% Arab minority.
*In 1967, Prime Minister Eshkol was pressured to give away Gaza, Judea & Samaria: "By 1987 there will be an Arab majority west of the Jordan River." In 1987 there was a 37% Arab minority west of the Jordan River.

Even if Friedman's projection was correct, why do we need Beilin's plan? By 2000, 98% of all those called Palestinians were living under PA control. All that was left was border adjustments. The contiguity and amount of land to be determined by negotiation. Arafat chose to make war instead of negotiate. And we're supposed to reward him with what he refused to accept through peaceful means? If the Palestinian state that Friedman so longs for doesn't exist in all of the territories Israel capture in 1967 that will be the fault of the Palestinian government and its constituents who consistently negotiated and acted in bad faith while Israel was trying to make peace.

Oh, and Mr. Friedman didn't notice that it wasn't only Likudniks decrying the Geneva initiative. Guess who said this?

Sharon's predecessor was equally withering. Former prime minister Ehud Barak, who left office in early 2001, several months after the intifada broke out, said Monday it was unfortunate that the Labor Party had permitted some of its members to formulate such a "delusional" peace plan.
"This is a fictive and slightly peculiar agreement... that clearly harms the interests of the State of Israel," Barak told Israel Radio.

Why none other than Mr. Friedman's favorite Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.
UPDATE: Please check out Joe Schick's comments on the column.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
When Columns Collide
Just a few days ago Friedman was writing about the humiliation that the Arab world suffers and used it to excuse violence against the Israel and the United States. Now Thomas comes forward with a novel idea (wait a second didn't we already see this before?) that Israel and Saudi Arabia should make peace.

The parallels are remarkable. There's the house of Sharon in Israel. In Saudi Arabia its the house of Saud. PM Sharon was elected by popular vote - twice; the Saud family rules by divine right. Then Saudi Arabia has its Wahhabis; Israel does too. The Saudi Wahhabis destroy buildings with airplanes and bombs and stuff. The Israeli Wahhabis build houses (albeit in the wrong place.) Given these similarities it should be obvious that Israel and Saudi Arabia have much in common and each can save the other from ruin. Of course, that will require giving the Palestinians a state with "dignity." (We can't have a state borne of "humiliation." Here are the key paragraphs:

"The only hope for the Saudi ruling family, for long-term survival, is to deliver on two key sources of legitimacy: a rising standard of living and the Palestine question," argues the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. "Improving standards of living requires gradual political and economic reforms to transform the Saudi education system and society so it delivers for more young people. That will take time."

But to buy time for economics, adds Mr. Cohen, the Saudis need to deliver on emotions "by helping to bring about a dignified solution to the Palestine problem, which returns the mosques of Jerusalem to Muslim control. . . . Some 26 years ago Anwar Sadat responded to the food riots in Egypt by going to Jerusalem to make peace with Israel. In doing so he bought his successor 26 years to deal with Egypt's economic problems. Crown Prince Abdullah needs to forge his own breakthrough for the same reasons." In short, to buy the time to deal with the people's economic aspirations, the Saudis need to deliver on their political aspirations, from Palestine to participation.

Where the Israelis need the Saudis is in combating the rising tide of anti-Semitism. This new anti-Semitism is a witches' brew of Muslim rage — nurtured in madrasas and mosques financed by Saudi money — and classic European hatred fed by a new anti-Israel anti-Semitism. Both are fanned by a European press that increasingly reads like the worst Arab press, and abetted by the real images of Israeli settlers seizing Palestinian land and uprooting their olive groves.

The problem is that this solution doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. No doubt many of you remember how Thomas and Crown Prince Abdullah collaborated on a peace plan a few years ago. In return for Israel pulling back to its 1967 borders (presumably minus, Gilo, Ramot, Ramat Eshkol and certainly minus Efrat, Etzion Bloc etc.) the Saudis were willing to recognize Israel's right to exist maybe. And maybe the rest of the Arab world would too. Not that there were any guarantees.

Thomas took the Crown Prince at his word that he was seeking peace with Israel even though only a year and a half earlier the CP played a role in sinking the Camp David Summit, as reported by the NY Times. From Susan Sachs in "Arab Nations Hold Tongues, Await a Briefing From Arafat," the New York Times, July 26, 2000:

During the last few days, a number of Arab leaders like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudia Arabia and President [Hosni Mubarak] have joined with Mr. Arafat's domestic opponents in Islamic militant movements to weigh in on the issue. They all but threatened Mr. Arafat with political excommunication if he accepted Prime Minister Ehud Barak's proposals for administrative control over parts of the city and access to -- but not sovereignty over -- the major Muslim sites.

Hmmm. It wasn't humiliation that prevents peace, it's Saudi connivance. Did Thomas ever mention that? Does he even read his own paper?

The whole time that Thomas was promoting the CP's peace plan he never asks for some sort of goodwill gesture. He never noted that the peace plan was really an ultimatum. Do as we say or you'll never know a day of peace.

This gets to the crux of the matter. Saudi Arabia really has nothing to offer Israel. It could stop supporting those who wish to destroy Israel. But that isn't something that Israel should give up land for (to another party yet) that is part of being civilized.

And Friedman needn't be so certain that "settlers" are uprooting Arab trees. Arutz-7 has cast some doubts on the veracity of those claims. The problem isn't what the settlers do, that's just the pretext that those who hate Israel use to justify their hatred. Just like he did by validating the "humiliation" argument, Friedman lets the antisemites he just condemned off the hook, this time by backing their argument uncritically.

Is anyone at the NY Times noticing how inconsequently Thomas is becoming?
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Humiliation as an Excuse
Little Green Footballs and Roger L. Simon have already taken Thomas Friedman to task for his recent column "The Humiliation Factor." There are other points worth making.

For one thing Friedman writes:

One reason Yasir Arafat rejected the Clinton plan for a Palestinian state was that he and many followers didn't want a state handed to them by the U.S. or Israel. That would be "humiliating." They wanted to win it in blood and fire. Hezbollah TV had bombarded Palestinians with stories of how the Lebanese drove the Israelis out. Palestinian militants wanted the "dignity" of doing the same.

If that's the case what's the point of the Mitchell Plan, the Tenet Plan or the Road Map (not to mention Oslo I and II)? All Israeli concessions will do is further humiliate the Arabs won't they? If every time Israel surrenders land it doesn't bring peace closer, why should Israel give up any land? Friedman is so set on recasting the world with his pithy formulations that he gives no thought to the implications of his new analysis.

The problem is that what he's doing is essentially excusing Arab extremism. Why is it so difficult for the U.S. to win the peace in Iraq? Because the Iraqis are humiliated. Why can't Israel and the Palestinians make peace? Because the Palestinians are humiliated.

Barry Rubin, in "THE US IN THE MIDDLE EAST, 1999" wrote:

In January, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described US goals for the year as "the implementation of the Wye Accords, the negotiation of final status agreement and pursuit of a comprehensive peace." Albright praised the Palestinians and criticized Israel's government: "The Palestinians have been fulfilling some aspects of what they are supposed to do in terms of their security obligations under Wye. And I think that the Israelis also need to fulfill their obligations."9 Arafat was well-received in Washington during his early February visit.
The State Department signaled efforts to improve US-PA relations while opposing any unilateral PA declaration of independence.10 At that time, Albright referred to delays in the peace process and repeated--albeit with somewhat more nuance--her previous statement by saying, " The Palestinians have fulfilled some of their obligations, and some of them they have not; and we are concerned about that. The Israelis need to fulfill theirs.11 Clinton held a brief private meeting with Arafat and also with Leah Rabin, widow of the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.12

These attitudes were all too common during the Clinton years when an unreconstructed terrorist Yasser Arafat was hosted at the White House more than any other world leader. Arafat was lavished with money, attention, access and, most of all, legitimacy. No Arab complained.

(And why isn't the Arab world complaining about the humiliation of Egypt receiving $2 billion in American aid; with hundreds of million more sent to Jordan and the PA?)

