Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Friedman’s central premise that peace isn’t just around the corner. And he is also correct that the United States ought not to be making the peace process its central focus in the Middle East.

What I object to, is his characterization of Israel as being uninterested in peace. Israel, near as I can tell doesn’t possess the complete “West Bank,” as he calls it, having ceded the major cities there to the Palestinians during the 1990’s. Israel has taken quite a few significant steps for peace since 1993. But let’s go back to the scene of Friedman’s crime. (i.e. what the “Call Barack” line refers to.)

In 1990 then Secretary of State, James Baker expressed his frustration with the Israeli government. His pique was dutifully reported by the then New York Times diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Friedman.

If such new thinking is not forthcoming ”quickly” from Israel, Mr. Baker cautioned, then the Bush Administration is simply going to disengage from Middle East diplomacy. Washington, he suggested, will adopt the attitude that could be summed up as ”call us when you are serious about peace.”

To drive home that point to the Israelis, the Secretary of State gave them President Bush’s White House telephone number.

”I have to tell you that everybody over there should know that the telephone number is 1-202-456-1414,” Mr. Baker said. ”When you’re serious about peace, call us.”

(I believe that I’ve read the Friedman fed Baker the line about calling the White House, but have found no documentation of the charge.)

But continue reading the article.

In its coalition agreement, the new Israeli Government stipulated that Israel would not negotiate directly or indirectly with anyone affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Organization. It also excluded from the negotiations any Palestinians who are residents of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

Washington, as well as Israel’s Labor Party, has argued that to get Palestinians to accept negotiations, those Palestinians who are residents of both Jerusalem and the occupied territories should be allowed to take part, as well as those who might identify with the P.L.O. but have no formal affiliation with the organization.

Earlier today, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir added an additional condition: that Palestinian negotiators must formally embrace Israel’s idea that negotiations would be about autonomy for the occupied territories and nothing more, before talks could begin. The American position is that the talks should open with a discussion about autonomy, but then eventually move on to issues of final status.

Understand some things. In 1990, the only people in Israel who were advocating for a Palestinian state were those on the far left. Now even the supposedly “hawkish” Israeli Prime Ministers, Binyamin Netanyahu is working from that premise. In 1990, the discussion as to whether or not to negotiate with Palestinians affiliated with the PLO – there was virtually no one in Israel who, nineteen years ago, approved of negotiating with the PLO itself.

But these taboos have fallen by the wayside. The PLO is in charges of Palestinians living in “the West Bank.” The more extreme Hamas rules Gaza. And Israel is no closer to peace than it was back in 1990. In the name of peace, Israel has given the PLO land, money and even weapons. In the name of peace of the PLO has taken them, but made neither reciprocal nor concrete contributions to the “peace process.”

As Israel ceded territory to the PLO, the PLO under Yasser Arafat used its newfound freedom to create a “suicide factory” in the territories he controlled.

And after rejected Ehud Barak’s peace offer in 2000 at Camp David, Arafat launched a new war against Israel, that killed thousands until Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield to destroy the terror infrastructure Arafat built even whill being hailed as a “peace partner.” But how did Friedman react to the terror war that Arafat launched in 2000? This is what he wrote in “Arafat’s War.”

Mr. Arafat had a dilemma: make some compromises, build on Mr. Barak’s opening bid and try to get it closer to 100 percent ? and regain the moral high ground that way ? or provoke the Israelis into brutalizing Palestinians again, and regain the moral high ground that way. Mr. Arafat chose the latter. So instead of responding to Mr. Barak’s peacemaking overture, he and his boys responded to Ariel Sharon’s peace- destroying provocation. In short, the Palestinians could not deal with Barak, so they had to turn him into Sharon. And they did.

Of course, the Palestinians couldn’t explain it in those terms, so instead they unfurled all the old complaints about the brutality of the continued Israeli occupation and settlement- building. Frankly, the Israeli checkpoints and continued settlement- building are oppressive. But what the Palestinians and Arabs refuse to acknowledge is that today’s Israeli prime minister was offering them a dignified exit. It was far from perfect for Palestinians, but it was a proposal that, with the right approach, could have been built upon and widened. Imagine if when Mr. Sharon visited the Temple Mount, Mr. Arafat had ordered his people to welcome him with open arms and say, “When this area is under Palestinian sovereignty, every Jew will be welcome, even you, Mr. Sharon.” Imagine the impact that would have had on Israelis.

But that would have been an act of statesmanship and real peaceful intentions, and Mr. Arafat, it’s now clear, possesses neither. He prefers to play the victim rather than the statesman. This explosion of violence would be totally understandable if the Palestinians had no alternative. But that was not the case. What’s new here is not the violence, but the context. It came in the context of a serious Israeli peace overture, which Mr. Arafat has chosen to spurn. That’s why this is Arafat’s war. That’s its real name.

Not everything here is wrong or outrageous, but Charles Krauthammer identifies the underlying problem with Friedman’s observation.

