Doubting Thomas

The New York Times' Nasarallah

In "Jews, Israel and America", Thomas engages in some vitriolic rhetoric. He refers to those Israeli nationalists who object to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza as "Israel's Hezbollah". The hyperbole has not gone unchallenged.
Media Backspin quotes Michael Dinowitz:

Now let me see if I understand this. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. They've attacked and killed innocent people. They've launched attacks into foreign countries. They've threatened even more attacks. They are terrorists.
Far right Jews are not terrorists. They are not dedicated to destroying anyone. They are not attacking other countries. They are not launching rockets or kidnapping people.

There is no connection between these two groups other than in Friedman's libelous mind. Why did he make this comparison?

Josh Harvey also weighs in:

Friedman steps over the line into Guardian territory when he compares Israel’s extreme right wing with the Hezbollah. (”[Sharon] is being opposed by the Israeli far right—the Jewish Hezbollah.”) The ill-defined group he’s talking about certainly includes some unsavory individuals, but the death and destruction carried out by its members boils down to an act of butchery by one crazed loner, a political assassination by another, and random thuggery that would embarrass a street gang in its tameness.

This group is hardly comparable to one of the world’s foremost terrorist groups, an organization with the blood of hundreds of innocents on its hands.

Clearly Friedman is over the top by comparing a group of people who demonstrate their dislike for their government's actions by forming a human chain to a terrorist group. But he also has the opposite problem: whitewashing that terrorist group. He has written on many occasions that once Israel withdrew from Lebanon, Hezbollah, no longer having a pretext for striking at Israel, would stop attacking. That's not what happened at all. (I detailed this at "Instant Obsolesence".) Not only has Hezbollah continued attacking Israel accross the border with impunity (I don't believe that Friedman has ever criticized Hezbollah's continuing violence against Israel) but it claims to have a grievance in that Israel has not withdrawn from Shebaa farms and it reportedly has been strengthening terror networks in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Hezbollah was a sideshow to Friedman's column though. His thesis was that something had to be done to reverse the tide of the anti Americanism and anti semitism of the Arab world. Strangely, he places little of the blame on the Arab world.

Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and America," all lumped together in a single threat.

This wider trend has been fanned by Arab satellite TV stations, which deliberately show split-screen images of Israelis bashing Palestinians and U.S. forces bashing the Iraqi insurgents. The trend has also been encouraged by some mosque preachers looking to explain away all the Arab world's ills by wrapping all the Satans together into JIA. This trend has been helped by the Bush team's failed approach to the Arab-Israel problem, which is to tell the truth only to Yasir Arafat, while embracing Ariel Sharon so tightly that it's impossible to know anymore where U.S. policy stops and Mr. Sharon's begins.

This trend of JIA is now metastasizing from the core of the Arab-Israel conflict, across the Muslim world and into Europe. There is no quick fix.

"Some" preachers? Does this guy read MEMRI or Palestinian Media Watch? It hardly seems that this is an isolated phenomenon.
Nor do I believe that this problem has intensified since 9/11. It was pretty pervasive before. Using 9/11 as a cutoff is useful if your goal is to blame the administration for the outbreak of hatred. (Perhaps the rhetoric has intensified since 9/11, I doubt it though.)

What really infects the column though, is a mindset:

One thing that Israel can do is push harder to defuse the conflict with the Palestinians in order to deprive the Arab media of the raw images that help to feed this phenomenon, not because the continuing conflict is all Israel's fault - it is not - but because Israel has such an overriding interest in forging a partnership with a legitimate Palestinian Authority, and getting this poisonous show off the air. A generation of Muslims raised on these images on the Internet is enormously dangerous for Jews, Israel and America.

Israel must do something. What exactly will Israel do to stop this hatred? It was going on even when Rabin and Barak were prime ministers. Politician, Diplomats and pundits just ignored it. As long as "peace" was being achieved they overlooked the overt hostility directed toward Israel even if it violated the letter of the Oslo accords. What was important? That Israel would cede territory to its "former" enemy. That was the essence of the the peace process. Get Israel to give away its land in the face of unremitting hostility. People like Friedman simply looked away and declared their program a success (unless ruined by the likes of Netanyahu or Hamas.)
After all this time Friedman still refuses to admit his mistakes. To admit that he should have objected to the violations of the Palestinians. Nope the problem still is the West Bank.

Mr. Rabin knew that no peace deal would resonate in the Arab-Muslim world if it did not have a legitimate Palestinian partner. Mr. Sharon seems to want to get out of Gaza to make peace with the Jews. His aides have made clear that he is getting out of Gaza in order to entrench Israel even more deeply in the West Bank and the Jewish settlements there.