But what happened when President Clinton asked Arafat to make a deal? Arafat, of course, did not. President Clinton, frustrated lashed out and this is what happened according to
"A Different Take on Camp David Collapse"

With that, Qureia said, Clinton left the room. Qureia said he complained later to Clinton's aides that the president had overstepped his role. "He was a mediator. And to blame the Palestinians in front of the Israelis is not fair," he said.

In this article Lee Hockstader, then the Washington Post's Middle East correspondent was giving voice to Robert Malley's excuse for Palestinian intrasigence.

Abu Ala's (that's Ahmed Qureia) complaint here that Clinton wasn't fair, is just another way of saying that the Palestinians were "humiliated." Of course the six years prior when Arafat was deodorized by the Clinton administration count for nothing. Never mind that the whole reason Arafat was to be rehabilitated was to make peace. When he showed conclusively that he was incapable of making peace those with blinders obviously felt themselves betrayed. All this shows is that there is almost no limit to the capacity of Arafat's apologizers to make excuses.

That's what makes the "humiliation" explanation an excuse. It explains nothing. It only serves to excuse the Arab world for its hostility to the West. That Thomas Friedman bases a column on mere wordplay is a reminder that he is more concerned with soundbites than with analysis.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Washing Rental Cars
One of Friedman's themes (advertising slogans) is that no one washes a rental car. The point is that he doesn't believe that Iraqis will start taking control of their lives unti they feel that the country is theirs. In today's column, "Iraqis at the Wheel," he blasts the Bush administration for not doing more to give Iraqis a stake in their future:

I repeat, yet again, Lawrence Summers dictum: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." Too many Iraqis still feel that they are renting their country, first from Saddam and now from us, so they aren't really washing yet. We cannot just toss the keys to anyone, as France suggests. But we can insist — much more vigorously — that they begin the constitutional process that will produce a legitimate body of Iraqis to accept the keys and eventually drive off on their own.

Funny but someone who just returned from Iraq noted:

The greatest hope comes in signs of a new personal pride Iraqis are revealing as they rebuild homes, shops and cities like Samawa, Uram said.

"They have already experienced the worst that is possible," he said. "It can only get better for them. The average Iraqi's life is better today than it was two weeks ago. And two weeks from now, I believe it will be better yet."

Thanks to Instapundit for noting this story.

 
Thomas Friedman - Ad Man
I think I've finally hit upon what annoys me most about Thomas Friedman. It's clear that he's a very smart man. He's capable of making shrewd observations. But he seems incapable of serious analysis. Instead he looks for a cute slogan and pass it off as a deep thought. In his most recent column "The End of the West?" his slogan is provided by former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt ""Our defining date is now 1989 and yours is 2001..." Bildt is explaining why Europe views things differently from Americans:

Every European prime minister wakes up in the morning thinking about how to share sovereignty, as Europe takes advantage of the collapse of communism to consolidate economically, politically and militarily into one big family. And the U.S. president wakes up thinking about where the next terror attack might come from and how to respond - most likely alone. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security," says Mr. Bildt. "While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world. No longer united primarily by a common threat, we have also failed to develop a common vision for where we want to go on many of the global issues confronting us."

Fair enough, but did Friedman even think about Bildt's comment? Why is Europe at peace? Because during the 80's the United States stood up the "Evil Empire" and saw the Soviet Union end up in the dust bin of history. Ignoring the Soviet Union isn't what defeated it; it was confrontation. The same is true about our current crisis. Europe may feel safe from Islamism, but ignoring it won't solve the problem. The world took a holiday from history during the 90's when the threat built up. 2001 shocked us out of our reverie.

Other than his simplistic formulation, there were other problems with Friedman's essay. For example:

What I'm getting at here is that when you find yourself in an argument with Europeans over Iraq, they try to present it as if we both want the same thing, but we just have different approaches. And had the Bush team not been so dishonest and unilateral, we could have worked together. I wish the Bush team had behaved differently, but that would not have been a cure-all — because if you look under the European position you see we have two different visions, not just tactical differences. Many Europeans really do believe that a dominant America is more threatening to global stability than Saddam's tyranny.

The Bush team dishonest and unilateral? He's right that different behavior wouldn't have changed anything. Jonathan Rauch, looks at things slightly differently.

Bush is not going it alone. He is setting his agenda and then looking for support, rather than the other way around. That is what presidents and countries typically do. It is certainly what France does—and how. France's intransigence on farm subsidies has been the single greatest impediment to progress at the World Trade Organization. France's determination to set up an independent European military-planning center risks splitting NATO. France's refusal to comply with the European Union's fiscal rules may result in the rules' collapse. France freely uses its E.U. clout to bully dissenting European countries. It does not shrink from calling on them to "shut up." It did not shrink from announcing it would unilaterally veto any Security Council resolution authorizing military action against Iraq, "whatever the circumstances." This is not exactly team playing, although critics of American unilateralism rarely see fit to mention it.

Rauch feels that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been arrogant and that arrogance has aggravated other countries. But he writes:

The only way to placate today's angry Europeans is to change the ends, not just the means, of U.S. foreign policy. And the only way to have avoided the trans-Atlantic falling-out over Iraq would have been for Bush to condition America's use of force upon the approval of the Security Council (read: France). No responsible American president, of either party, would have done that.

Exhibit A: In September of 2002, Al Gore, then still a possible Democratic presidential contender, warned of the perils of acting unilaterally against Iraq. He urged Bush to take his case to the Security Council and ask for a resolution demanding "prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time." And if the Security Council failed? "Other choices"—Gore meant force—"remain open." After all, "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."

Bush, of course, followed Gore's advice. If that was unilateralism, then few are the presidents who would forswear it.

Of course Friedman simply thinks that a summit or two could bring the US and Europe closer together. that I think, understates the venality of France. The Washington Post reported this week that according to former Iraqi VIP, Tariq Aziz:

Aziz's extensive interrogations -- eased by a U.S. decision to quietly remove his family from Iraq to safe exile in a country that American officials would not name -- paint Hussein on the eve of war as a distracted, distrustful despot who was confused, among other things, by his meetings with Russian and French intermediaries. Aziz said Hussein emerged from these diplomatic sessions -- some secret at the time -- convinced that he might yet avoid a war that would end his regime, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Aziz has told interrogators that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured Hussein during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a U.S.-led war through delays and vetoes at the U.N. Security Council. Later, according to Aziz, Hussein concluded after private talks with French and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up a stiff defense, he might buy enough time to win a cease-fire brokered by Paris and Moscow.

Aziz's account, while provocative, has not been corroborated by other sources, said U.S. officials involved in the interrogations. They said they were aware that Aziz might be trying to pander to his American captors' anger at French and Russian conduct before the war.

Though there's the disclaimer at the end, if true it casts French (and Russian) actions in the leadup to the war in an even less flattering light than previously suspected. It also raises the question as to how responsible President Bush is for their behavior. Friedman of course wants to hurl brickbats at the President. I'm not convinced that he's right.

 
Thomas Twofer
Last Wednesday's column "On Listening" was directed largely at the Bush administration. Despite the fact that the Bush administration seems to be adjusting to changing realities in Iraq (see Charles Krauthammer), Friedman charges the administration with being close minded to those who would criticize it. (This is a hypocritical charge from Friedman. Of all NY Times op-ed writers, he is the only one who doesn't post his personal e-mail address! I don't think he fears the praise the Peace Now folks heap upon him.) He ends the article with one of his gratuitous swipes at Israel:

Unfortunately, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — where some really sick terrorists claimed three U.S. lives yesterday — the Bush team has decided to fall in behind Ariel Sharon's failed strategy of only listening to the terrorists and postponing any initiatives until they are all defeated. So the only voice we hear there is that of the terrorists. No alternative reality is being built to smother or counter them, and that's just what the terrorists want.