We are now at Phase Two. This is the war Arafat has coveted all his life: the war against Israel from within Palestine. He tried first to make war from Jordan and was expelled in 1970. He then tried to make war from Lebanon and was expelled in 1982. And then in 1993, the miracle: Israel itself, in a fit of reckless high-mindedness unparalleled in the annals of diplomacy, brought him back to Palestine, gave him control of 98 percent of the Palestinian population, armed his 40,000 “police” (i.e. army), and granted him international legitimacy, foreign aid, and the territorial base of every city in the West Bank and Gaza.

Yet there are still observers in the West who remain puzzled by Arafat’s war. Taken in by Oslo for the entire eight years, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman, for example, now rationalizes the collapse of his illusions by characterizing Arafat’s war as senseless and self-defeating, “a grievous error” and an “idiotic uprising.”

This analysis is sheer nonsense. The war is the war Arafat always wanted. He has just seen Israel, facing guerrilla war in Lebanon, abjectly surrender and withdraw unilaterally. And now, after a year of his own guerrilla war within Palestine, the balance of forces with Israel has shifted dramatically in his favor.

Why was Friedman surprised? Had he not been paying to attention to Arafat’s perfidies over the previous 7 years? And yet Friedman thought it was conceivable that Arafat would see Barak’s proposal and make a counteroffer. Friedman refused to believe what happened since Oslo. He always figured that if Israel made enough concessions it would achieve peace. He accepted no evidence to the contrary.

Still even after that point, now nine years later, he still argues that Israel isn’t serious in peace. I notice that he didn’t write a column earlier this year after lame duck Israeli Prime Minister Olmert made an offer even more generous Camp David to “moderate” PA President Abbaas that was summarily rejected! Friedman who invested so much ink, pixels and prestige to (then) Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace ultimatum saying that it was significant (though the Saudi was vague about Arab commitments to Israel) refused to acknowledge a concrete Israeli peace offer that still didn’t bring peace.

That’s because no amount of land will satisfy the Palestinians, as long as Israel still exists. That has not changed in the sixteen years since Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo Accords. Rather than acknowledge the sea change in Israeli politics that has occurred since then, Friedman chooses to retreat into his comfortable “plague on both their houses” approach. Sorry but all Friedman is doing, is validating the continued Palestinian rejection of Israel, ensuring that peace will remain remote.

Maybe one day Friedman will come to his senses. But for now he remains stuck in the glorious past when he was the Secretary of State’s favorite stenographer.

Related: see Meryl tomorrow (11/09/09).

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Here’s what Israelis need to understand: President Obama is not some outlier when it comes to Israel. His call for a settlements freeze reflects attitudes that have been building in America for a long time. For the last 40 years, a succession of Israeli governments has misled, manipulated or persuaded naïve U.S. presidents that since Israel was negotiating to give up significant territory, there was no need to fight over “insignificant” settlements on some territory. Behind this charade, Israeli settlers bit off more and more of the West Bank, creating a huge moral, security and economic burden for Israel and its friends.

Actually President Obama is an outlier. His demand for freezing settlements in and around Jerusalem went further than any previous administration.

Israel Matzav explains further:

While other American Presidents have opposed the settlement enterprise, no previous President other than Jimmy Carter has characterized the ’settlements’ as illegal. Both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations acknowledged that the 1949 armistice lines are no longer relevant, and envisioned Israel retaining control of Jewish areas of Jerusalem and of ’settlement blocs.’ Clinton put that in writing through the proposals he made to end the conflict. Bush put it in writing by agreeing to allow Israel to continue building in ‘east’ Jerusalem and in the ’settlement blocs,’ a writing that the Obama administration disingenuously ignores (while demanding that Netanyahu live up to previous Israeli governments’ commitments).

But the part of this paragraph that drips with dishonesty is Friedman’s dismissal of Israel’s willingness to compromise for peace. In 1994 and 1995 Israel withdrew its forces from Jericho, Tulkarem, Bethlehem, Kalikilyeh, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah. In 2000 Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon. In 2005 Israel withdrew all of its forces and nationals from Gaza. In early 1996 Israel was hit with a wave of suicide bombings that killed over 60 people. The withdrawal from Lebanon was followed by Hezbollah’s arming itself and threatening northern Israel leading to the 2006 war. The withdrawal from Gaza was followed by the arming of Hamas and the attacks on southern Israel.

No what we’ve seen over the past sixteen years are a few of Palestinian leaders who murmur just enough moderate sounding phrases in English to buckle the knees of naive columnists who think that we are just an Israeli concession or two from peace. For dupes like Friedman, peace never depends on actual compromises by or moderation of the Arabs generally or Palestinians specifically. Later on Friedman writes:

What about Mr. Obama? He has nothing to apologize for policy-wise. The president is working on a deal whereby Israel would agree to a real moratorium on settlement building, Palestinians would uproot terrorists and the Arab states would begin to normalize relations — with visas for Israelis, trade missions, media visits and landing rights for El Al.

