Doubting Thomas

If you make a correction get it right

Last week as I noted, Thomas Friedman asserted incorrectly:

And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.

This week he corrected his error. Sort of.
In the middle of his article "Arabs, It's Your Move," Friedman writes:

On Palestinian prisoners, Abbas asked for an Israeli commitment to release large numbers of prisoners, which would have really given Abbas street credibility. Instead, Sharon released a few hundred, none of them big-name fighters and some just criminals. So Arafat easily destroyed Abbas by portraying him as a U.S.-Israeli stooge.

and in case anyone forgot that this was not what he wrote last week, he wrote a brief correction at the end:

My Feb. 5 column erred in saying Ariel Sharon had released no Palestinian prisoners to Mahmoud Abbas. He did. It was just too limited a release to have any impact. See above.

I give him credit for at least acknowledging that he made a mistake.
The problem is that he's still wrong.
(Let me just say here, that I don't expect the public editor to act on this. What constitutes a "big name fighter is a judgment call. It doesn't mean that Friedman is not intellectually dishonest.)
First of all there was at least one "big name fighter" who was released. That was Ahmad Jabara, the "refrigerator bomber." Jabara was welcomed by many people in addition to Arafat and given a special title. The release may not have been enough for Abbas, but would any number have been? It's also wrong to claim that the release was too limited. This is from a contemporaneous account by The Media Line:

The Palestinian Authority [PA] regards this step of releasing prisoners as a positive one, since it will build trust on both sides. The PA also believes that such steps will put pressure on terror organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was reported on the Israeli news website Ynet, adding that the Palestinians claimed most of those released were ending their sentence in any case.

Crowds gathered to greet Jabara at the Qalandia checkpoint, from where Jabara headed straight for the Muqata’a, Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Jabara was greeted by Chairman Arafat with open arms. The Palestinian Al-Hayyat reported Jabara’s release as the main item on its front page, alongside a picture of Arafat holding Jabara’s hand as a demonstration of strength and solidarity.

The release of Jabara was frong page news in the official Palestinian press. That suggests that this was an excellent "confidence building" measure for those who believe that such things help. Instead of strengthening Abbas, Arafat got all the credit.
This is the problem with Israeli concessions. They are all too often underappreciated. And even if they are appreciated, they help the wrong people. In this case it was Arafat.
Additionally, Friedman's complaint that Israel didn't release any "big-name fighters" is troubling. The nature of these "big-name fighters" (and many others) is that they go back to their terrorist activities. To suggest casually that these are people that Israel should release fails to acknowledge the big risk there is to Israel in releasing them.
Another problem with the column is that it seems that Friedman has discovered that peace in the Middle East is up to the Arab world. Nice to know. Here's a proposition he makes in the name of President George W. Bush:

So, now I come to you Arab leaders. Guys, Sharon isn't the only one who didn't lift a finger to help Abbas and the Palestinian moderates. You Arabs did nothing. But in truth, so did I. So here's what I propose to make amends: You are holding an Arab summit this March. I want you guys to invite Sharon and me to attend.

Yes, you heard me. And I want you to present Sharon, face to face, with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace plan, which you've already adopted as an Arab League initiative: full normalization with Israel in return for full withdrawal from the territories.

No doubt this is another effort by Friedman to put pressure on Israel. He's hoping that his good friend, Crown Prince Abdullah will invite Sharon to the Arab League summit and that Sharon will refuse.
The problem is that the Saudi "peace" initiative was always a fraud. That's what I thought from the beginning. I know that Friedman believes that it was a real offer but it wasn't.
First of all it took the form of an ultimatum. The offer was along the lines of "Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines and we'll make peace. Until Israel does that there's nothing to talk about."
Second of all, when Crown Prince Abdullah went to Syria to get approval for his plan, he got it. Sort of. President Bashar Assad insisted that Israel still had to withdraw from Lebanon even though two years earlier Israel had done so and had its withdrawal certified complete by the UN.
At issue is the area called Shebaa Farms that is part of Syria and subject to negotiations between Syria and Israel. Syria instead prefers to say that it is part of (Syrian occupied) Lebanon so that it is justified in continuing to support Hezbollah's war against Israel.
Friedman didn't bat an eyelash when Syria added this demand. You'd think he would have because this Syrian (and Saudi) dishonesty calls into question what Israeli concessions will accomplish if the Arab world simply denies that they take place.
Indeed Friedman predicted that an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would render Hezbullah ineffective. In a column titled "How Bibi got Re-elected" (reproduced here, probably illegally, by Holocaust deniers)
In the hypothetical scenario produced by Friedman, Bibi wins re-election by withdrawing Israel from Lebanon and ...

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."

As we see that hasn't happened. If anything, the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon appears to have emboldened Hezbollah ( they've been launching different attacks across the international border ever since the Israeli withdrawal) and some say that Israel's withdrawal under fire emboldened Arafat to reject Camp David because he didn't get as much as he wanted from Barak.
Friedman worships at the altar of Israeli withdrawal and concession that has done nothing but encourage extremism. And yes the withdrawal from Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah, it would be nice if Friedman had the guts to admit this.
One of the fundamental problems with the past ten+ years of peace processing is that Israel's concessions and risks are consistently minimized not only by the Arab world, but by many in the West. Those who minimize the magnitude of what has happened in Israel give cover to the Arab world for whom no concession is ever enough.
The position of Ariel Sharon now, is the position of Peace Now ten years ago. Ideologically, for better or for worse, Israel has come quite far in ten years. The problem is that the Arab world remains static. It is just as hostile to Israel's existence as it was ten years ago. The Israeli concessions have only strengthened the extremists. The irony of Friedman's concerns is that Sharon's fight against the PA has weakened the extremists including Arafat, but people like him who have never appreciated Israeli concessions have emboldened them.
Daniel Pipes in a recent column notes:

Such schemas, admittedly, sound like cloud-cuckoo land at present. But when Palestinian Arabs finally undergo a change of heart, when they accept Israel's existence and renounce the use of force against it, all sorts of positive developments can take place to sweep aside today's seemingly intractable issues.

And to the question, "How will we know when that change of heart takes place," my reply is: When Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel).

Until that happy day arrives, the issue of Jews living in the territories is perhaps the least significant one facing strategists and would-be diplomats. Instead of focusing on this political triviality, they should devise ways to induce the Palestinian Arabs to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state called Israel. Until that happens, no other initiatives will do any good.

He is quite right. Why does Friedman only require words from the Arabs? Why not ask them to
1) Disarm Hezbollah by force.
2) Insist that Assad finally abide by the Taif Accord that calls for a complete withdrawal of Syrian troops from occupied Lebanon.
3) Return the body of Eli Cohen to Israel.
4) Drop their objection to the certification of the Magen David Adom by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
These actions would certainly show a change of heart in the Arab world and in no way do they play any role in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He doesn't ask it, because he knows he would be rebuffed.
For people like Friedman, there's no Palestinian complaint too insignificant to ignore; no Arab concern too trivial to discount and no Israeli concession too significant to recognize. This makes Friedman incapable of fairly evaluating the Middle East. Thomas Friedman is simply a mean spirited cynic when it comes to Israel.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Posted by SoccerDad at February 12, 2004 06:27 AM