"Ariel Sharon's failed strategy?" Nice line. But as Evelyn Gordon recently pointed out the numbers, while grim, show progress:

In the intifada's grim second year, from October 2001 through September 2002, Palestinians killed 449 Israelis and foreigners present on Israeli soil, including both civilians and soldiers. Yet for the year that ended last week, this figure was down 47 percent, to 240.

On a monthly basis, the comparison is even more dramatic. Never again has there been a month even approaching the horror of March 2002, the month before Operation Defensive Shield. The 134 Israelis killed that month is more than three times the death toll during the worst month of the past year, and almost 2.5 times the 58 people killed in the second-worst month of the intifada (June 2002, the month after the army withdrew from Palestinian territory following Defensive Shield. It was this renewed surge of killing that persuaded the government to send the troops back and this time, to keep them there).

Furthermore, two of the worst months of the past year were months in which military activity was drastically curtailed: June 2003, with 32 deaths, and August 2003, with 29. June was the month of the road map "peace process," during which Israel largely suspended military operations so as not to disrupt the "momentum toward peace." August was the month of the famous Palestinian cease-fire, to which Israel responded by restricting its own military activity. (In fact, the death toll that August was higher than in 22 of the 34 months without a truce!) One could thus reasonably assume that had Israel maintained the military pressure over the summer, the year's death toll would have been even lower.

Nice try.

Yesterday instead of criticizing close-mindedness in America he wrote about open-mindedness in the Arab world. In "Courageous Arab Thinkers" he revisits the Arab Human Development Report. The one for 2003 just appeared and once again it represents something good in the Arab world - Arabs who are willing to take a hard look at the failures of their societies:

Those who worked on this report do not believe in the Iraq-war model of political change. They prefer evolution from within. But they believe there must be serious change. They are convinced that Islam has a long history of absorbing knowledge. But in the modern era an unholy alliance between repressive Arab regimes and certain conservative Muslim scholars has led to the domination of certain interpretations of Islam that serve the governments but are hostile to human development — particularly freedom of thought, women's empowerment and the accountability of governments to their people.

I realize that this stuff is very appealing to Friedman who believes that unfettered trade will solve all ther world's problems. I believe that too, with qualifications. What is interesting here, is that Friedman omits what these folks say about Israel. Is it progressive? Do they aim to change the way their societies view the Jewish state?
Well, in a word, "no."

The report, available at the UN's website lists the Israeli occupation of Palestine as one of the major challenges facing the Arab world. See "The Effect of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine on Human Development in the Arab World" I can't cut and paste the language because it's in PDF format. But check it out yourself. Go to the link provided and search on "Israel" using the Acrobat Reader search function.) In other words these "free" thinkers excuse the way Arab leaders use "Palestine" as a way of distracting their constituents from complaining about their lack of freedoms. "Blame the Zionists" seems to be a legitimate creed according to Friedman's intellectuals. Perhaps this report says more about Friedman than it does about these intellectuals.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Bad Friedman
Often, even when he's wrong on some point, Friedman sometimes gets something right. Other than his tone, which is not abrasive as usual, there's little to recommend today's column "Long Spoon Diplomacy." I can agree with his premise that Iraq is important. But then he argues:

There is an old proverb that says, "If you're going to sup with the devil, use a long spoon." Does the White House pantry have any long spoons? I ask because if President Bush really wants to achieve his objectives in Iraq, he may have to sup a little with Yasir Arafat, the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad.

But why? He wants the US to use Arafat, Khamenei and Assad to help stabilize Iraq. What makes him think that will work?

First of all, after ten years of Oslo, why would Arafat suddenly start working for world peace? He had everything to gain by playing along. But he couldn't even do that. He reverted to type and Israel is less safe than it was ten years ago.

Asking Ayatollah Khameini to help with the Shi'ites is also not likely to be helpful. After all the Iraqi Shi'ites seem to be shying away from an Iranian type theocracy. And Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson fled to Iraq to get away from his homeland!

Over the years Assad Sr. lent support to the terrorist PKK organization that was attacking Turkey. As Daniel Pipes has observed on more than one occasion, it was Turkish military pressure that brought Syria to bear and stop its support of the PKK. It was threat of force, not making nice that made Assad Sr. behave.

I can only guess that Friedman was trying to sound so counterintuitive as to be considered profound. Instead he simply sounds ignorant.

I could use my own proverb: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Friedman just keeps on fooling himself.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Classic Friedman
Today's Thomas Friedman column, "Passions and Interests" is a classic. And I don't mean that in a good way. It is filled with all the worst cliches about the Middle East. Friedman makes absolutely no effort to analyze the situation in the Middle East. he just tosses out a series of myths, misconceptions and prejudices. For example:

Most Israelis now believe that Palestinians only have unquenchable passions — not interests that can be nurtured to counterbalance those passions. With Israelis hit by a sickening 100 suicide bombers in three years, who could blame them for feeling this way? And most Palestinians now believe Israelis, with their relentless settlements, only have insatiable appetites for Palestinian land, not interests for peace that could be nurtured by a credible Palestinian overture.

There you have it, terrorist bombings are the equivalent of Jewish settlement building. Even if you believe that "settlements" are wrong, they don't justify brutal murders.

Amnesty International in one of its more lucid moments decried suicide bombings and called them war crimes. AI said that this even applied to Jews living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, who are there illegally. Being somewhere illegally does not make someone a combatant.

Of course when people such as Friedman equate Israeli "settlements" with terrorism they are essentially excusing the latter because of the former. What would happen if terror was categorically decried in the West? Is it possible that one of the factors that encourages the terrorism is the willingness of so many to excuse it?

If the Palestinians are going to miss another opportunity to miss an opportunity, let it be a real opportunity — one that any fair-minded person would deem fair. At best, Israel would enable the real interests of the Palestinians to emerge, and at worst it would create a moral clarity where Israel can fight a permanent war with the Palestinians, without 27 Israeli Air Force pilots going on strike, saying justice isn't on their side.

Actually, this happened three years ago. Israel made an exceedingly fair offer - actually it was over generous - at Camp David that was rejected and was rewarded about two months later with a new war. Most Israelis sensed that and that's why Ariel Sharon won election as Prime Minister with a huge majority. Most Israelis are fair minded; Thomas Friedman is not. And neither are those 27 Air Force pilots. They, like Friedman are partisans, who feel that more concessions will change Palestinian society.

The heart of Friedman's mistake is here:

Who is Yasir Arafat? He's a terrorist bum, but not a strategic threat to Israel.

and here:

It's time for Israel to try that — yes, yet again. Israel has incredible strength. I saw that in how individual Israelis responded to the suicide bombings — by defiantly riding the same bus lines and going to the same cafes the day after they were blown up. But while individual Israelis behave with great strength, their current government behaves as if Israel is a weak little victim.

Yes Israel is strong and Yasir Arafat is not - by himself anyway - a strategic threat. But Israel is vulnerable and Yasir Arafat is an opportunist. Give him the opportunity to kill Jews and he will.

Over the past ten years, Arafat and the Palestinian Authority have used their authority and territory to build a terrorist infrastucture. This has included an educational system and media that indoctrinates its subjects to hate Israel (and Jews). It includes redundant security forces whose job involves aiding and abetting terrorists to arm themselves and recruit volunteers to carry out terror attacks. Any "fair-minded person" can see that. It is those whose willful blindness informs them that if only Israel would make one more concession there would peace who can't - or won't - see that.

What if Arafat and the PA had spent the past ten years focusing on teaching understanding and creating opportunity? What if the initiative the Palestinians have shown in manufacturing and smuggling arms had been channeled instead to creating jobs and a functioning economy? If that had happened, Ariel Sharon would not be Prime Minister of Israel. And Israelis would have embraced any chance to make peace regardless of the cost.( I don't know that Ariel Sharon is an obstacle to peace, even in Friedman's view. When the Camp David Agreement required that Israelis withdraw from the Sinai, it was Sharon, in his capacity as defense minister who evacuated the Jews from the Sinai.)