The President is not working on a deal. He has, perhaps, one in mind. But it seems that no one is buying it. Certainly not the Saudis. And the Palestinians have concluded that they need not compromise if American pressure on Israel can be counted on. Of course asking Israel to surrender something concrete and irreversible for gestures that can easily be reversed is par for the course.

But that’s typical for Friedman. He is very much an ideologue in the Peace Now / J Street mold. So when he writes of American Jewish opposition to “settlements” he speaks for himself and his compatriots. It isn’t that this view is necessarily popular among American Jews, but that this is the view of the administration.

Friedman for his part has been rather blind about continued Israeli concessions not bringing peace. After Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David, Friedman wrote:

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.

To Friedman, Arafat’s rejection of Camp David was due to a lack of courage. It was perfectly predictable given Arafat’s beliefs. Eventually, however, Friedman did come around, after Arafat died he wrote:

But once it became clear, after the collapse of the Camp David talks, that no deal was possible with Arafat, I wished for his speedy disappearance. He was a bad man, not simply for the way he introduced a whole new level of terrorism to world politics, but because of the crimes he committed against his own people. There, history will judge him very harshly.

Of course, this is with the benefit of hindsight (and ignoring what he had written four years earlier, believing that Arafat could still change.) The problem is that none of his observations explain why Arafat’s rejectionism was so popular among the Palestinians. In the post-Arafat op-ed he laments that Arafat never educated his people for peace. But Friedman seems surprised. Due to his ideological blinders, he never understand Palestinian nationalism. It always was more about destroying Israel than it was about creating Palestine.

Alas this misunderstanding persists in the Obama administration, as Elliott Abrams writes (via memeorandum, Hot Air):

The deeper problem–and the more complex explanation of bilateral tensions–is that the Obama administration, while claiming to separate itself from the “ideologues” of the Bush administration in favor of a more balanced and realistic Middle East policy, is in fact following a highly ideological policy path. Its ability to cope with, indeed even to see clearly, the realities of life in Israel and the West Bank and the challenge of Iran to the region is compromised by the prism through which it analyzes events.

The administration view begins with a critique of Bush foreign policy–as much too reliant on military pressure and isolated in the world. The antidote is a policy of outreach and engagement, especially with places like Syria, Venezuela, North Korea and Iran. Engagement with the Muslim world is a special goal, which leads not only to the president’s speech in Cairo on June 4 but also to a distancing from Israel so as to appear more “even-handed” to Arab states. Seen from Jerusalem, all this looks like a flashing red light: trouble ahead.

Jenniferf Rubin comments:

So don’t expect much to change so long as the Obama team “attributes every problem in the region to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while all who live there can see that developments in Iran are in fact the linchpin of the region’s future.” And don’t expect the Obama team to admit error or reverse course. For people who have decried, as Hillary Clinton put it, “rigid ideologies and old formulas,” they are, for the foreseeable future, sticking with theirs.

A point that Israel Matzav emphasizes:

But all Obama has done is substitute one ideology for another. Obama has sacrificed friendly relations with Israel, Colombia, Honduras, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Ukraine, South Korea and other former US allies to pander to the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Cuba’s Fidel and Raoul Castro, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, and of course, unrepentant Fatah terrorist Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen. He has gained nothing from his new friends in return. And yet, he dogmatically continues to pursue his ideology of ‘engagement’ as if there’s a shot in hell that any of those countries or the ‘Palestinians’ are going to take even the smallest step in the direction that the United States – including Obama – would like them to move.

Thomas Friedman deeply believes in the administration’s ideology. So his “counsel” is worthless. “Free” is an appropriate price for what he’s peddling.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets — from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan — but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.

Amd surely Friedman is correct when he writes this:

Extolling or excusing suicide militants as “martyrs” has only led to this awful phenomenon — where young Muslim men and women are recruited to kill themselves and others — spreading wider and wider. What began in a targeted way in Lebanon and Israel has now proliferated to become an almost weekly occurrence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This is similar to the late Michael Kelly’s observation in the aftermath of 9/11:

If it is morally acceptable to murder, in the name of a necessary blow for freedom, a woman on a Tel Aviv street, or to blow up a disco full of teenagers, or to bomb a family restaurant — then it must be morally acceptable to drive two jetliners into a place where 50,000 people work. In moral logic, what is the difference? If the murder of innocent people is for whatever reason excusable, it is excusable; if it is legitimate, it is legitimate. If acceptable on a small scale, so too on a grand.

And yet, Friedman has been one of those who has excused suicide terror when it has been directed against Israel. As he wrote five and a half years ago:

Suicide bombing is becoming so routine here that it risks becoming embedded in contemporary culture. America must stop it. A credible peace deal here is no longer a U.S. luxury — it is essential to our own homeland security. Otherwise, this suicide madness will spread, and it will be Americans who will have to learn how to live with it.

Friedman, while he often called on the Palestinians to stop suicide bombings, also held the view that the Palestinian grievances were such, that such terror was understandable. This paragraph shows that he felt once Israel helped create a Palestinian state, suicide bombings would end. Implicit in that belief is a level of tolerance of terror.

