Tom Friedman: Israel Is Losing Its Greatest Asset: Acceptance

[maestrob]

Feb. 27, 2024

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Amman, Jordan

I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s.

I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.

That such anger is boiling over in the Arab world is obvious, but I heard it over and over again in conversations in India during the past week — from friends, business leaders, an official and journalists both young and old. That is even more telling because the Hindu-dominated government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only major power in the global south that has supported Israel and consistently blamed Hamas for inviting the massive Israeli retaliation and the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, the majority of them civilians.

That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. But when so many civilians die in a retaliatory invasion that was launched by an Israeli government without any political horizon for the morning after — and then, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally offers a morning-after plan that essentially says to the world that Israel now intends to occupy both the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely — it is no surprise that Israel’s friends will edge away and the Biden team will start to look hapless.

As Shekhar Gupta, the veteran editor of the Indian newspaper ThePrint, put it to me: “There’s enormous love and admiration for Israel in India. But a war with no end will strain it. Initial shock and awe apart, Netanyahu’s war is damaging Israel’s greatest asset: the widely held belief in the invincibility of its army, the infallibility of its intelligence services and the justness of its mission.”


Each day brings new calls for Israel to be banned from international academic, artistic and athletic competitions or events. That so much of it is hypocritical in singling out Israel for censure — while ignoring the excesses of Iran, Russia, Syria and China, not to mention Hamas — is true. But this Israeli government is doing things that make it too easy. Many of Israel’s friends are now just praying for a cease-fire so that they don’t have to be asked by their citizens or voters — especially their youth — how they can be indifferent to so many mounting civilian casualties in Gaza.

In particular, many Arab leaders who privately want to see Hamas destroyed, who understand what a warped and destructive force it is, are being pressured from the streets to the elites to publicly distance themselves from an Israel that is unwilling to consider any political horizon for Palestinian independence on any border.

Or, as Netanyahu put it in the morning-after plan he issued last Friday: Israel will keep security control over Gaza, the territory will be demilitarized, the strip’s southern border with Egypt will be sealed much more tightly in coordination with Cairo, the United Nations agency that provides primary health and education services for Palestinian refugees will be disbanded and education and administration will be completely overhauled. Civil administration and day-to-day policing will be based on “local elements with administrative and management experience.” Who will pay for all of this and how local Palestinians will be enlisted to perpetuate Israel’s control is not explained.

I have real sympathy for the strategic dilemma that Israel faced on Oct. 7 — a surprise attack by Hamas that was designed to make Israel crazy by murdering parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents, sexually abusing and mutilating women and kidnapping infants and grandparents. It was pure barbarism.

It felt to me, at least, that the world was ready initially to accept that there were going to be significant civilian casualties if Israel was going to root out Hamas and recover its hostages, because Hamas had embedded itself in tunnels under homes, hospitals, mosques and schools and made no preparations of its own to protect Gazan civilians from the Israeli retaliation it knew it would trigger.

But now we have a toxic combination of thousands of civilian casualties and a Netanyahu peace plan that promises only endless occupation, no matter if the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank transforms itself into a legitimate, effective, broad-based governing body that can take control of both the West Bank and Gaza and be a partner one day for peace.

So the whole Israel-Gaza operation is starting to look to more and more people like a human meat grinder whose only goal is to reduce the population so that Israel can control it more easily.

Netanyahu refuses to even consider trying to nurture a new relationship with non-Hamas Palestinians, because to do so would risk his prime minister’s chair, which depends on backing by hard-right Jewish supremacist parties who will never cede an inch of the West Bank. Hard to believe, but Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice Israel’s hard-won international legitimacy for his personal political needs. He will not hesitate to take Biden down with him.

But the broader point is that a unique opportunity to permanently diminish Hamas, not only as an army but also as a political movement, is being squandered because Netanyahu refuses to encourage any prospect, however long term, of building toward a two-state solution.

Still so traumatized by Oct. 7, Israelis, in my view, are failing to see that at least making an effort to move slowly toward a Palestinian state led by a transformed Palestinian Authority and conditioned on demilitarization and hitting certain institutional governance goals is not a gift to Palestinians or a reward for Hamas.

It is instead the most hard-nosed, selfish thing Israelis could now do for themselves — because Israel is losing on three fronts at once today.

It is losing the global narrative that it is fighting a just war. It has no plan to ever get out of Gaza, so it will eventually sink into the sands there with a permanent occupation that will surely complicate relations with all its Arab allies and friends across the globe. And it is losing regionally to Iran and its anti-Israel proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, who are pressuring Israel’s northern, southern and eastern borders.

There is one fix that would help on all three fronts: an Israeli government prepared to begin the process of building two nation-states for two peoples, with a Palestinian Authority that is truly ready and willing to transform itself. That changes the narrative. It gives cover for Israel’s Arab allies to partner with Israel in rebuilding Gaza, and it provides the glue for the regional alliance Israel needs to confront Iran and its proxies.

In failing to see that, I believe Israel is imperiling decades of diplomacy to get the world to recognize the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination and self-defense in their historic homeland. It is also relieving Palestinians of the burden and depriving them of the opportunity of recognizing two nation-states for two people and building the necessary institutions and compromises to make that happen. And, I repeat, it is going to put the Biden administration in an increasingly untenable position.