How do I know that? Because in 1999, when terrorism was down Israel elected Ehud Barak to secure peace. The problem was that the lull had nothing to do with a Palestinian acceptance of Israel. It was a strategic choice by Arafat to reduce the level of violence to get what he could by negotiation at that point. The hate and infrastructure were still there; just waiting for the signal.

Another mistake is here:

The only people who can stop the suicide bombers are the Palestinians. They won't do it overnight and can't do it with a decimated Palestinian Authority.

As mentioned above the PA has been responsible for much of the hatred and violence. To say that destroying the PA works against Israel's interests is to ignore a decade of history.

At the beginning of the article Friedman boasts with a sense of irony:

Yes, they actually pay me for such observations.

Actually there is nothing terribly original about his observations. The Times pays him because he states the underlying assumptions of his newspaper (and many others). It's nice to have someone clever explaining your worldview. That's what Friedman is paid for. Not for any original insights. For that you'd have to read Jim Hoagland or William Safire or Daniel Pipes.
Crossposted on IsraPundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Tom's on a Roll
After a long drought, Mr. Friedman has given me reason to comment on 3 consecutive columns. After the insensitivity of Thursday's column, Friedman has descended even further in today's "One Wall, One Man, One Vote." Here's the first paragraph:

If there is one iron law that has shaped the history of Arab-Israeli relations, it's the law of unintended consequences. For instance, Israel is still wrestling with all the unintended consequences of its victory in 1967. Today, Israel is building a fence and walls around the West Bank to deter suicide bombers. But, having looked at this wall extensively from both sides, I am ready to make a prediction: It will be the mother of all unintended consequences.

The unintended consequence to which Friedman refers is the likelihood that the Arabs will demand a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan in which they are equal citizens with Jews.

There are several things to say about Friedman's prediction. First of all, I would say that Oslo had unintended consequences. It was supposed to make peace but had the effect of making peace less likely and creating greater hatred and grievance than there was before.

Of course there were those of us who said that trusting Arafat and the PLO to make peace was folly and that once he was trusted, the failure to hold Arafat and his thugs to any standards is why the situation deteriorated. In other words, the unintended consequences may be less a case of unforeseen circumstances, than of willful blindness. Is there anyone who studied Arafat's records over the years and really thought that he changed? Or did people simply say that Israel must do something and this is the least bad option? Once they came to that conclusion, they kept on averting their eyes from Arafat's corruption and violence and continued down their path of advocating "peace" above all else. And those of us who correctly predicted Arafat's perfidy were simply "right wingers" who couldn't appreciate the fruits of peace.

Friedman's big problem with the fence is:

Why is this happening? First, because the fence is not being built on the 1967 border. It is being built on Palestinian land across the border, inside the West Bank. And since the fence is really a strip — up to 100 yards wide — of razor wire, trenches, sensors and cameras, more slices of Palestinian land are being confiscated to build it and farmers are being separated from their fields.

"If the Israelis want to build the wall on the 1967 Green Line — no problem, they could build it 100 meters high," said Nidal Jaloud, spokesman for the West Bank Palestinian border town of Qalqilya, where Israel put a 24-foot-high wall after five suicide bombers came out of there. "But it is not being built on the Green Line — it is built on our lands."

For someone who worshipped at the altar of Oslo this is incredible. For as Yehoshuah Porath points out:

There are those who say that Israel is no less, and perhaps even more, responsible for the failure of the Oslo Accords than the Palestinians because it did not halt the establishment and building up of the settlements. It must therefore be reiterated that nowhere in the Oslo agreements is there anything that expressly prohibits the establishment of settlements or requires that they be dismantled in part or in whole.

Oslo did not require that Israel withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The PA insists that Israel was obligated to do that. And supporters of Oslo, like Friedman, insist that Oslo requires Israel to pull back to its 1967 borders and point to "settlements" as the leading cause of mistrust between Israel and the PA. But that wasn't written into the Oslo Accords and that's what Porath is saying.

To support for his position that there's a view among Palestinians that wants a bi-national state in all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Friedman quotes from a poll taken by Khalil Shikaki:

As Palestinians find themselves isolated in pockets next to Jewish settlers — who have the rule of law, the right to vote, welfare, jobs, etc. — and as hope for a contiguous Palestinian state fades, it's inevitable that many of them will throw in the towel and ask for the right to vote in Israel.

Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster, has already found 25 to 30 percent of Palestinians now supporting this idea — a stunning figure, considering it's never been proposed by any Palestinian or Israeli party.

The problem is that Shikaki's polling may skew things a little as Max Abrahms notes about a Shikaki poll last month. In the poll, many media types saw the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict because Shikaki supposedly discovered that most Palestinians would be willing to accept compensation instead of a "right of return."

Shikaki interpreted this data to mean that Palestinians are uninterested in overrunning Israel demographically with unregulated emigration.

Yet Shikaki fails to consider that Palestinians generally do not want to become "Israeli citizens" or move to Israel if only a "small number" of Palestinians will be living there. For this reason, the shallow support for "becoming an Israeli citizen" and "returning" to Israel in "small numbers" may indicate nothing more than a broad-based desire to relocate to Israel under more propitious circumstances. Indeed, Shikaki downplays a more noteworthy finding: According to his own data, 95 percent of Palestinian respondents agree with the statement that the "right of return" is a "sacred right that can never be given up." And "When asked how the respondents feel about the proposal," half said that they are presently opposed to compromising with Israel on the refugee problem.

So anyway, Friedman ought to treat Shikaki's polls with a little skepticism. Still, I don't think that Shikaki's poll was the impetus for Friedman to bring up the idea of a binational state. It was rather, Ari Shavit's recent article in Ha'aretz saying that it wasn't possible to divide the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River anymore that probably inspired Friedman. But like so many of the "five minutes to midnight" scenarios of the past twenty years of more, he's just evading the main issue and that's the Arab refusal to accept Israel.

Crossposted on IsraPundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Half a great column
Thomas Friedman wrote half a great column today. He called it "Breaking Death's Grip." And the great part of the column included this:

Israelis' ability to adapt to, and defy, these bombings demonstrates the amazing strength of this society. When bus bombings first started, for a week after an explosion few people would ride the buses. Now they're right back on them after an hour.

Unfortunately - you knew this was coming - there was another half to the column that included this:

But message to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: Palestinians are not leaving either, and your iron fist will not make them accept Israeli settlements or a truncated Palestinian state. If you think Oslo was a failure, look at your alternative. In three years, some 850 Israelis have been killed under your strategy. Yours and Hamas's are two failed strategies that add up to a human meat grinder. You want Israelis to believe they have no other choice, but they do. It is to use Israel's amazing inner strength to take a different set of Israeli actions, like really uprooting settlements, to stimulate a different set of Palestinian reactions, like controlling suicide bombers.

First of all, Sharon's alternative was not something chosen; he didn't even arrive on the scene until February 2002 as Prime Minister and wasn't able to form a government of his own choosing until nearly a year later. Nor is it clear that Sharon's approach is any different from what any other Israeli Prime Minister would have done. Certainly when Arafat and the PA started their war, then-PM Ehud Barak had the army hit back.

Though the terror has been worse during the past three years, has it really been worse because of Sharon's approach? Or has it been the fruit of the failed peacemaking efforts? After all, there's been relatively little terrorism coming from Gaza, most of it has come from Judea and Samaria. This suggests that the area under the authority of the PA has incubated the growth of terror.

Friedman's argument weakens significantly in the final sentence, which argues that if only Israel would give more land to the PA, the PA would try to stop suicide bombers. This is a sick joke.

Before the latest war started the worst string of terror attacks to hit Israel was in February and March, 1996. That, it could be argued, was the height of the peace process. Israel had just handed over Jenin, Kalkilya, Bethlehem, Schechem (Nablus), Ramallah and Tulkarem to the PA a few months earlier; the PM was Shimon Peres, who wanted to make peace with the PA and the Hamas killers with the complicity of the PA carried out its deadly missions.