The “occupation” has served as a justification for terror against Israel. Actually it’s been a pretext to justify anti-Israel violence and antisemitism. It is why broadcasts by Hamas and Hezbollah have been too long tolerated in Europe.

Europe can act against Hamas TV under its own legal authority governing television broadcasting. France should enforce the warning its own audiovisual authority issued on Dec. 2, 2008, warning Eutelsat that al-Aqsa programming violates French communications law. Eutelsat’s recent decision to stop distributing al-Aqsa on only one of its satellites is not sufficient compliance, and Eutelsat should be held accountable for its continued broadcasting of al-Aqsa.

And Turkey is allowing this malevolence to metastasize. According to the BBC (via memeorandum)

Mohammed Nazzal, a senior Hamas leader based in Damascus, challenged Arab governments to “open their borders and allow the fighters to come.”

Delegates from all over the Middle East, and from Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Indonesia applauded as he stabbed the air with a raised finger and declared: “There will be no agreement with Israel… only weapons will bring respect.”

Mr Nazzal told his audience: “Don’t worry about casualties.”

LGF wonders:

Didn’t Obama just reach out to the Muslim world? Weren’t they listening to his message of hope, change, and unclenched fists?

For too long suicide bombing and terror in general has been tolerated. And it’s not just the Muslim world that needs to take a stand against it. Looking for moderation where there is none won’t change those who hate the West. While the West doesn’t just need to fight terror, it must make it known that terror is unacceptable and that those who perpetrate it will be held accountable. Showing “understanding” doesn’t help.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In recent days, some have questioned whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was making a big mistake in appointing so many “special envoys,” such as George Mitchell, to handle key trouble spots, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think they are right to question Mrs. Clinton about this plethora of envoys. But I don’t think the problem is that she has too many; it’s that she doesn’t have enough.

While I don’t think that Oslo was a good deal, people – even experts like Friedman – forget that it was first negotiated in secret. The United States was not involved at all until the end of the process. Similarly too, the United States only got involved with the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty at the end, after both countries had done preliminary negotiations without outside interference. There’s no reason now to assume that American involvement is essential. It probably hinders the likelihood that any sort of agreement will be reached.

The idea that American involvement hinders peacemaking may seem paradoxical, but it isn’t. By declaring its interest in a peace treaty and getting involved the United States shows the Palestinians how highly it values peace. It also freezes diplomatic thinking into believing that the only choices are the ones available. The Palestinians know that they can then raise the cost of peace for Israel by making more demands. We saw this throughout the 90’s where American desire for a settlement meant that it ignored Arafat’s constant violations of Oslo because it valued a treaty more than actual peace. Arafat was deemed essential to making peace, so his violations were overlooked as understandable responses to Israeli failures rather than deeming him an obstacle to peace and looking for a new interlocutor.

Where to begin? Palestinians are now divided between the West Bank and Gaza, with a secular Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank and a fundamentalist Hamas government based in Gaza. But Hamas is further divided between a military and political wing, and the political wing is further divided between a Gaza-based leadership and a Damascus-based leadership, with the latter taking orders from both Syria and Iran.

There is, of course, no real division between the political and terrorist wings of Hamas. It’s a convenient fiction created by those who pretend that there’s a chance of Hamas moderating its positions.

Best I can tell, the Palestinians from Gaza are simultaneously negotiating a cease-fire with Israel in Cairo, pursuing war-crimes charges against Israel in Europe, digging new tunnels in the Sinai to smuggle more rockets into Gaza to hit Tel Aviv and trying to raise money for reconstruction from Iran. Meanwhile, the West Bank Palestinian leaders are busy publicly collecting food and blankets to help all those Palestinian civilians brutalized by the Israeli incursion into Gaza, while privately demanding to know from senior Israeli officials why they wimped out and didn’t wipe Hamas in Gaza off the face of earth — casualties be damned.

“Brutalized by the Israel incursion?” How about “brutalized by being used as human shields by Hamas?” Still what’s difficult to understand. Fatah wants more power.

Israel, meanwhile, has a government in which the prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister each has a different peace plan, war strategy and cease-fire conditions for Gaza, and the foreign minister and defense minster are running against each other in Israel’s election on Tuesday. Speaking of that election, a whole new party, Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Lieberman, which has been accused of having “fascist,” viciously anti-Arab leanings, appears headed to make the biggest gains and possibly become the kingmaker of Israel’s next government. The other day, the Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, was quoted in the newspaper Haaretz as criticizing Lieberman as a lamb in hawk’s clothing, asking: “When has he ever shot anyone?”

So after Friedman tells us that there’s really a cuddly part of Hamas, he takes a cheap shot at Avigdor Lieberman and suggests that it will be Israeli extremism that will prevent a deal.

