Doubting Thomas

Rue the Rue

via InstaPundit.
I was going to mention this but VodkaPundit beat me to the punch. In his Sunday column, Thomas Friedman wondered what had gone wrong with the United States in the Arab world:

I was at a dinner the other night and was introduced to a lovely Lebanese woman. We started reminiscing about the good old days in Lebanon and I asked her where she lived in Beirut. She said it was in a building off "Rue John Kennedy." I stopped her immediately. "Rue John Kennedy?" I said, rolling over the words in my mind. "I forgot there was a time when they actually named streets in the Arab world for an American president."

VodkaPundit reacts:

What's absurd here is Friedman expecting to get away with his sleight-of-hand.

Lebanon in the 1960s was about as typical an Arab country as, say, Jamaica. My great grandmother, Dorothy von Hoffmann, used to go to Beirut to gamble, fer crissakes. And don't think she wasn't gambling without her ever-present scotch & soda.

I love it when Friedman does things like that. He has no respect for his readers. And in case you didn't notice, he doesn't advertise his e-mail address like every other op-ed columnist for the Times. And Friedman blasts the Bush administration for being secretive. I sure hope that he mends his ways.

Sensible Column; Declined

On Sunday Friedman had a tantrum and called "Kicking over the Chessboard" instead of writing a column.

At first, I thought I'd write a column that just ripped President Bush for declaring that the United States — after decades of neutrality — has decided to oppose the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel as part of any final peace settlement. Why is the president dragging America into the middle of this most sensitive Israeli-Palestinian issue? You're telling me that just because Ariel Sharon has to persuade the right-wing lunatics in his cabinet to undo the lunatic settlement mess that Mr. Sharon himself created, America has to pay for it with its own standing in the Arab world?

The notion that President Bush's support for Israel has hurt America's standing with the Arab world assumes that when an American President leans on Israel, it helps America's standing in the Arab world. Despite leaning on Israel (and building a coalition with much of the Arab world) President George HW Bush was snubbed by King Hussein (King Abdullah's father) when it came to recruiting for the first Gulf War. (It didn't stop Bush 41 from treating the king royally while showing PM Shamir the back of his hand.) And as I showed on Soccer Dad President Clinton's pressuring of PM Netanyahu didn't, in the end, secure the backing of the Arab world for peace.

But then I thought I also had to write to the Arab leaders wailing over the Bush statements and ask them a simple question: Where have you been? Saudi Arabia's crown prince comes up with one peace plan, one time, for one day. That was it. There's been no follow-up — not a single imaginative, or even pedestrian, Saudi, Arab or Palestinian initiative to sell this peace plan to the Israeli people. And what did the Palestinians think? That years of insane suicide bombing of Israelis wouldn't drive Israel to act unilaterally?

Friedman's final sentence here is correct. But shouldn't he ask himself if all the years he and other journalists, politicians and diplomats who supported the Palestinian grievance encouraged the terror?
But he really has to get a grip. A friend pointed out (I missed this when I first read the tantrum) that if he acknowledges now that Saudi "peace proposal" was legitimate for no more than one day, what makes him think that it was legitimate for even that one day? In fact the proposal would never have gotten off the ground if not for his promotion of it (and the promotion of it by his paper the NY Times.) And just in case he doesn't see himself as an enabler of the Saudi fiction he should check out the official Saudi website where he can find his column reproduced in its entirety!
The problem with the Saudi proposal was that it wasn't as much a peace plan as an ultimatum. Crown Prince Abdullah never offered any "confidence building measures" (say a humanitarian gesture like allowing the Mogen David Adom to join the International Committee of the Red Cross) or offered any specifics over what the Arab world would offer Israel. (To say that a bunch of kings and dictators could offer "legitimacy" to a democracy is perverse.) And the demands were clearly unacceptable to Israel. Remember that, to the Saudis, Israel would have to withdraw from Gilo, French Hill, Ramat Eshkol and Ramot.