The terror is not a function of an addressable Arab grievance; it is a function of hate. And it is enabled by allowing that hate to simmer in territory that is not sufficiently controlled by Israel allowing an infrastructure of smuggling and manufacturing weapons to thrive. (If the Arab residents of Yesha cared about their own lives they'd use that resourcefulness to create industry and they'd build rather than destroy. But they've been weaned on a religious based hatred that allows no compromise.)

By validating the Arab claims against Israel, Mr. Friedman does all he can to contribute to the cause of terror. It is this perversity that hurts all of those fighting terror - whether in America or in Israel - and leads to more threats against the American homeland, not just Israel.
Crossposted on IsraPundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
A Wail of a bad term
OK, maybe I'm overstating it a bit, but the title of Thomas Friedman's most recent column, "The Wailing Wall" is really offensive. Maybe it's not so offensive as Hillel Halkin claims here. But the content of the column is.

This week the peace processors' dream date, Mahmoud Abbas resigned as Prime Minister. Big surprise. And Yasser Arafat brazenly appoints a successor to Abbas. The whole charade that somehow Arafat has been sidenlined has been laid bare. In other words, Arafat's obstruction is now obvious. What does Friedman write about being an impediment to peace? If Israel would build the separation fence too far to the east then:

Good fences make good neighbors, but only if your fence runs along a logical, fair, consensual boundary — not through the middle of your neighbor's backyard.

Never mind that Arafat has rejected boundaries that even Friedman considers "fair." The idea that the PA would not get everything it demands is the price to be paid for rejecting an offer that was more than fair. Why shouldn't Israel include, say, Ariel?
Friedman continues:

If this wall is used to unilaterally bite off chunks of the West Bank to absorb far-flung Israeli settlements, then "it will just become a new and longer Wailing Wall," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "But unlike the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, this wall will have people wailing on both sides. Jews will be mourning the collapse of their dream of a Jewish democratic state, and Palestinians will be mourning their own lost opportunity to translate all their sacrifices into a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel."

Why won't Israel be a Jewish democratic state? Because Friedman declares it so? Even if Israel "bite[s] off chunks" of Yehuda and Shomron, Israel can still have a majority within its section. There's no reason that the Palestinians have any right to veto Israel's fence "map."

For Friedman to suggest that Israel's democracy hinges upon where the fence goes is offensive. There will be no peace until Arafat is gone from the scene. That is a necessary but insufficient condition for peace. The other condition is a change in Palestinian society so that it accepts the rights of Jews to live and be sovereign in the Middle East. Any arrangement that takes place without those two conditions will be risky for Israel.

Israel has gone far to show that it is committed to peace. It has risked and lost a lot. Israel need not demonstrate that commitment any more. It followed Thomas Friedman's worldview for at least seven years and received death and destruction in return. It's time for Israel to dictate the terms of the peace rather than having the terms dictated. Clearly giving the Arabs everything they demand doesn't make peace or make Israel secure.

Another problem with Friedman's view is that he is essentially justifying Arab violence against Israel. He is excusing the expected grievance in advance. But the Arab grievance against Israel is more basic than disagreeing over how much land Israel should have, it's about whether Israel should have *any* land. It is clear that given the choice between supporting democratic Israel and the terrorist PA, Friedman supports the latter and couches it in terms of criticizing Israel "for it's own good."
Crossposted on IsraPundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Where Credit is Due

I have to give Thomas Friedman credit. His column today, Shaking Up the Neighbors, was sharp and to the point. It was a tough critique of the Arab world. The beginning is the best:

Shortly after the 25-member Governing Council was appointed in Iraq, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, questioned the U.S.-appointed Council's legitimacy. "If this Council was elected," complained Mr. Moussa, "it would have gained much power and credibility."

I love that quote. I love it, first of all, for its bold, gutsy, shameless, world-class hypocrisy. Mr. Moussa presides over an Arab League in which not one of the 22 member states has a leader elected in a free and fair election. On top of it, before the war, Mr. Moussa did all he could to shield Saddam Hussein from attack, although Saddam had never held a real election in his life. Yet, there was Mr. Moussa questioning the new U.S.-appointed Iraqi Council, which, even in its infant form, is already the most representative government Iraq has ever had.

But I also love Mr. Moussa's comment for its unintended revolutionary message: "power and credibility" come from governments that are freely "elected." If only that were the motto of the Arab League.

Read the whole thing. It's very good.

 
Whose Reality?

Thomas Friedman once again treats us to one of his pithy formulations in "The Reality Principle"

By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.

It's true that it seems that Israel has knocked off a lot of leaders of Hamas, but it hardly follows that each dead Hamas operative is replaced with three new recruits. Friedman simply dismisses the possibility that Hamas might really have a lot of recruiters by saying:

We're not talking about I.B.M. here. We're talking about a ragtag terrorist group.

Hamas terrorists are not volunteers as much as they are recruits. Hamas wants people who are determined not suicidal. That's what improves the chance of success. Recruiting and training a suicide terrorist probably is a labor intensive job requiring a number of people. That's probably why there seem to be so many "key" members of Hamas, because there are; not due to "Palestinian math."

Then Friedman informs us:

The fact is, the only time Israelis have enjoyed extended periods of peace in the last decade has been when Palestinian security services disciplined their own people, in the heyday of Oslo. Unfortunately, Yasir Arafat proved unwilling to do that consistently. The whole idea of the Bush peace process is to move Mr. Arafat aside and replace him with a Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who is ready to rebuild the Palestinian security services, and, in the context of an interim peace settlement, corral Hamas.

"...unwilling to that consistently" is the height of understatement. More often than not Arafat not only didn't fight Hamas and the other terrorist groups, he openly supported them. The only time since 1993 when Israel wasn't struck with lots of terror was during Netanyahu's term as Prime Minister. That wasn't, according to Friedman anyway, the heyday of Oslo. (Terror didn't disappear during Netanyahu's term, there was just less of it.) The best explanation for Arafat's limited co-operation then was that Netanyahu made Arafat's good behavior a condition for making any concessions.

The notion that the PA's security need rebuilding is called into question by a recent report from IMRA that

ISS ("Shabak") head Avi Dichter told the Cabinet today that the PA has 15,000 armed men posted in the Gaza Strip who are trained and ready for action, thus the claims that the PA needs time to build up a force before it acts are groundless. Dichter said that some of these armed PA forces are under Arafat's command while others are under Dahlan's command.

The Reality Principle
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN


ave you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as "a senior Hamas official" or a "key operative"? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be? We're not talking about I.B.M. here. We're talking about a ragtag terrorist group. By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.

Self-destructive is, in fact, a useful term to describe Israelis and Palestinians today. "Both sides," notes the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, "have crossed the line where self-defense has turned into self-destruction. When self-defense becomes self-destruction, only an external force can bring people back to their senses. And that force is President Bush. I think he is the only reality principle left that either side might listen to, and I hope he understands that."

You know that both sides are in self-destruction mode when you can look at their military actions and say that even if they succeeded they would be worse off. The question is not whether Israel has a right to kill senior Hamas officials. They are bad guys. The question is whether it's smart for Israelis to do it now.

The fact is, the only time Israelis have enjoyed extended periods of peace in the last decade has been when Palestinian security services disciplined their own people, in the heyday of Oslo. Unfortunately, Yasir Arafat proved unwilling to do that consistently. The whole idea of the Bush peace process is to move Mr. Arafat aside and replace him with a Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who is ready to rebuild the Palestinian security services, and, in the context of an interim peace settlement, corral Hamas.

Hamas knows this. So its tactic is to goad Israel into attacks that will unravel the whole process. The smart thing for Israel to do — and it's not easy when your civilians are being murdered — is not to play into Hamas's hands. The smart thing is to say to Mr. Abbas: "How can we help you crack down on Hamas? We don't want Israel to own Hamas's demise. Palestinians have to root out this cancer within their own society. If Israelis try to do it, it will only metastasize."

