Friedman has an Op-Ed in today's Times: If I Were an Israeli Looking at the Iran Deal where he walks through the conclusions he would reach if he were an Israeli grocer, Israeli general or the Israeli Prime Minister.
If I were an Israeli grocer, just following this deal on the radio, I’d hate it for enshrining Iran’s right to enrich uranium, since Iran regularly cheated its way to expanding that capability, even though it had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. After all, Iran holds “death to Israel” marches and in 2006 sponsored a conference to promote denial of the Holocaust. Moreover, Iran’s proxy, the Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, in 2006, started an unprovoked war with Israel, and when Israel retaliated against Hezbollah military and civilian targets, Hezbollah fired thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets all across Israel. No — no matter the safeguards — I as an Israeli grocer would reject this deal from my gut.
Of course, the tacit assumption is that the only the views of Jewish Israeli grocers matter. Perhaps Palestinians have a deep-seated aversion to selling vegetables.
It's interesting that Friedman chooses to discuss 2006, as if there was no history between Israel and Lebanon before that. Oh, I don't know, something like the Israeli army's invasion of Lebanon and carpet bombing of Beirut in 1982 to further the Phalangist militia's cause and create a Christian state in Lebanon. That couldn't be relevant at all could it? After all, Ben-Gurion and his cabinet actively supported the Phalangist's cause starting in 1948. Or the Palestinian expulsions that displaced hundreds of thousands and de-stabilized Lebanon and Jordan? I'm sure the deaths of thousands of civilians had nothing to do with it, nor did the IDF's role in Sabra/Shatila, or the fact that the IDF occupied Southern Lebanon and the Shi'a wanted them gone, probably because they didn't want to become another West Bank. None of that could possibly have led to the creation of Hezbollah, which happened after Israel's invasion in 1982. I mean, it's not like a former Israeli PM Ehud Barak said this in 2006:
"When we entered Lebanon ... there was no Hezbollah. We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by the Shia in the south. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah".
Friedman goes on to discuss the Israeli general's view.
Israel’s core strategic doctrine is this: No enemy will ever out-crazy us into leaving this region.
Israel plays, when it has to, by what I’ve called “Hama rules” — war without mercy. The Israeli Army tries to avoid hitting civilian targets, but it has demonstrated in both Lebanon and Gaza that it will not be deterred by the threat of civilian Arab casualties when Hezbollah or Hamas launches its rockets from civilian areas. It is not pretty, but this is not Scandinavia. The Jewish state has survived in an Arab-Muslim sea because its neighbors know that for all its Western mores it will not be out-crazied. It will play by local rules. Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah know this, which is why Israel’s generals know they possess significant deterrence against an Iranian bomb.
It's somewhat refreshing to hear Israel described as just another "crazy" regime in a "crazy" Middle-East.
But isn't it strange that only Israel can use the "crazy neighborhood defense"? Why do we never hear someone like Tom Friedman say: Well you know, it's not really their fault Hamas/Syria/Hezbollah/Lebanon/Jordan/Egypt have to resort to violence, they're dealing with this "crazy" Israeli regime that is determined to "out-crazy" everybody else in the region.
That might actually be a more accurate representation given the number of wars Israel has initiated with its neighbors. Oh right, I forgot, those were just to demonstrate they could "out-crazy" everyone else. The Suez Crisis was really no different from the All Blacks performing the Haka.
I don't know whether Friedman is consciously aware of this or not, but he's also parroting Bibi's case for last year's high civilian casualties in Gaza. For the record, hundreds of the civilian dead were not killed because "Hamas launches its rockets from civilian areas", hundreds of women and children were killed in their homes by Israeli bombs (made in the USA of course), often while they were asleep with no rockets around. This was often to assassinate a single person the IDF had decided was worth eradicating along with their entire family. This has been going on since 2002. "Out-crazy" indeed.
And seriously, what "western mores" is Friedman talking about? Are these the "western mores" of 19th century settler-colonial states in the Americas and Australia?
Anyway, Friedman figures the Israeli general would advocate for accepting the deal, which of course many actually have. Partly because:
...Iran’s ayatollahs have long demonstrated they are not suicidal. As the Israeli strategists Shai Feldman and Ariel Levite wrote recently in National Interest: “It is noteworthy that during its thirty-six-year history the Islamic Republic [of Iran] never gambled its survival as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein did three times”
Great, so the ayatollahs aren't crazy, but Israeli leaders are still out to "out-crazy" them? I don't get it, who was crazy first?
Was it Israel (and the US), which allied with the Pahlavi regime and sent Mossad and CIA guys to help set up SAVAK and trained them to torture (cough, conduct enhanced interrogations)? No, of course it wouldn't be crazy to help overthrow a popularly elected government, put an unelected monarch in place and then help him set up a brutal intelligence service. The crazy must have started with the ayatollahs who were tortured by SAVAK, sometimes to their deaths.
It's all so confusing the Middle East, I guess I should just trust the pundits.
Friedman then moves on to day-dreaming he was the Israeli PM:
I’d start by admitting that my country faces two existential threats: One, external, is an Iranian bomb and the other, internal, is the failure to separate from the West Bank Palestinians into two states, leaving only a one-state solution where Israel would end up governing so many Palestinians it could no longer be a Jewish democracy.
Riiiight, somehow Friedman would magically be able to convince the
63% of Israeli Jews who believe closing the settlements in Gaza was a mistake that they should now close the West Bank/East Jersualem settlements which have 100 times the settlers Gaza did. The electorate believes moving 7,000 people out of Gaza was wrong and they should be allowed to go back, and Friedman is convinced he'll be able to move 700,000. BTW,
46% of Israeli Jews say they completely oppose evacuating any settlements in the West Bank, another 39% say "it depends".
I guess Friedman's punditry is much more powerful than I've assumed thus far, he can magically change opinions through an 8 inch column in the New York Times Op-Ed page! But hey, we're day-dreaming here...
And then I’d put all my energies as Israel’s leader into trying to securely disengage from the West Bank Palestinians to preserve Israel as a Jewish democracy.
Yeah, like that's going to happen. The last guy who tried
was shot. The assassin is venerated by Israeli right wingers kind of like John Wilkes Booth was venerated by a particular sort of confederate sympathizer. Which of course brings us to the million shekel question. What about the "West Bank Palestinians" Friedman wants to disengage from?
Behind all his pious attempts to "put myself in someone else's shoes", Friedman never stops to ask, what do the Palestinians think about Iran developing a nuclear weapon? After all, if Iran strikes Israel, 5 million Palestinians are also toast, as is their homeland. Can we spare a thought for what they think?
Oh right, they don't matter, most of them don't have a vote. Like literally, they don't have a vote anywhere it matters. Not in Israel, not at the UN, certainly not in Congress. Their interests don't matter. The only interests that matter are the interests of Israeli grocers, generals and Prime Ministers. Moral blindness indeed.
It's like Lincoln said:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.
Everyone knows this is somehow about the Palestinians, but let's all pretend it's about "states rights", you know the Israeli state's rights.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming, snarky rant off.
PS. Please note how Friedman never says East Jerusalem. There is no peace deal with the Palestinians unless Jerusalem is a joint capital, or East Jerusalem is part of Palestine. Day dreaming indeed, but in whose shoes?