How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Oh please. It’s gone on so long because the fundamental requirement for peace has been lacking. Palestinian nationalism is based on the destruction of Israel. It is something that even Fatah has never officially renounced. As mentioned above, no outrage was serious enough to disqualify Arafat once he was named a “peacemaker.” Given that the Palestinians want a state in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, it’s hard to be sympathetic to complaints that non-contiguity will be a problem. Israeli communities don’t prevent a future Palestinian state from having connecting routes, but continued Israeli growth in Judea and Sarmaria and resultant loss of territory is a reasonable cost for failing to act in good faith for fifteen years.

Friedman simply refuses to acknowledge that the assumptions he clings to, against all evidence, are wrong. The fundamental obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Arab and Palestinian refusal to accept Israel. All else is obfuscation.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

After making fun of the regular calls for peace in the Middle East over the past two decades or more, claiming that it is absolutely urgent, Thomas Friedman tells us that peace in the Middle East (according to the terms that he, in his infinite wisdom, determined to be just and workable) is really urgent.

At the end of his article he even evokes the “Five minutes to Midnight” cliche used on the very same page by Anthony Lewis back in 1982. Apparently, five minutes lasts a lot longer today, than it used to.

As a general critique of the article I’d point out that Israel has moved pretty far from its position of 26 years ago. What was then the dream of Israel’s far Left and its supporters in the West – like Friedman and Lewis – has largely become the mainstream of Israel’s politics. Have we seen similar movement on the part of the Palestinians?

Why Israel even sat down with, negotiated with and capitulated to Yasser Arafat and we seem no closer to peace than we were back then. The areas Israel withdrew from: Jenin, Tulkarem, Kalkilye, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Lebanon, and Gaza each became launching pads for new terror initiatives against Israel. No longer did terrorist have to operate underground, the controlling authority in the areas Israel withdrew from abetted the terrorists.

Anyway, let’s go to some of Friedman’s arguments.

We’re getting perilously close to closing the window on a two-state solution, because the two chief window-closers — Hamas in Gaza and the fanatical Jewish settlers in the West Bank — have been in the driver’s seats. Hamas is busy making a two-state solution inconceivable, while the settlers have steadily worked to make it impossible.

Conveniently, Friedman has scapegoats on both sides. The Palestinian terrorists and the Jewish “settlers.” But what happened when the evil settlers were removed from Gaza? Why Hamas was strengthened. But here’s what Friedman refuses to acknowledge: Palestinians generally are opposed to the Jewish state. That’s why Hamas won the 2006 elections. Fatah’s corruption made a convenient fig leaf, but Palestinians support Hamas because of its intransigence and designs against Israel. Furthermore, the Palestinian state will necessarily be divided. If non-contiguity means non-viable, well Gaza-Jericho was a non-starter. For the past 15 years, since Oslo was signed, Israel has been subjected to a higher level of terror than it experienced before. If the consequence of that bad faith is that the Palestinians have less land to create their state on, so be it. There should be a price paid for bad faith.

Because without a stable two-state solution, what you will have is an Israel hiding behind a high wall, defending itself from a Hamas-run failed state in Gaza, a Hezbollah-run failed state in south Lebanon and a Fatah-run failed state in Ramallah. Have a nice day.

So if you believe in the necessity of a Palestinian state or you love Israel, you’d better start paying attention. This is not a test. We’re at a hinge of history.

Please don’t appeal to those of us who love Israel. Your history has shown that you don’t. You have shown absolutely no pangs of conscience for advocating policies that have endangered Israel. You’ve written that the duly elected leader of Israel was a bad guy and that Yossi Beilin was worth listening to, well after the Israeli electorate determined that he was irrelevant.

Finally Friedman gets to the point where he quotes from “experts” who advocate his point of view:

As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen says, “It is not enough for Israel that the world recognize that Hamas criminally mismanaged its responsibility to its people. Israel’s longer-term interest is to be sure that it has a Palestinian partner for negotiations, which will have sufficient legitimacy among its own people to be able to sign agreements and fulfill them. Without Hamas as part of a Palestinian decision, any Israeli-Palestinian peace will be meaningless.”

But bringing Hamas into a Palestinian unity government, without undermining the West Bank moderates now leading the Palestinian Authority, will be tricky. We’ll need Saudi Arabia and Egypt to buy, cajole and pressure Hamas into keeping the cease-fire, supporting peace talks and to give up rockets — while Iran and Syria will be tugging Hamas the other way.

And that leads to the third new factor — Iran as a key player in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy. The Clinton team tried to woo Syria while isolating Iran. President Bush tried to isolate both Iran and Syria. The Obama team, as Martin Indyk argues in “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” “needs to try both to bring in Syria, which would weaken Hamas and Hezbollah, while also engaging Iran.”

Here’s Friedman’s fundamental problem, he views non-violent Israelis as a bigger threat to peace than Hamas. How do we see that? So somehow Israel must marginalize the “settlers,” but must co-opt Hamas, that denies Israel’s right to exist. And how will Israel do it? But getting Saudi Arabia involved. And that leads to another problem with Friedman’s column.