Israel's supporters argue that if America can go after Osama bin Laden, Israel can go after Hamas. Of course Israel is entitled to pursue its mortal enemies, just as America does, but it cannot do it with reckless abandon, notes Mr. Ezrahi, for one reason: America will never have to live with Mr. bin Laden's children. They are far away and always will be. Israel will have to live with the Palestinians, after the war. They are right next door and always will be.

The fact is, Ariel Sharon's two years of using the Israeli Army alone to fight terrorism have not made Israelis more secure. He needs a Palestinian partner, and he has to operate and negotiate in a way that will nurture one. And the people who get that the best are Israelis. In a Yediot Ahronot poll released Friday, two-thirds of Israelis were critical of Mr. Sharon's tactic of targeted assassinations of Hamas officials and said they wanted Mr. Abbas to be given a chance to establish his authority.

It may be that Mr. Abbas can't step up to this. It may be that the Palestinians are capable only of self-destructive revenge, rather than constructive restraint and reconciliation. But surely Israel has more to gain in the long term by giving Mr. Abbas every chance to prove otherwise, and to empower him to do so, rather than killing one more Hamas "senior official," who will only be replaced by three others.

Because if the two sides cannot emerge from this dead end, then you can forget about a two-state solution, which is what both Hamas's followers and the extremist Jewish settlers want. They each want a one-state solution, in which their side will control all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The one-state solution would mean the end of the Zionist enterprise, because Israel can rule such an entity, in which there would soon be more Arabs than Jews, only by apartheid or ethnic cleansing. It would also mean the end of Palestinian nationalism, because the Israelis will crush the Palestinians rather than be evicted. That is the outcome we are heading toward, though, unless the only reality principle left, the United States of America, really intervenes — with its influence, its wisdom and, if necessary, its troops.

 
Passion for PLO

In a typically arrogant column, "Passion for Peace," Thomas Friedman tells us what needs to be done to achieve peace in the Middle East.

Don't get me wrong — ultimately it is up to Israelis, Palestinians and Iraqis to liberate themselves. They have to want it. But at this stage, we have to use our power to help create the context for them to do it. And that is hard. It means taking hits politically and militarily, which is why if we are to do it right we really have to want it bad.

That's right. America must bring pressure to bear on all the parties involved in order to achieve peace. So how did Thomas feel when Arafat rejected Barak's generous offer three years ago? In an article titled "Yasir Arafat's Moment" (July 28, 2000), Friedman says that Arafat should have said that the offer wasn't enough and come back with a counteroffer! (Take my word for it; I save these things, but I didn't save the URL)

I have two problems with that. 1) If Friedman really believed that, he had his head in the sand for the six and a half years that Arafat ruled the PA prior to Camp David. For those six and a half years Arafat ran a government based on perpetuating grievance, not reaching accomodation. 2) Friedman demonstrated, conclusively, his bias against Israel. For if he feels that Israel is, in any way, holding up "peace" he favors American pressure on Israel (which he covers by calling for pressure on both sides, like he does today) but in late July 2000, this is how he felt about Arafat -

Why didn't Mr. Arafat seize on that with a serious counteroffer? One view in the U.S. camp is that the Palestinians still don't know who they want to be when they grow up. They still prefer to whine and play the victim. Another view says, hold on, Mr. Arafat knows he has to engage, but he needed to show his people he could say no before he says yes.
My own view is a mix. I believe Mr. Arafat presides over a decentralized, disenfranchised and dysfunctional national movement that, against all odds, has managed to survive Arab regimes that wanted to control it and Israeli governments that wanted to destroy it. He survived all these years by bobbing, weaving, straddling and never making an irrevocable decision. But now he is at the moment of truth. He must do something he has never done before: clearly define not just what the Palestinians want, but what they also believe the Jews are entitled to, and then split the difference and take responsibility.
To do that he is going to have to rise above his personal history and circumstances, and also enlist the backing of Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- which represent the Muslim world, but which ran away when Mr. Clinton asked them to help Mr. Arafat fashion and sell a compromise on Jerusalem. It's not too late. Listen to Israel. Listen to the silence. It's the Israeli silent majority already redrawing maps in their heads. That is Mr. Barak's great achievement. But it has limits, and it will be utterly wasted if Mr. Arafat and the Arabs can't muster the courage to get their own people to do the same.

This is excuse making at its most cynical. He asked Arafat(!) to chase after Egypt and Saudi Arabia for help. He didn't tell Clinton to press the Arab world to press Arafat to accept a deal. Even as he talks about a silent Israeli majority that favors compromise he implies that on the other side there is no such moderation. But he doesn't acknowledge that asymmetry. Nope, he simply pretends that the Arab world is as interested in compromise, as is Israel.

 
Does he realize what he's saying?

I don't think that Oslophile, Thomas Friedman, understood what he wrote in his most recent column:

It isn't often you get to see a live political science experiment, but that is what we're about to witness in Iraq as the first interim Iraqi government is formed from the different factional leaders in the country. What American advisers and this Iraqi interim government will attempt to answer is the most fundamental question facing the Arab world and many developing countries: How do you get from here to there? How do you go from a brutal authoritarian regime to a decent, accountable, democratizing society, without ending up with an Iranian-style theocracy or chaos?

Interestingly enough, what the smartest experts in the democracy field all seem to agree on is that this interim Iraqi authority should not focus on holding national elections — the hardware of democracy. Elections should come last. Instead, it must start with the software — building, brick by brick, the institutions of a free society — so that when people do get to vote, when national power is up for grabs, they have a range of choices and can be assured that there will be a rotation of power.

Well one thing you don't do is give the tyrant control of all apparatuses of government and no penalties for misbehavior. That's what happened with Oslo and it didn't seem to bother Mr. Friedman. Oslo failed because the "software" was ignored. The Palestinians used every government body necessary to deliver their message of hatred towards Israel and Jews. Instead of building commerce they built weapons factories and organizations to smuggle them. Friedman and others in similar positions had a responsibility to point this out. They didn't.
Cross posted to IsraPundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
The meaning of Friedman

Friedman's column from Sunday April 27, 2003 "The Meaning of a Skull" is pretty good. In it, he argues effectively that America's war against Saddam was justified even if no weapons of mass destruction are found.

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.

That's well and good.

But as with most of Friedman's columns, he manages to tarnish this cogent thought by explaining that it's hard for Democrats to be excited because now Bush and Rove will "drive through a radical conservative agenda." Worse still, Democrats and administration critics have found that they'll be labelled unpatriotic for criticizing the administration.

And when you look at the way war critics — from the Dixie Chicks to Tom Daschle — have been savaged by conservatives, it feels as if some people want to use this war to create a multiparty democracy in Iraq and a one-party state in America.

Give me a break. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks spoke up, as was her right (in England.) Country music fans either destroyed their copies of Dixie Chicks albums or won't buy them anymore. That's democracy for you. How Friedman purposely confuses criticism with repression is beyond me. But even when he's right, Thomas Friedman feels the need to take gratuitous shots at the Republicans or Israel or some other source of evil in his little world. It's a shame because he clearly has talent. He just chooses to squander it so he can be a hit man for the Democratic party.



He said it

It's good to be back at blogging. While I was away others have been taking shots at Friedman. Here's a nice piece from the Wall Street Journal on war critics. Thomas has a place of honor in the next to last entry.

 
Thomas Friedman call your Shrink

As I've often noticed, Friedman has an obsession with Israeli "settlements." They, and not money, are the root of all evil for our intrepid columnist. So in Sunday's column he finds lessons for America to learn from Israel's occupation of Judea and Samaria.

Israel has been trying to get rid of Yasir Arafat for years, but it was a legitimate process, managed by the Palestinian legislature, that last month produced the first legitimate alternative: the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.

