Tom Friedman is coming a bit late to this realization. He’s finally discovered what more astute observers like Tony Judt have know for well over a
decade, and others like Chomsky have suggested for over
three decades. Hell, anyone who can read a map has known for over a decade that the “two-state solution” is dead.
Start with Israel. The peace process is dead. It’s over, folks, so please stop sending the New York Times Op-Ed page editor your proposals for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.
In fact, every president since FDR has had to deal with an Israel “determined to permanently occupy all the territory”. But that’s another matter altogether.
We do need to notice what’s missing in Friedman’s statement. Bingo, it’s Gaza. He seems to have forgotten the 1.8 million people in Gaza. It’s not his fault though, it means Sharon’s “disengagement” partly accomplished what Sharon intended (spinning off Gaza and its population in discourse and fact as a separate micro-state while cleaving to the west bank even tighter).
I’m not surprised Friedman has forgotten that Palestinians consider Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem part of one entity. But hey, their desires have never carried any weight with US public intellectuals before, why start now?
But how did the “two-state solution”, the driving force behind so many finely-catered conferences die? Who killed first-class airfare and five-star hotels in Geneva for the “two-state solution” industry? Friedman now has to apportion the blame, and he does start in the right place.
How did we get there? So many people stuck knives into the peace process it’s hard to know who delivered the mortal blow. Was it the fanatical Jewish settlers determined to keep expanding their footprint in the West Bank and able to sabotage any Israeli politician or army officer who opposed them? Was it right-wing Jewish billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson, who used their influence to blunt any U.S. congressional criticism of Bibi Netanyahu?
Or was it Netanyahu, whose lust to hold onto his seat of power is only surpassed by his lack of imagination to find a secure way to separate from the Palestinians? Bibi won: He’s now a historic figure — the founding father of the one-state solution.
This is a starting point, though entirely inadequate. It’s simply too easy to blame the settlers. What about the successive Israeli governments, both left and right who permitted the settlers to take over plots in the West Bank and authorized the army to support them? Successive governments left and right, who went along with the kabuki theater of a “two-state solution” while they continued carving up the West Bank?
What about the Levi Eshkol’s government that began the occupation after a series of “preventive” strikes on neighboring states? What of the successive American governments who supported Israeli policy? What of everyone who believed the propaganda designed to de-humanize and other-ize Palestinians?
Well, I think we have to give Friedman a little bit of time to understand all that. It’s baby steps for Friedman. Give him a few more weeks or months and he might realize the full extent of the “two-state solution” shell game. For now, he can’t resist blaming Palestinians in an attempt at “even-handedness”:
And Hamas is the mother. Hamas devoted all its resources to digging tunnels to attack Israelis from Gaza rather than turning Gaza into Singapore, making a laughingstock of Israeli peace advocates. And Hamas launched a rocket close enough to Tel Aviv’s airport that the U.S. banned all American flights for a day, signaling to every Israeli, dove or hawk, what could happen if they ceded the West Bank.
But Hamas was not alone. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, sacked the only effective Palestinian prime minister ever, Salam Fayyad, who was dedicated to fighting corruption and proving that Palestinians deserved a state by focusing on building institutions, not U.N. resolutions.
First, who appointed Thomas Friedman judge over when people “deserve” self-determination? Was there some sort of election to the post at Davos? Because I could have sworn self-determination is a universal human right and not a reward.
Isn’t it remarkable how only black or brown people need to satisfy pre-conditions to “deserve” a state? After all, I’ve never heard Friedman suggest Greeks didn’t “deserve” a state because they had corrupt leaders. Nor has he ever suggested Italy should be run as a colony because they can’t manage to keep a government in power for more than 5 months. No, of course not, that suggestion would be unthinkable. But it’s par for the course for brown people.
But no one should be surprised at this, after all supposedly enlightened Silicon Valley leaders who helped build core internet technology seem to believe colonialism wasn’t all that bad and feel free to express that view, and it’s 2016 last I checked.
Since Friedman is a liberal centrist, there’s no way he’d get away without apportioning some blame to Palestinians. But we aren’t bound by those rules, and we don’t need to engage in victim-blaming. The lion’s share of the blame lies with Israel and successive Israeli governments. The Palestinians have been responding to Israeli agency for decades.
For someone who aspires to be a “public intellectual”, Friedman is especially dense when it comes to global trade and how it impacts the opportunity set for a micro-state. That’s the most reasonable and charitable explanation I can come up with for the “Gaza into Singapore” nonsense. Because of course Gaza isn’t going to become Singapore. It doesn’t lie along the straits of Malacca, nor does it have the links to the vestiges of a global empire like Singapore did when it attained independence. And last I checked, Israel had bombed Gaza’s airport, blockaded its ports, runs a ubiquitous surveillance state there and has put its people on a caloric diet. Not something Singapore has endured since the second World War ended. But this ignorant talking point is so prevalent among Op-Ed writers, one almost can’t blame Friedman for abusing it. He probably thinks it makes him sound smart, quite the opposite in fact.
Friedman is only just shrugging off the wool that’s been pulled over his eyes for so long, so let’s give him some time to adjust.
They all killed the two-state solution. Let the one-state era begin. It will involve a steady low-grade civil war between Palestinians and Israelis and a growing Israeli isolation in Europe and on college campuses that the next U.S. president will have to navigate.
Well, at least Friedman is astute enough to know what comes next. If you accept the reality is a single state that has in fact, existed for 50 years, then the corollary is that the four million people within its borders who have limited or no rights should have rights. And we then have to admit that an apartheid-like regime has been running for decades, masked as something else. Though really, there is absolutely no excuse for Friedman’s ignorance since Chomsky and numerous Israeli leftists have been saying this loudly and clearly for over three decades. Well, what a surprise, the lefty loons were right all along, and those who wanted to be fooled allowed themselves to be.
So why does Friedman’s acknowledgement matter at all? It’s not news, not even in the remotest sense. He’s three decades late to the party. Well, I’ll let Gideon Levy explain:
Friedman is only a journalist. Still, it’s impossible to ignore this seminal moment, the moment in which one who always reflected the mood in Washington and influenced it, discards the idea that has accompanied him and us for years. Friedman heard it in the hallway. If he didn’t hear it, from now on they’ll talk about it there. Too little, too late – but very encouraging. The longest masquerade ball, the two-state orgy, has reached its end, even as far as Friedman’s concerned. If America listens to its most senior commentator, then there’s hope. Europe, which continues to recite “two states” with an involuntary post-mortem spasm – because it’s convenient for everyone – will have to find its own Friedman to awaken it from its slumber.
And so we know the next steps. A boycott campaign along the lines of the one the South African apartheid regime faced. The Israeli government is a couple of steps ahead of Friedman. They’ve been hard at work delegitimizing BDS, trying to get laws passed in the US, UK and France that attempt to make boycotts of Israel and “Israel occupied territories”, illegal.