Aside from the fact that the Saudis run a state that violates nearly every norm of Western society, Saudi Arabia isn’t offended by Israel’s “occupation,” it is offended by Israel’s existence. As Max Boot wrote:

Moreover, Prince Turki’s protestations of peace and goodwill are severely undercut by the rabid hostility his article exhibits toward Israel. He writes that the Israeli armed forces have “murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians” in the course of their “bloody attack on Gaza.” He also refers to Operation Cast Lead as a “calamity,” “butchery,” “the slaughter of innocents,” and a “disaster.” He lays almost all the blame for what happened at Israel’s feet — it was “Israeli actions that led to this conflict, from settlement building in the West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary arrests of Palestinians.”

And so on, in the typical way of anti-Israel zealots. Prince Turki concludes with a plea: “Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve to rein in the murderous Israeli regime and open a new chapter in this most intractable of conflicts.”

It is hard not to laugh at a representative of one of the world’s most oppressive and intolerant regimes condemning the most democratic, liberal and tolerant government in the region as a “murderous… regime.” It is also hard to take seriously the prince’s professions of deep concern for the sufferings of Hamas, a terrorist group that is aligned with Saudi Arabia’s chief enemy, Iran, and whose destruction he would no doubt be delighted to witness.

(See also Talkin’ Turki, parts I and II.)

Thomas Friedman has parlayed his time as a bureau chief for the Times into a column that requires little real work. Once again he falls back onto meaningless cliches and like-minded talking heads to support views that haven’t yet worked. How many times can he be proven wrong and still expect his views to be heeded?

UPDATE: Sometimes, by the time I post, I forget all the points I want to make.

Friedman is dishonest in another way. He complains about “settlers” plus he advocates the Saudis as honest brokers. However the Saudi position is that places like Maaleh Adumim and the Etizion bloc are “settlements.” And even neighborhoods such as Ramat Eshkol, Ramot and Gilo in Jerusalem are according to the Saudis. These are places that Israel liberated in the 6 Day War. Does Friedman consider these to be “settlements?” In other words does he accept the extreme Saudi position in this regard? I suspect that he does – after all he promoted the Saudi “peace plan” seven years ago and put it on the diplomatic map – but he’d never come out and say so, because he knows that such a position is way out of the mainstream in Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I have only one question about Israel’s military operation in Gaza: What is the goal? Is it the education of Hamas or the eradication of Hamas? I hope that it’s the education of Hamas. Let me explain why.

Friedman educates us:

There have always been two camps in Israel when it comes to the logic of peace, notes Gidi Grinstein, president of the Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute: One camp says that all the problems Israel faces from the Palestinians or Lebanese emanate from occupying their territories. “Therefore, the fundamental problem is staying — and the fundamental remedy is leaving,” says Grinstein.

The other camp argues that Israel’s Arab foes are implacably hostile and leaving would only invite more hostility. Therefore, at least when it comes to the Palestinians, Israel needs to control their territories indefinitely. Since the mid-1990s, the first camp has dominated Israeli thinking. This led to the negotiated and unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank, Lebanon and Gaza.

So the answer is “leave.” Israel withdrew from Jericho, Jenin, Tulkarm, Bethlehem, Kalkilye, Nablus, Jericho, and Ramallah in late 1995, only to watch Arafat allow various terrorist organizations to thrive. It took operation Defensive Shield to fight and rollback the terror capabilities that were built in its absence.

Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 allowing Hezbollah to build up its forces and threaten northern Israel. Then it launched a war in 2006 that forced Israel to respond.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas used the opportunity to build up its threat against Israel, until Israel finally responded three weeks ago.

It would seem the result of Israel’s “fundamental remedy of leaving” has served to enable its “implacably hostile” enemies to build their abilities to strike at Israel. I’d hardly consider this a proof that the “remedy of leaving” solution works.

Friedman continues:

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

Here’s what Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, said the morning after the morning after about his decision to start that war by abducting two Israeli soldiers on July 12, 2006: “We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 … that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”

Yes Friedman wrote his oh-so-clever “morning after the morning after” column shortly after the war. And yet Hezbollah has spent the time since the war re-arming and forcing itself into the Lebanese government. It might be that the Hezbollah values its political power and is unwilling to jeopardize it by attacking Israel. However overnight thee Katyushas were fired near Kiryat Shmona last night. Remember also that like Hamas, Hezbollah is a client of Iran, and may be looking to draw Israel away from destroying its fellow client. So it’s far too early to conclude that Israel’s northern border is now secured. It’s an “implacable hatred” thing and Friedman wouldn’t understand.

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims. Now its focus, and the Obama team’s focus, should be on creating a clear choice for Hamas for the world to see: Are you about destroying Israel or building Gaza?

I’m sorry but I missed something. What is it about the Hamas charter that Friedman doesn’t understand? Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas has built up its offensive abilities to strike at Israel. Taken together with the commitment to destroy Israel written into its charter, I think that the answer to that last question is rather obvious. Hamas is about destroying Israel. It had its opportunity to build Gaza and didn’t.