Now aside from the question of how legitmate the process was or if Abbas even represents much of a departure from Arafat, let's accept Friedman's premise that this is a good thing. Did it come about because the PLC simply decided that Arafat was immoral, or a terrorist or had led his people to ruin? Well no. It had everything to do with America showing resolve and telling the Palestinians that the gig was up. Arafat was not legitimate; go find someone else.

I'm still curious what Friedman thinks was legitimate about the process anyway? There was no election.

That's been a core problem with the Israeli-Palesitinian peace process. People in the media, government and the diplomatic core are unwilling to say the truth about Arafat and his cohorts. Anyone undiplomatic enough to point these things out is labelled an extremist or Likudnik and dismissed out of hand.

It's true that Friedman came down hard on Arafat after the Camp David fiasco of 2000 but two paragraphs earlier shows, he seems to have forgotten that.

Mr. Bush should visit the West Bank. It is a cautionary tale of an occupation gone wrong. It is a miserable landscape of settlements, bypass roads, barbed wire and cement walls. Why? Because the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams spent the last 36 years, since Israel's victory in 1967, avoiding any clear decision over how to govern this land. So those extremists who had a clear idea, like the settlers and Hamas, hijacked the situation and drove the agenda.

If my math is correct 36 years brings us to 2003. It's as if 2000 never happened. Ehud Barak was the perfect Israeli PM by Friedman's standards, yet his efforts are simply forgotten by a man who pretends to be the world's greatest living expert on the Middle East.

Furthermore, settlers build and Hamas (not to mention the PA) destroy, this equivalence is absolutely repugnant. But that's Friedman's obsession.

He really needs to see someone about it.

Cross-Posted on Doubting Thomas and IsraPundit.

 
Tony Blair for President, again

Once again Thomas Friedman expresses his preference for Tony Blair over George W. Bush in "Repairing the World." The central theme of Friedman's essay is expressed like this:

Contrast that with Mr. Bush. His White House declaration about resuming the peace process was delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone about to have his teeth drilled. On the environment, the president has never appreciated how damaging it was for him to scrap the Kyoto treaty, which was unimplementable, without offering an alternative. Nothing has hurt America's image more than the impression Mr. Bush has left that when it comes to terrorism — our war — there must be a universal crusade, but on the environment — the universal concern of others — we'll do whatever we want.

Friedman is purposely distorting Bush. When I've heard Bush talk about freedom for all people I hear enthusiasm. Friedman is being too partisan to give Bush any credit. And even if one accepts Friedman's judgment, there's still reason for the President to be selfish about our war: the consequences of not acting are a lot more immediate than a failure to act on Friedman's Kyoto concerns. (If there is indeed global warming.) But even if Bush had put forward some sort of environmental proposal - which he actually did in his State of the Union address - it would never pass muster with Friedman because it would never be enough. Remember he wants Tony Blair's environmentalism, which would be more radical than Kyoto.

I wonder though, if Friedman is implicitly striking out against American Democrats. He realizes that there no tough minded Democrats, who can articulate the need for deposing Saddam the way Blair can. He also realizes that Bush's concerns are indeed the most pressing right now. He just can't bring himself to say that. When Clinton dispatched American troops to fight in Kosovo, he never bothered to make a case. Friedman didn't demand that Clinton attack any deeper meaning to his defense of the Kosovar Albanians. Of course not. He agreed with most of Clinton's agenda. He disagrees with most of Bush's so he demands that Bush show his sincerity by adopting Friedman-approved policies. Friedman's inability to credit Bush for doing the right thing is perverse.

Frankly there's little to fault Bush for. Ron Dermer of the Jerusalem Post explains
"Why America has few allies on Iraq:"

MANY HAVE maintained that if the president were "more articulate" (like Clinton) or if his administration were "less arrogant" (like the Clinton administration), America would be more successful at winning international support.

Nonsense. The Clinton administration was better liked not because it knew how to win friends and influence people but because it failed to wield American power. You cannot compare the world's feelings toward a US administration that assiduously - and sometimes negligently - tried to avoid conflict with America's enemies with one that is determined to preemptively confront them.

The resentment of American power is today unavoidable because nations that have no power, particularly those who have had it in the past, have always resented those who have it. In an age when America is a lone superpower, this old resentment is made more acute by a postmodernist philosophy that regards all forms of power as morally suspect.

To some degree Friedman buys this argument:

Yes, some people and nations are just jealous of America's power and that's why they oppose us on Iraq. But there is something more to the opposition.

No there isn't. That's about the main reason for the opposition. After all as Bret Stephens notes:

The second reason is that the UN has become the principal vehicle for expressing, if not outright opposition to, then a certain distance from, the American view of the world. Before even the Bush administration, America and the majority of UN members were at odds over the establishment of an International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, a protocol banning land mines and, not least, Israel. Nations too weak to stand up to the US militarily or economically find the UN a useful platform to amplify their political and cultural differences. So too do many non-governmental organizations, who turn to the UN for moral comfort and legal support. "Together, we are a superpower," goes the NGO mantra. Frequently, their weapon of choice is a Security Council or General Assembly resolution.

These differences existed at the time of Clinton too. They were not reasons for opposing Clinton's wars in Bosnia, Kosova or Iraq. It's only those like Friedman who make excuses for the cowardly French, Germans and Belgians who perputuate the idea that there is any nobility in their oppostion to war or that Bush is somehow at fault for alienating them.

 
Rooting for Democracy

Thomas Friedman has it in for the world. Until now, no one has promoted democracy in the Arab world.

In fairness, though, before now the U.S. has never shown much interest in Arab democracy either. It treated the Arab states like big, dumb gas stations, and all the U.S. cared about was that they kept their pumps open and their prices low. Otherwise they could do whatever they wanted to their own people at home or out back.
Only after 9/11, as we realized that what was going on out back in these countries threatened us, did the U.S. begin to call for democracy in the Arab world — but only to get rid of Yasir Arafat and to punish those Arab regimes it did not like, namely Saddam Hussein's. You still have not seen any serious democratization effort being directed at Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Kuwait. For America, government of the people, by the people and for the people is only for our enemies, not our friends.
But then, other than a few courageous Arab liberals, Arab intellectuals have not made democracy promotion a supreme value either. In part it's because liberating Palestine has always been treated by them as a more important political value. And in part it's because many Arab societies are still so tribalized, and have such a weak sense of citizenship, they fear that democracy could bring forth fundamentalists, a rival tribe or anarchy. Hence the Arab saying: "Better a hundred years of tyranny than one day of anarchy."

and in summary:

What all this means is that when it comes to building democracy in Iraq, the Europeans are uninterested, the Americans are hypocritical and the Arabs are ambivalent.

You'd think from this criticism was coming from a promoter of democracy in the Middle East. Well, yes, he has written about how the Arab world needs to enter the 21st century or face eternal stagnation. But for the most part it seems like empty sloganeering. Take, for example, Friedman's acceptance of Crown Prince Abdullah's "peace plan" last year. Friedman took Abdullah's plan seriously and had his paper promote the plan even as columnist Cragg Hines of the Houston Chronicle noted:

For one thing, in the draft idea's two weeks on the shelf, it has become clear that the proposal, if and when the prince fleshes it out, is not going to be carved on stone tablets. It will require intense negotiations that would not only involve Israel and the Palestinians (and we've been through that about a jillion times) but also ever-problematic Syria and Lebanon (for which you can read "and more Syria").
Even as Abdullah was entertaining Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, at midweek in Jeddah, one of the prince's principal advisers was in Washington conceding how nonspecific the notion was.
"We are not in the real estate or zoning business," said Adel al-Jubeir. "It's really up to Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria to negotiate, because it's their land." (Well, yes, and we've seen how easy that is, even when President Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak were ready to give away the store.)
In other words, Abdullah will accept the Nobel Peace Prize just so long as he doesn't have to do any of the heavy lifting.

