Thomas Friedman, liar-in-chief of the NY Times

What if all two million Palestinians of Gaza marched to the Israeli border fence with an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other, saying, “Two states for two peoples: We, the Palestinian people of Gaza, want to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish people—a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed adjustments. — Thomas L. Friedman, “Hamas, Netanyahu and Mother Nature,” New York Times, May 22, 2018.

The really disconcerting thing about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is that at times, he can actually produce sensible and insightful articles, as long as he is not writing (or more precisely, ranting) on Israel. Or Donald Trump. Or the Palestinians. Or Barack Obama.

Sadly, however, whenever he makes one of his far-too-frequent forays into any of these “touchy” topics, his journalistic output invariably degenerates into patently partisan pamphleteering.

But even compared to his past inanities, his May 22 column, “Hamas, Netanyahu and Mother Nature,” is a real doozy, a masterful blend of personal bile and bias, liberally laced with logical inconsistencies, factual inaccuracies and even blatant non sequiturs.

Friedman begins by feigning journalistic impartiality and paying perfunctory lip service to “balance,” with some cursory condemnation of Hamas, acknowledging “its utter failure to produce any kind of decent life for the Palestinians there, whom Hamas has ruled since 2007.”

He accuses the Islamist terror group of “Cynici[al] and Reckless Disregard for One’s Own People in Pursuit of a Political Fantasy [capitals in original],” and of “facilitating the tragic and wasted deaths of roughly 60 Gazans by encouraging their march, some with arms, on the Israeli border fence in pursuit of a ‘return’ to their ancestral homes in what is now Israel.”

But then, predictably, he reverts back into his almost Pavlovian, Israel-bashing, Bibi-phobic mode — dismissing the importance of his previous censure of Hamas and shifting the onus onto Israel: “So much for the ‘bad’ Palestinian leadership. What’s Israel’s approach to the secular, more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Answer: nothing.”

The secular, moderate Palestinian Authority! Really?

Like Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who not long ago referred to Jews desecrating the Temple Mount with their “filthy feet”? Or who explained that the slaughter of millions of Jews during the Holocaust was due to their practice of usurious money-lending? Or who orchestrated a vicious campaign of incitement against the Jewish state and praised the bloody violence in terror attacks against the Jews, proclaiming: “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr [Shahid] will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.”

That moderate, secular PA?

Friedman has, of course, long been captive to the seductive deception of two-statism. At the base of this dogma is the belief that, among the Palestinian Arabs, there is a leader sufficiently reasonable to cut a deal acceptable to Israel and sufficiently authoritative to ensure its implementation.

Friedman would do well to heed the somewhat contrite confession of yet another dogged advocate of two-statism, Aaron David Miller, formerly a senior State Department official, deeply involved in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and today, vice president of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In a recorded exchange, with the suitably gloomy title, “Today’s Bleak Prospects for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” Miller acknowledged: “I would draw from my own experiences that when we failed in diplomacy, and particularly in the pursuit of Arab-Israeli negotiations, it was almost always because Americans—let’s forget the Israelis and the Palestinians for a moment—chose to see the world the way they wanted it to be, rather than the way it actually was.”

Significantly, this closely parallels the assessment expressed in the opening excerpt by Michael Mandelbaum, professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, that “the American conduct of the peace process … was based on an inadequate understanding of the pathology it attempted to cure.”

Of course, Friedman will have none of this hard-nosed realism. Accordingly, he embarks on a flight of fantasy into the realm of “what if.”

Wistfully, he asks: “What if all two million Palestinians of Gaza marched to the Israeli border fence with an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other, saying, ‘… We, the Palestinian people of Gaza, want to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish people’ …”

Well, perhaps the question Friedman should ask is: Why don’t they? A truthful answer to this would be: “Because it is not in their nature!”

Friedman speculates on how better things might have been “if only” the hopelessly improbable had transpired. He laments: “If Hamas had chosen to recognize Israel and build a Palestinian state in Gaza modeled on Singapore, the world would have showered it with aid and it would have served as a positive test case for the West Bank. Hamas chose otherwise.”

Is Friedman is banking on the ignorance or the amnesia of his readers? After all, the international community has showered aid on Gaza, only to have most of it diverted into construction of military infrastructure to be used against Israel or into the personal bank accounts of the corrupt cliques who rule the enclave, and their complicit cronies.

Surely, Friedman must know that Gaza has not degenerated into the current cesspool that it is because of any lack of international funding or of Israeli largesse. It has done so despite an abundance of both!

Friedman “graciously” acknowledges that “Israel has no choice but to defend its border with Gaza with brute force.” But then, nimbly sidestepping the morass in Gaza, he goes on to berate Israel anyway, regarding Judea-Samaria: “I find it a travesty that a country with so much imagination in computing, medicine and agriculture shows so little imagination in searching for secure ways to separate from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” 

As it turns out, the real problem is not achieving “separation,” as the Gaza episode clearly shows. The real problem is to ensure that the post-separation realities will not be those that arose following the separation in Gaza—i.e., that Israel will not face a hostile mega-Gaza on the fringes of Greater Tel Aviv, overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport and abutting the trans-Israel highway.

Clearly willing to stand up for his so-called “liberal” principles down to the last Israeli, Friedman pontificates: “Israel has never been stronger than it is today. Hamas has never been weaker. If there were ever a time for Israel to take a few calculated risks to try to nurture a different pathway with Palestinians in the West Bank, it’s now.”

Leaving the reader to puzzle over what on earth a weak Hamas in Gaza has to do with taking huge risks in Judea-Samaria, Friedman rails on with puerile pique: “Unfortunately, its [Israel’s] prime minister is too cowardly, and America is too slavishly supportive, for that to happen.”

While I have many criticisms of Netanyahu, it is patently absurd to accuse him of being cowardly, unless Friedman is suggesting that to be “courageous,” Netanyahu must bow to enemy demands; unless to be “courageous” is to concede to pressures to expose Israeli citizens to unacceptable risks.

And as for the overly “slavish support” of America, Friedman seems to have forgotten that for eight years, the White House was occupied by a president who was anything but “slavishly supportive” of Israel—and yet nary a sign of separation appeared on the horizon. I wonder why!

Clearly then, drivel is drivel, even when it appears in the purported paper of record, leaving one to wonder how this stuff even gets published.

Martin Sherman is founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.