In the face of this plan, the Bush team is silent. This is partly because the Palestinians continue to stick with Arafat as their leader, even though this bum has led them to ruin - so the U.S. has nothing to offer Israel. And it's partly because the Bush team, which is so inept at diplomacy, has never had the energy or creativity to shape a better Palestinian alternative to Arafat. As a result, the Sharon vision of getting out of Gaza in order to take over the West Bank will probably win by default. If that happens, "Jews, Israel and America" will be bound together more tightly than ever as the enemies of Arabs and Muslims.

Friedman never was ahead of the curve in exposing Arafat as an irredentist. Even after Arafat refused Barak's offer in Camp David this is what Friedman wrote ("Yasir Arafat's Moment", July 28, 2004), :

The reason President Clinton was so frustrated with Mr. Arafat at Camp David was not because he refused to accept every aspect of Ehud Barak's offer for how to share Jerusalem. No one could have, or should have, expected that. The Palestinian-Muslim claim to Jerusalem is authentic, deep-rooted and heartfelt. The reason the Americans were frustrated with Mr. Arafat was that he played rope-a-dope. He came with no compromise ideas of his own on Jerusalem. He simply absorbed Mr. Barak's proposals and repeated Palestinian mantras about recovering all of East Jerusalem.

What should Mr. Arafat have said? He should have told Mr. Barak that his ideas for granting Palestinians an administrative presence in East Jerusalem, autonomous control over the Arab neighborhoods there and religious control over the Temple Mount were a huge leap forward for an Israeli leader.

But, he should have added, they didn't go far enough. The Palestinians needed three things: First, they must have not simply an administrative presence but a sovereign presence in East Jerusalem, over which they have full control and can fly their flag -- even if it is just one square block. It could be at Orient House or in the Muslim Quarter. Second, they must at least share sovereignty with the Jewish people over the sacred space of the Temple Mount, which is the site of both the ancient Jewish Temple and two of Islam's holiest mosques. And third, the Palestinians must have direct access from that sovereign Palestinian presence to both the mosques on the Temple Mount and to the Palestinian state in the West Bank, so they don't have to go through Israeli checkpoints.

He simply takes every Palestinian claim as legitimate and immutable and explains that Arafat should have made a counteroffer. Only Israel needs to compromise.
That's a nice thought but there was never any evidence that Arafat was interested in peace (and quite a bit of evidence to the contrary) and after nearly seven years of peace processing Friedman was covering for him!

The reason Jews, Israel and America are an anathema in the Arab/Muslim world is because too many have excused the hatred saying that the Palestinian claims were legitimate even if their methods were not.

The Arab world used that leverage and used the language of freedom to mask a syntax of violence. Hatred of Israel was legitimized by the cause of Palestinian statehood, while so many pretended that the hatred was a result of the Palestinian disenfranchisement.

It's easy for Friedman to refer to Arafat as "bum" and deride the administration for not showing enough "creativity." But if the U.S. had not supported Israel's sidelining of Arafat would Friedman be referring to him as a bum or would he still be making excuses for him? It took a lot for the United States to reverse the damage of the illusion a decade in the making.

And it's not up to Israel or the United States to change the Palestinians. Read the following CV of the recently departed Adnan al Ghoul:

Adnan al-Ghoul, the Hamas military leader assassinated in an Israeli missile strike Thursday, had long eluded Israeli forces through a mixture of stealth and luck.

Al-Ghoul, 46, joined Hamas in 1988 when the group was in its infancy, and went on to help found its military wing. He became the organization's top bomb-maker after Israel assassinated Yehiya Ayash, known as "the engineer," in 1996.

Al-Ghoul also developed the homemade Qassam rocket as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, according to Palestinian and Israeli military officials. Palestinian militants have fired dozens of Qassams into southern Israel in recent years, and Israel launched a broad offensive into Gaza late last month after a rocket attack killed two Israeli preschoolers.

What if al Ghoul had simply been killed in a traffic accident and his life story had read: al Ghoul founded a software company in 1990. His products were marked by creative, easy to use interfaces. By 2000 his company employed 400 people and was generating $500 million in revenues.

But there is no one like that. al Ghoul was the product of his society that values hate and destruction over creativity. But if the fictional al Ghoul and many others like him existed there would now be a Palestinian state that was at least four years old. Instead the Palestinians are further from statehood than they were 11 years ago. And they have no one to blame but themselves.

It would be asking too much to expect Thomas Friedman to understand that.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.

Posted by SoccerDad at October 26, 2004 02:22 AM