Worth every penny of “free”

In “Free marriage counseling” Thomas Friedman offers advice how to repair the currently strained American Israeli diplomatic impasse. The operative word is “free” because that is exactly what Friedman’s advice is worth. Friedman simply strings together his past positions and calls it a column.

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.