Doubting Thomas

Good for israel?

Behind the Times Select firewall we see this much of Thomas's latest "Rooting for Bibi":

A loss for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the Likud Party could be a victory for Israel’s moderates.

Quite clearly the gist of this article will argue that if Netanyahu wins the Likud primary, the Likud will split between the moderates and the far right. Bibi will lead the Likud to flaming defeat and the Israelis will win, no longer being threatened by the extreme right wing.
When Friedman says Israelis, he means Israelis as opposed to Jews. Bibi is a Jew. Peres is an Israeli. Israelis are enlightened folk; Jews are not.
No doubt Thomas is basing himself on current poll figures. I don't doubt that they may indicate the the shakeups he writes about; but they're too early to be used for any well reasoned analysis of Israel's electorate.
I'll update this entry when I get access to Thomas's full column.
UPDATE: Now I have it and my call was correct:

If I could vote, there is no question whom I would cast my ballot for: Bibi. Yes, pray for Bibi to crush Mr. Sharon and drive him right out of the party. That's where Mr. Sharon belongs.

Why, you ask? Because the Likud under Bibi, and without Ariel Sharon, will be free to be itself -- to represent the lunatic right in Israel, become a fringe party and drive over a cliff. Mr. Sharon will then also be free to be himself, to form a new party with other center-right and center-left figures, a party that can give Israel a solid majority for making a final settlement with the Palestinians -- provided they ever get their act together and turn Gaza, their ministate, into something more like Dubai and less like Mogadishu.

There are several prolbems with Thomas's premises here.
1) Despite Thomas's name calling, Bibi isn't any more extreme that PM Sharon. Netanyahu was the first Likud leader to propose territorial compromise (in 1997) and to actually carry it out. (He withdrew Israeli troops from 80% of Chevron.)
2) The likelihood of a Sharon led "centrist" party succeeding is extremely small. In the past decade, none of the ballyhooed centrist parties succeeded. And as my brother pointed, even David ben Gurion was unsuccessful when he started his own party.
3) I believe that Netanyahu's chances of beating Sharon in this preliminary vote (and subsequently in a primary) are rather small; but even if Netanyahu prevails it won't lead to the demise the Likud. Right now, despite whatever labels Thomas wishes to use, the Likud is the centrist party in Israel right now.

Thomas continues later:

The whole debate about disengagement from Gaza exposed the real political trends in Israel today, precisely because having 8,000 Jews living in one-third of the Gaza Strip, surrounded by over 1.3 million Palestinians, had become utterly insane -- disconnected from any strategic, moral, demographic, nationalist or religious logic. Therefore, those who supported continuing the status quo in Gaza indefinitely, which included the whole hard-line wing of Likud, really identified themselves as Jewish extremists and messianists who are a danger to the future of Israel and the Jewish people.

Those who were against it have had their fears realized in the past few weeks:
1) The burning of the one time synagogues.
2) The destruction of the greenhouses.
3) The smuggling of the weapons.
4) The shooting of the rockets.
5) The encouragement to terrorists.
6) The insistence that Gaza (and surrounding areas) is (are) still occupied.
All of these were foreseeable outcomes of the withdrawal; not crazy messianic visions. I'd love Thomas to explain why these effects aren't so bad.There were plenty of good reason not to withdraw from Gaza. The cost, short term, has been high. Why doesn't Thomas explain that these costs are worth it instead of denigrating those who feared them?

BTW, I disagreed with the withdrawal, but if everything I've read is correct, Bibi would have done it too. Maybe not in the same fashion or the same time frame, but he would have done it.

Finally let's get to some general comments about Thomas's views on the Middle East.

He calls Likudniks who disagreed with disengagement "the lunatic right." He roots for their repudiation at the polls to render them political defeated. Well how do you think Thomas regards Yossi Beilin? Why to Thomas, Yossi Beilin is a "moderate." Yossi Beilin, you may remember, was too dovish for the Labor party, so he struck out on his own. And ... Well he's no longer a member of Knesset because his party did so well in the 2003 elections. But in "Wanted: Fanatical Moderates" ( November 16, 2003) this is what Thomas wrote:

What I have always admired about Mr. Beilin is that he is a fanatical moderate -- as committed to his moderation as the extremists are to their extremism. In a Middle East where extremists tend to go all the way and moderates tend just to go away, the example that he and his Palestinian partners are setting is critical. It shows that civil society in Israel and the West Bank is still alive and refuses to give in to pessimism. But they need, and deserve, courage and help from America now too.

Yossi Beilin is the lunatic left in Israel. If Thomas calls him a moderate he's showing his own ideological colors.

(What was at issue was the Geneva Accord, a publicity stunt that Beilin, rejected by the voters of Israel, pulled to get back in the news and pretend that he was working towards peace.)

In short if Thomas agrees with a politician his rejection at the polls does not constitute irrelevance; if he disagrees with a politician then his career is over.

Earlier I had mentioned that Netanyahu was the first Likud Prime Minister to propose territorial compromise. That happened in 1997. Here's how Charles Krauthammer characterized it in "Netanyahu's Map" (WP, June 13, 1997):

Some critics, pointing to these percentages, say the plan is not forthcoming enough. But they miss the point, the momentousness of the principles conceded here by Likud. Likud, after all, is the "Land of Israel" party, the party whose election was greeted in the United States with teeth-gnashing anguish as the ascendancy of religious-nationalist "Greater Israel" fanaticism.

Even before Netanyahu's election, I argued that this view was a compound of nonsense and disinformation. The Netanyahu plan now proves the point. With it, Likud does the unthinkable. It lays out a territorial compromise. It leaves some Jewish settlements behind Palestinian lines, ensuring that they will eventually be razed. And it omits any mention of Likud's ritual opposition to a Palestinian state, a clear signal that it is prepared to concede this principle too. And this is its opening negotiating position!

Thomas responded with "All Map and No Vision" (NYT, June 16, 1997):

But even that could be surmountable in negotiations. The main reason Mr. Netanyahu's map was spurned by the Arabs was that it was totally unconnected to what he's doing on the ground -- where negotiations have halted, where Israel is squeezing Palestinians out of Jerusalem and engaging in in-your-face settlement-building and other machinations, and where Mr. Netanyahu is mounting a campaign in America to delegitimize Mr. Arafat, who is the only Palestinian leader who can sign for less than 100 percent of the West Bank and make it stick with his people.

Peace is not just about maps. It's about relationships -- mutual trust and mutual understanding of the other side's political constraints.

(Funny, but the Arabs never need to consider the Israeli leaders' "political constraints" do they?)

To which Martin Peretz responded in "Off the Map" ( TNR, July 7, 1997):

My friend Tom Friedman, opining in The New York Times, answered Krauthammer's complaint, and agreed, in part. "A huge tree fell in the forest of Israel the other day, and nobody heard it," Tom wrote of the reception accorded to Netanyahu's plan. But Tom's reason for the odd silence is the usual reason--it is Netanyahu's fault: "the main reason Mr. Netanyahu's map was spurned by the Arabs was that it was totally unconnected to what he's doing on the ground." I see a different reason: I think the main reason Netanyahu's map was spurned by the Arabs is that the Arabs know they can count on attitudes like Tom's to prevail in the American press. They can count on a press that deeply dislikes Netanyahu to dismiss even a substantive proposal from him as cynical posturing.

Exactly, and eight years later Thomas is still cynically placing burdens on Israel that he doesn't place on the Palestinians. Remember earlier I quoted from last week's "Rooting for Bibi" about the Palestinians trying to make their" ...ministate, into something more like Dubai and less like Mogadishu."

It's nice for him to pay lip service to the risks Israel is taking. But that's not crediting Israel properly. It's an issue that he needs to address but won't. Why not?

Thomas is effectively a member of Peace Now. If he doesn't actually pay dues, he still fully subscribes to that organization's views. There is nothing original about his analysis except perhaps for his semi-clever formulations. For Thomas, everything in the Middle East must fit into Peace Now's ideological framework: there will only be peace when Israel satisfies Palestinian territorial demands, "settlements," not Palestinian rejectionism are the main obstacle to peace, and the Jewish historical connection to the land of Israeli is irrelevant.

I bring up that last point because that's perhaps Thomas's most significant flaw. He may be able to say that supporters of "settlements" are beyond the pale, but he doesn't recognize that his own position is too. If you polled Israelis about the importance of the Jewish historical connection to the land of Israel, I would guess that not more than 20% of those polled would say that it wasn't. But among those 20% (and probably less) are most of the Israelis that Thomas hangs out with. So to him that's mainstream; but he's fooling himself. Hopefully he doesn't fool anyone else.

One final note: All sources used in this article were obtained from public library databases. So you can use them not just to get around Times Select but also to go pretty far back in both magazines and newspapers.

Technorati Tags: Thomas Friedman, Israel, Technorati Tags: Times Select.

Crossposted on Doubting Thomas and Israpundit.

Posted by SoccerDad at September 23, 2005 04:20 AM | TrackBack