Abdullah's proposal was nebulous and insincere. It required clarification. But just as long as Friedman could credit the Prince with new thinking he was no longer a bad guy. Did it make a difference that Fateh concluded its observations of the Saudi initiative like this:

Our supreme pan-Arab interests lie in the unified stance Arab states have to adopt, a stance that respects international legality, refuses any form of submission or begging, and views the Palestinian struggle as a battle of civilization between the Arab and Muslim world, on the one hand, and its enemies, on the other hand.
The Saudi peace initiative represents not only the Palestinian rights but also those of the Arab nation, and, therefore, it should not be prejudiced in any manner. It should be able to materialize our hopes into real peace in the land of peace, Palestine.
Revolution Until Victory.

In other words, to Chairman Arafat's political organization the Saudi plan changed nothing. "Peace" was to be based upon:

First, A just and comprehensive peace can be achieved when 1) Israel withdraws its forces to the borders of June 4, 1967 including Jerusalem, and evacuates its settlements. 2) A sovereign Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital. 3) The Palestinian refugees are allowed to go back to the homes they were driven out from.
Second, Arab states should extend all forms of political and financial support. The financial support in particular should not be subject to bureaucratic complications that prefer to channel money into long-term projects rather than preserve the PNA as an entity that has its own responsibilities.
Third, Arabs should reject the US definition of terrorism that excludes the Zionist terrorism represented by Sharon’s racist policies. Arabs should make the US realize that its interests in the region depend on the nature of its policies towards the Palestinian cause.
Fourth, the US should also realize that peace in the area includes not only Palestine but also the entire Arab world including Iraq. As Crown Prince Abdullah told Thomas Friedman, the US should not target Iraq because this does not serve the US interests or those of the region, and Iraq no longer represents a threat to the world peace.
Fifth, To face the Israeli hegemony and the international failure to contain it, Arab states should sever all kinds of relations with Israel until it changes its policies on all peace tracks.

Did Friedman then suggest that Fateh's belligirent stand threatened the "peace proposal?" Not that I saw. The New York Times did some PR work of its own claiming that Syria supported the plan. In fact an official Syrian statement that day stated:

Viewpoints were identical regarding all discussed issues and ideas where assertion was that the just and comprehensive peace in the region as the strategic option could never be realized but through the Israeli full withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories including from the Syrian Golan Heights to the line of June4 1967, the liberation of the remaining occupied territories in South Lebanon, the establishment of an independent Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital clinging the the right of the refugees return in accordance with related UN resolutions.

(emphasis mine) In other words Syria didn't even accept the UN sanctioned Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon (additionally the Arab Summit, where CP Abdullah was to formally offer his proposal was held in Syrian occupied Lebanon!) After such an acceptance whose to say that the terms of what constituted Israeli compliance wouldn't change? (In fact the UN Security Council never endorsed the Abdullah proposal because it called for an Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon that the UNSC had already certified!) Friedman, of course, never required that Abdullah give any specifics for his proposal. (Would the Arab League reward Israel by supporting its inclusion in the Middle East group of the UN? Would the Arab League allow Israel to keep French Hill, Gilo or Ramot? Would the Arab League require the destruction or evacuation of Maaleh Adumim or Efrat? Would the Saudis take the initiative to eliminate official antisemitism from the Arab world?) Words of peace were enough for Friedman even if the accompanying actions belied the sincerity of the proposal. He didn't require any real change. The charge of hypocrisy rings true for Friedman. Not only didn't he require any real change for Crown Prince Abdullah, he never required it of the Palestinians. Until July, 2000 he acted as if Arafat was a legitimate head of state. But he had to have known that the nascent Palestine that was created in Gaza, Jericho, Ramallah, Beit Lechem, Kalkilya, Tulkarem, Nablus and Jenin was a mini-Serbia steeped in the worst kind of corruption, hatred and terror. Still he considered its creation a good thing. If Bush insists that his standards for democracy and peacefulness for the Palestinians be attained prior to their achieving statehood he will accomplish more than Friedman's little exercise in pressuring Israel. Of course Bush's changes are not the kind to take two or three years; ten, fifteen years or even a generation may be required to undo the damage of the PA's antisemitic indoctrination of its population. Bush, if the sticks to his gun may effect change; Friedman who is wedded to Arab words devoid of any meaningful action can be nothing more than a hypocrite.
Cross posted to Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

 
Thomas debates himself?!

It's nice to know that some people are doing my work for me. Check out the Brothers Judd Blogg for some incredible mental gymnastics on the part of Thomas Friedman. This had occurred to me but I might never have nailed it down. My own guess is that Friedman realized that a couple of his columns came accross as too pro-Bush, so he felt he ought to temper it a bit with a third column; whether or not there was any way to do it and maintain consistency. (Thanks to Instapundit for pointing this out.)

 
Giving into Tyrants

While the news media are playing up the objections to America's war effort against Iraq, it's worth noting what happens when virtuous nations fail to stand up to aggressive tyrants. Read Caroline Glick's latest column, "Rejecting false realities." Glick argues (correctly) that:

"For their part, the Palestinians themselves have stated repeatedly since the withdrawal that the perception that Hizbullah forced Israel to surrender in Lebanon was the major inspiration for their terrorist war against Israel. According to Ya'alon, 'The withdrawal from Lebanon is perceived in the region as a major victory of the Islamic revolution. For this we are paying a strategic price.
It impacted the Palestinian situation and in the long run it has implications for the Syrians.'
In other words, the decision to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon was a mistake in every respect Yet, rather than learning the lessons of Lebanon, Israel's Left, again with media support, has for the past two years been attempting to repeat its policy prescriptions with the Palestinians."

And how did Israel reach the point that it had to withdraw from Lebanon?

"In the days and weeks after the crash, the media gave almost uninterrupted coverage to defeatist voices telling the public that there was no reason for the IDF to be in south Lebanon.
Statements by security officials such as then-head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon who explained that such remarks played into the hands of Hizbullah and obfuscated the fact that the soldiers were in Lebanon in order to protect Israel's towns and villages in the north were either given cursory attention or dismissed as opportunistic opining of officers trying to defuse legitimate criticism of the IDF.
So overwhelming was the media's coverage and backing of the campaign for defeatism, and so successful was the manipulation of national grief, that a poll taken a week and a half after the accident showed that 74 percent of Israelis favored a unilateral pullout from Lebanon."

So the media (and political) focus on the supposed failure of military force created a climate where the government chose to retreat rather than hold its ground; with awful consequences.
Of course there were quite a few experts who figured that Israel would benefit greatly from withdrawing from Lebanon; notably Thomas Friedman. In a hypothetical column "How Bibi Got Re-elected"
Friedman supposes that by withdrawing from Lebanon, Netanyahu would beat Barak. Of course Netanyahu didn't withdraw from Lebanon; but Barak who defeated him did. Still Friedman supposed:

"The Israeli move has totally unnerved the Syrians, the Hezbollah guerrillas and Iran "They are all now in a quandary," said the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. "The Hezbollah guerrillas are saying to themselves: 'Now that we have liberated Lebanon, do we want to use that as leverage to rule Lebanon? Or do we want to use that as a springboard to move on to Jerusalem?'
If they want to do the latter, now they're really going to have to pay for it."

Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are still ensconced in Lebanon and even have their hooks into the PA. They do want to move onto Jerusalem; and they haven't paid a cent. Despite the fact that Hezbollah hasn't changed; the NY Times still gets misty eyed for these Al Qaeda allied Islamacist terrorists as Friedman did in "Lebanon and the Goblet of Fire" or Neil MacFarquhar did here in "To U.S., a Terrorist Group;
to Lebanese, a Social Agency."
Another parallel between the efforts to encourage an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and the antiwar folks now is that the defeatism is something that is encouraged by Europe! Glick writes how Israel's domestic proponents of a withdrawal from Lebanon were often funded by the EU. The efforts to stop the war against Iraq also are heartily endorsed by France and Germany.
Maybe Daniel Pipes is correct in Europe vs. America.