But that requires diplomacy. Israel de facto recognizes Hamas’s right to rule Gaza and to provide for the well-being and security of the people of Gaza — which was actually Hamas’s original campaign message, not rocketing Israel. And, in return, Hamas has to signal a willingness to assume responsibility for a lasting cease-fire and to abandon efforts to change the strategic equation with Israel by deploying longer and longer range rockets. That’s the only deal. Let’s give it a try.

Hamas was sending a message? That’s ludicrous. Since Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas had every opportunity to build a civil society to leave in peace with Israel. It built smuggling tunnels to bring in materiel for attacking Israel. Or to put it another way it chose Katyushas over butter. It demonstrated its neglect of the well being of the people of Gaza. There’s nothing ambiguous for Friedman to misconstrue.

As I’ve pointed out above, Israel has given terrorists three opportunities to build up their forces against Israel and three times the terrorists have taken those opportunities to build up their capabilities to attack Israel. So the idea of trusting Hamas has been given a try. It failed. Miserably.

Barry Rubin wrote:

If Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, progress toward peace is impossible. No peace, no dismantling of settlements (on the West Bank, they’ve already been dismantled in the Gaza Strip. Remember? When Israel withdrew completely and turned the Gaza-Egypt border over to the Palestinians?]. No peace, no Palestinian state. No peace, no serious economic construction and stability. No peace, no resettling of Palestinian refugees in a country of their own.

Second, Hamas is a disaster for Palestinians as a ruler. It is creating a repressive Islamist state where freedom will be extinguished, women treated as third-class citizens, and children will be brought up to be suicide bombers. While Hamas has had social welfare programs to recruit supporters and support the families of those it has ensured would be martyrs, it has no interest in educational, health, infrastructure, and job creation or anything but waging war.

Friedman’s doesn’t just wear rose colored glasses, he’s wearing blinders. He is so beholden to the idea of negotiated settlements that he can’t see that with some enemies they don’t work. At this time, the Arab world does not accept Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinians certainly don’t. For him to expect Israel to “teach” Hamas a lesson and leave it at that is ludicrous.

And it’s not just that Friedman is oblivious to the behavior of terrorist groups, it’s that he hasn’t learned from his own mistakes. In 2004 Friedman wrote:

With that U.N.-approved pullout, Israel completely reversed its situation: It went from holding the strategic and moral low ground, to holding the strategic and moral high ground. When Israel was occupying south Lebanon it was embroiled in a guerrilla war in which it could never use its vast military superiority. It was going mano a mano with Hezbollah. Worse, any Hezbollah attack on Israel was seen by the world as legitimate resistance. Once Israel was out, it could use its superior air power to retaliate for Hezbollah attacks — and the world didn’t care.

”Sure,” say the critics, ”But the Palestinians saw the Israeli withdrawal as a sign of weakness and it triggered their Intifada II.” Well, maybe the Palestinians did watch too much Hezbollah TV. Their mistake. But I’ll tell you who didn’t misread Israel’s withdrawal: the people it was directed at — Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria.

Hezbollah knows it can’t launch any serious attack on Israel from Lebanon now without triggering a massive retaliation in which Israel’s air force would destroy all the power plants of Beirut. This would bring down the wrath of all of Lebanon on Hezbollah — because the Lebanese public would not consider an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on Israel as legitimate, or worth sacrificing for, now that Israel is out of Lebanon and Lebanon’s sovereignty is restored.

And two years later Hezbollah ignored the problem of launching an “illegitimate” war against Israel and did just that.

Thomas Friedman: the columnist who keeps on fooling himself.

UPDATE: (via memeorandum) In a perfect example of a blind idealist leading a blind terror apologist, Glenn Greenwald seizes upon Friedman’s silly description of Israel’s war aims to conclude that Israel – not Hamas or Hezbollah – is guilty of terrorism. Clearly Greenwald’s hatred of Israel is matched only by his ignorance of international law. Israel is doing all it can to minimize civilian casualties while Hamas is operating from civilian areas, making it culpable for the collateral damage. Israel, of course, is targeting terrorist targets attempting to degrade the threat that Hamas posed. Trusting Friedman to interpret Israeli actions was foolish for Greenwald, though it served his immoral purposes to attack Israel’s actions.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Hamas rejects any recognition of Israel. By contrast, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, has recognized Israel — and vice versa. If you believe, as I do, that the only stable solution is a two-state one, with the Palestinians getting all of the West Bank, Gaza and Arab sectors of East Jerusalem, then you have to hope for the weakening of Hamas.

On the other hand Reuel March Gerecht writes:

Although Fatah, the ruling party within the Palestinian Authority, may get a second wind thanks to the excesses of Hamas and the Israelis’ killing much of Hamas’s brain power and muscle, it is difficult to envision Fatah reviving itself into an appealing political alternative for faithful Palestinians. Fatah is hopelessly corrupt, often brutal, and without an inspiring raison d’être: a Palestine of the West Bank and Gaza is, as Hamas correctly points out, boring, historically unappealing, and a noncontiguous geographic mess. Fatah only sounds impassioned when it gives vent to its anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, profoundly Muslim roots. It’s no accident that the religious allusions and suicide bombers of Fatah and Hamas after 2000 were hard to tell apart. If Hamas can withstand the current Israeli attack on its leadership and infrastructure, then the movement’s aura will likely be impossible to match. Iran’s influence among religious Palestinians could skyrocket.

It would be useful for Friedman to remember that Fatah is moderate relative to Hamas. It wasn’t Hamas that rejected the peace deal at Camp David in 2000. Abbas didn’t object to Arafat’s rejection either. A few months of dong what they should have been doing for 15 years, doesn’t mean that they’ve changed.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.

Ahmadinejad declared on Monday that Israel “has reached its final phase and will soon be wiped out from the geographic scene.”

By coincidence, I heard the Iranian leader’s statement on Israel Radio just as I was leaving the headquarters of Iscar, Israel’s famous precision tool company, headquartered in the Western Galilee, near the Lebanon border. Iscar is known for many things, most of all for being the first enterprise that Buffett bought overseas for his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

…So who would you put your money on? Buffett or Ahmadinejad? I’d short Ahmadinejad and go long Warren Buffett.

Whatever problems Israel has politically, economically it’s doing quite well. (Friedman actually argued this was a problem last week.)

Still, I’m not going to knock him. If Thomas Friedman wants to write something nice about Israel, I’m happy to read it (and promote it)!

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The fanatical moderate of the title was Yossi Beilin, an Israeli politician and former Knesset member and member of the cabinet. Of course, in Israel, Beilin isn’t in politics anymore. Last election he couldn’t even get a seat. It’s not because there’s anything extreme about Israel’s political scene – it is in fact pretty leftist in orientation compared to twenty years ago – it’s because Beilin is so far the left he no longer has any constituency.

Friedman wanted to sound clever by using words that sound oxymoronic, but, according to him, fit together. The problem is that what he was describing was fanaticism not moderate, so his oxymoron may have sounded clever and counterintuitive when, in fact, it was wrong.

What was clear from that column though is that Friedman is a firm believer in outside pressure to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

He just dredged up his old tricks again this week with, “Time for radical pragmatism.”

After arguing that there’s no way to create a Palestinian state, he argues for more American pressure for Israel to cede land to Abbas to give him a chance to develop credibility. It’s an astonishing argument, especially as he himself noted:

The trust deficit is exacerbated by the fact that after Israel quit the Gaza Strip in 2005, Palestinians, instead of building Singapore there, built Somalia and focused not on how to make microchips, but on how to make rockets to hit Israel.

So you say, but that was Hamas, this is Abbas and Fatah. Why would we expect a different result? Barry Rubin observed a few months ago:

Abbas tells his people and others that, as he said recently to an Islamic summit, Palestinians “are facing a campaign of annihilation” by Israel. The U.S. State Department merely calls this “overheated political rhetoric,” not comprehending that such talk by Abbas incites terrorism and forecloses his own options.It’s easy to justify violence but hard to rationalize making peace with those you say are committing genocide against you. That’s why the PA does things like letting “imprisoned” terrorists who murdered two Israeli hikers to “escape.” Every such terrorist is seen by both the PA and public opinion as a hero.

Fatah is every bit as committed to terror as is Hamas, it’s just a little less open and a lot less competent at it.

The security wall that Israel built (and Operation Defensive Shield ) have reduced Fatah’s terror making ability. But instead of praising this effort to protect Israeli lives, Friedman disparages it (thanks to Elie for observation)

The second energy shortage comes from the fact that Israel, with the wall that it has erected around the West Bank, has so effectively shut down Palestinian suicide bombers that the Israeli public right now feels no sense of urgency, especially with the Israeli economy booming. The West Bank behind the wall might as well be in Afghanistan.

Nor does his suggestion that asking Jordan to come in and help with the security make much sense. (He assured us that Egypt would do everything in its power to prevent a Hamas takeover in Gaza.)

In the end the failure to create a Palestinian state in the territory Israel has ceded is not Israel’s fault, it’s due the failure of Palestinian nationalism to evolve and accept Israel. Forget about settlements. The PLO failed to create a single police force of an acceptable number as stipulated in the accords. It failed to stop incitement. It failed to stop terror. It used its foreign aid to enhance the lifestyles of its favored few. Had it behaved, the popular pressure in Israel (however misguided) would have forced the government to continue ceding more control to the PLO. But Fatah never changed. It never earned the legitimacy it was granted in 1993.

Maybe Israel made mistakes, but the main failures were Fatah’s and the Palestinians’. It never changed from its roots of terror and they never really accepted Israel.

So what Friedman wants isn’t pragmatic, but it is radical. And that’s why his stupid oxymoron is simply moronic.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.