But after I got all these prospective columns off my chest, I decided what I really wanted to say was this: I'm fed up with the Middle East, or more accurately, I'm fed up with the stalemate in the Middle East. All it has produced is death, destruction and endless "he hit me first" debates on cable television. Arabs, Israelis, Americans — everyone is sick of it.

Friedman is too smart to really believe this. The conflict in the Middle East isn't about "he hit me first," it is about Israel's legitimacy and whether the Arab world will accept it. As noted above, Friedman and people like him supported the excuse the Arab world generally and the Palestinians specifically needed for not accepting Israel's right to exist.

First, will Mr. Sharon win the backing of his right-wing coalition for his Gaza withdrawal plan — which has set off the biggest ideological split in the Jewish right since Camp David? If Mr. Sharon really does split his party and manages to withdraw all Israeli settlements and forces from Gaza, there will only be a far right in Israel and a far left, and a huge center — which is what stable, sane politics requires. That would be a sea change in Israeli politics. Israelis will prove to themselves and to the Arabs that they can, under the right conditions, break the grip of the settlers. The Arabs will never again be able to say: "Why should we do anything? Israel will never leave the settlements anyway." Moreover, Israel will very likely have to form a national unity government — of Labor and Likud — to pull this off, and only such a coalition could reach a negotiated final peace with the Palestinians.

"Break the grip of the settlers?" Give me a break. That happened in January 1997 when PM Netanyahu signed the Hebron Accord; if not sooner. The only reason there's not Palestinian state right now is because Arafat refused it. Despite the "settlers," PM Barak would have signed a deal at Camp David if Arafat had been willing. Friedman really has to get over his obsession with the "settlers." And let's not forget that Friedman supported the Geneva Accord that was recently promoted by the self promoting Israeli ultra leftist, Yossi Beilin. Friedman doesn't pine for the center in Israel, but for its extreme left.

Second, will the Bush team make sure that Mr. Sharon, or his successor, fully withdraws from Gaza as promised? The Bush folks are experts at throwing up chessboards and then leaving the room, with the pieces bouncing all over the floor, and not doing the follow-up (see Iraq) because it interferes with their domestic political agenda. Having given up real U.S. negotiating assets to get Mr. Sharon to move, if Mr. Bush turns a blind eye to any Sharon stalling, U.S. interests will be badly damaged.

This is a good one. For seven years the Clinton administration turned a blind eye to Arafat's perfidies. Not a single commitment was fulfilled. But who did the Clinton administration blame for the failure of the peace process? Until 2000, it was Netanyahu. Israel has, since 1993, ceded territory (not as fast as many such as Friedman would like) to the PA in return for empty promises. I suspect, that as much as it pains him, PM Sharon will pull Israel out Gaza. (When he had an obligation to move Jews out of the Sinai, he did it. In fact many of the Jews in Gaza gave up their homes in the Sinai - willingly or not - in the name of peace with Egypt.) The only thing that will keep Sharon from his withdrawal is an increase in violence that makes withdrawal untenable.

Finally, if Mr. Sharon does pull out of Gaza, the Palestinians will have a chance to reposition themselves in the eyes of Israelis. They will have a chance to build a decent ministate of their own in Gaza that will prove to Israelis they can live in peace next to Israel. It will be hard and they will need help. Gaza is dirt poor. But if the Palestinians show they can build a decent state, it will do more to persuade Israelis to give up more of the West Bank, or swap land there for parts of Israel, than any Bush statements or Hamas terror. This is the best chance Palestinians have ever had to run their own house without the Israelis around. I wish them well, because if they do well, everything will be on the table.

The Palestinians had this chance. And they chose violence. In that way, it can be said that Arafat accurately represented the will of his people. Despite what Friedman wrote last Thursday:

Here's the message I take from this: There is nothing like the burden of responsibility to promote accountability.

we really haven't seen that take place in the context of Arab-Israeli conflict.
One last thing the Palestinians are not as poor as others:

(That said, conditions should not be exaggerated. Foreign aid adds $800 million a year, bringing annual per capita income to about $1,000 — or about the same as Syria and higher than India and all but a few sub-Saharan countries. Palestinians are thus by no means the poorest people in the world.)

Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas.