Doubting Thomas

Thomas Friedman Terror Appeaser

One of Thomas Friedman's nastiest commentaries was ". . . And One Man Voted Twice" after the election of Binyamin Netanyahu. The man who voted twice was Yigal Amir. According to Friedman, Amir had a chance to vote twice; once when he killed PM Yitzchak Rabin and the second time when he voted for Binyamin Netanyahu. He was, in short, delegitimizing Netanyahu. Netanyahu ("the bad guy") wouldn't have won without Amir.
Well guess what. Until a series of Hamas terror attacks in February and March 1996 Shimon Peres was leading Binyamin Netanyahu by "20 points in opinion polls." Where did I learn that? From today's Friedman column, "No Vote for Al Qaeda".
This contradicts his nasty column of eight years ago. Anyone the slightest bit familiar with Israeli politics knew that Netanyahu won *DESPITE* the assassination of Rabin not because of it. In November 1995 Netanyahu was running neck and neck with Rabin. In the aftermath of the assassination Likud (and Netanyahu) lost significant ground to Labor.
So today Friedman acknowledges the truth he distorted eight years ago. I might call it progress, if today's column weren't so twisted.
The gist of today's column is that the Arab/Israeli conflict has been a laboratory for the war on terror. Every tactic tried in the Middle East, according to Friedman, it being used in the War on Terror.
What's one example? Just as the Palestinian terrorists used terror to influence Israeli elections during the 80's and 90's and bring Likud to power, so to Al Qaeda will now attempt to effect the outcome of Western elections. It's a nice hypothesis, but tell me which Israeli elections were decided by terror?
Well one of the most effective ads in the 1992 Israeli elections was the Labor ad promising to take Gaza out of Tel Aviv. This campaign worked because a 15 year old girl named Helana Rapp was killed at a busstop a few months before the election. So terror, in 1992, helped Yitzchak Rabin get elected.
And if Hamas always prefers a Likud victory why then didn't it launch a series attacks prior to the 1999 election?
The answer is that Hamas has constraints. Hamas attacks when it has the means and opportunity to do so. It had the means and opportunity in 1996 when Israel had, just a few months earlier, withdrawn from Jenin, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, Nablus, Ramallah and one other city, leaving them under the control of the PA. The PA did not secure those cities from Hamas as it was required to by Oslo, so it gave Hamas the opportunity to organize in those areas.
In 1999 the PA had been cooperating, at least minimally, with Israel so Hamas didn't have the capacity at that time to carry out widespread attacks.
In the runup to the February 2001 elections there had been a series of roadside shootings. It took several months for suicide bombings to become the signature violence of the so called Aqsa intifada - really Arafat's Aqsa war. (The majority of those were claimed by Al Aqsa Brigades, if my memory is correct.) But Ehud Barak lost his hold on the government more for the failure of Camp David 2000 and the launch of Arafat's war against Israel than for any action of Hamas.
The notion that:

The Palestinian terrorists always "voted" Likud, not Labor. They wanted hard-liners at the helm in Israel because they would build more settlements and further radicalize and destabilize the situation.

is Friedman's own bias speaking. There is no evidence that Hamas prefers Labor or Likud. (Many people, in fact, fault Ehud Barak for building settlements when he was PM, so wouldn't Hamas have been happy with him to continue in office?) This is simply another way of saying that Hamas and Likud are aligned. The idea that a terror organization is somehow the moral equivalent of a legitimate political party is nothing more than slander.
And guess what? When Binyamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister there was less terror against Israeli citizens than during the tenure of any other post Oslo Prime Minister and the Palestinians were better off. From Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, a news release from November 1998:

The number of Palestinians working in Israel is steadily growing. Lawfully employed Palestinians in Israel today number about 60,000, of whom some 13,000 work in industrial zones and in the settlements. All told, more than 100,000 Palestinians are estimated to be employed in Israel approaching the record number employed in 1992.

Despite the stability implied by such statistics, Hamas didn't try to undermine Netanyahu by unleashing a wave of bombings.
Hamas is out for whatever any similar organization is for. It is out for more power and thus greater opportunities to exert its influence and carry out its operations. It has no preference in Israeli elections. (In fact I believe that Hamas spokesmen are famous for saying that they have no preference between Labor and Likud. I won't assert that confidentally though.)
The true similarity between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the War on Terror is something that Thomas Friedman would be loath to admit: the bad guys in both cases are enabled, empowered and encouraged by democrats who try to understand them.
When Yasser Arafat and Hamas saw that Israel was encouraged or pressured to respond to terror with acquiesence and concessions instead of force, they saw that their terror was successful. And indeed many in the diplomatic, political, academic and journalistic worlds believe that the core problem in the Middle East is "occupation" not terror or hatred. Until a few years ago Israel was pressured to treat Arafat as a "peace partner" and not an enemy no matter how many times he and his organization were implicated in terror.
Instead of fighting this terror Israel was told it had to hand over land. The implication of this was not lost on the PA or Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it showed them that terror paid and didn't have a significant associated cost. As long persons of influence continued saying that the Palestinian cause was just and shouldn't be illegitimate because of the terror associated with it. What people who made this argument (a common one in newspaper columns such as Mr. Friedman's ) didn't see was that the terror was an essential component of Palestinian nationalism. Encouraging that nationalism while its malignant component was ascendant only invited more terror and would never have brought peace.
The late Michael Kelly had it correct when he wrote in "When Innocents are the Enemy,"

Of all the uses of terror, none in the past several decades has been more faddishly popular (at least on the left), and none has been accorded more respectful media coverage, than that of the Palestinians. Yes, Palestinian terrorists and terrorists on behalf of the Palestinian cause murdered innocents -- but that was understandable, the argument went. The Palestinians had been wronged. They were oppressed. They were weak. What else could they do?

Here is where we end up, with murder on a mass scale of people whose sole sin was, apparently, that they were Americans. Immediate suspicion focused on anti-Israeli (and therefore anti-American) terrorist groups. Yasser Arafat, who has championed the legitimacy of anti-Israeli terror his entire career, nonetheless was quick to express himself "completely shocked," at an attack he said he condemned, and he offered the American people condolences on behalf "of the Palestinian people."

I don't doubt Arafat's shock. And I don't think he had anything directly to do with the monstrous evil of Sept. 11. Indeed, it is possible that what happened yesterday had nothing to do with the Middle East. But this evil rose, with hideous logic, directly from the philosophy that the leaders and supporters of the Palestinian cause have long embraced and still embrace -- a philosophy that accepts the murder of innocents as a legitimate expression of a legitimate struggle.

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.

The appeasement of Arab terror against Israel is one of the factors that encouraged Al Qaeda. After all if the West didn't stand with Israel, why would it stand for other countries? It is a test that Mr. Friedman failed, consistently blaming Israel (or, at least Likud) for exacerbating a situation that was being hijacked by terrorists. Had the world stood with Israel, Al Qaeda may not have emerged in the malignant form we saw in the embassy bombings or 9/11 or any of its other outrages.
If Friedman is looking for reasons for Al Qaeda's success he ought to look in the mirror. The pass he so often gave to Yasser Arafat helped a lot. I'm glad that he is staunchly anti Al Qaeda. I just wish he understood that neither Al Qaeda nor violent Palestinian nationalism can be accomodated. It is clear from his column - equating Hamas with Likud - that he still doesn't get it.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.