And it is making Iran’s day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/opin ... edman.html

[jserraglio]

Bibi’s to blame. He is the very model of a modern Right-wing nativist!!

[Rach3]

Bibi’s to blame. He is the very model of a modern Right-wing nativist!!

Plus being under criminal indictment. Sound familiar ?

[jserraglio]

Donald was indicted for all of us. His reelection will be the Second Coming and will be followed hard upon by the Third Great Awakening and the Rapture.

Trump Country will replace Western New York as our newest “burned-over district”.

There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious.

Bibi as the Messiah? That, I believe, amounts to blasphemy.

[Belle]

Bibi’s to blame. He is the very model of a modern Right-wing nativist!!

This is silly, shallow, partisan and low resolution - like almost all your hate-fuelled rants.

[Belle]

The NYT Misrepresents the History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
A welter of factual errors and misleading judgments has produced a distorted description of the 1948 War.(Quillette)

As we saw from the savage Hamas assault on southern Israel on 7 October, the Palestinians have certainly been active protagonists in their more-than-century-long battle against Zionism and Israel. But the New York Times would have it otherwise. Indeed, the underlying narrative in their magazine piece of 6 February 2024, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948,” is that the Palestinians have always lacked agency and have no responsibility for anything that has befallen them over the decades. This, plus a welter of factual errors and misleading judgments, has produced a seriously distorted description of the history of the first Arab–Israeli war and its origins.

The Times article consists of a lengthy “discussion” between Arab and Jewish scholars (three ostensibly from each side) and comments and clarifications (and mis-clarifications) by Emily Bazelon, the NYT staff writer who moderated the dialogue and put the piece together. Five of the six people involved can hardly be deemed experts on either the Arab–Israeli conflict or the 1948 war. Only one—Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington—has published works of some relevance: The Road Not Taken (1991), on the clandestine post-1948 Arab–Israeli peace talks, and The War for Lebanon (1984), on the Israel–PLO war of the early 1980s. During the discussion, the three Arab panellists—Nadim Bawalsa, an associate editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies; Leena Dallasheh, who is writing a book on Nazareth in the 1940s and ’50s; and Salim Tamari, a sociologist from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank—almost uniformly toe the PLO (or Hamas) line, which is indistinguishable from propaganda.

The drift of the Times article is that the innocent Arabs of Palestine just sat back and watched, as suffering victims, as the Zionists, Israel, and some international actors, principally Great Britain, did their worst.

This is pure nonsense.

Throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, Palestine’s Arabs consistently rejected all proposals for a political compromise and flatly demanded all of Palestine, “from the river to the sea.” And they did not restrict their activities to roundtable discussions. In April 1920, May 1921, and August 1929, Arab mobs, whose passions had been whipped up by religious and political leaders, attacked their Jewish neighbours and passers-by in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, and Safad, killing dozens in what amounted to a succession of pogroms. (The New York Times studiously avoids this word, referring to them only as “assaults.”)

Emily Bazelon informs readers that the first bout of violence took place when the 1920 Muslim Nebi Musa festivities in Jerusalem “turned into a deadly riot,” in which “five Jews and four Arabs [were] killed.” Neither she nor any of the panellists mention that an Arab mob attacked, murdered, and wounded Jews or that the crowd of perpetrators chanted “nashrab dam al-yahud” (‘we will drink the blood of the Jews’). Nor does she tell us that the crowd shouted, “Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword,” according to eyewitness Khalil al Sakakini, a Christian Arab educator. After three days of rampage and despoliation, British mandate security forces finally restored order, killing all or most of the four Arabs Bazelon mentions in the process. The findings of the subsequent British investigation are included in the July 1920 Palin Report, which states: “All the evidence goes to show that these [Arab] attacks were of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children—frequently in the back.”

During the May 1921 pogroms, which encompassed Jaffa, Hadera, Rehovot, and Petah Tikva, dozens of Jews were killed, and women were raped. In the efforts to restore peace, British security forces killed dozens of the attackers. Leading contemporary Zionist journalist Itamar Ben-Avi wrote: “The Islamic wave and stormy seas will eventually break loose and if we don’t set a dike … they will flood us with their wrath … Tel Aviv, in all her splendour … will be wiped out.”

The August 1929 riots were deliberately incited by the mufti of Jerusalem, the country’s senior Muslim cleric, Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, who was soon to emerge as the leader of the Palestine Arab national movement. He and his aides told the Arab masses that the Jews intended to destroy Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and build a (third) Jewish temple on the site, and that they had “violated the honour of Islam and raped the women and murdered widows and babies.” The resultant riots started in Jerusalem and quickly spread throughout Palestine. Dozens of Jews were massacred, and many Jewish women were raped, in the area around Jerusalem, and in Hebron and Safad. The British High Commissioner, John Chancellor, condemned “the atrocious acts committed by bodies of ruthless and bloodthirsty evildoers … upon defenceless members of the Jewish population [with] … acts of unspeakable savagery.” The British Shaw Commission, which investigated the multiple pogroms, concurred.

Bazelon comments that in 1929 the “Palestinians rebelled” against the British and “violence first broke out over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.” (Throughout the New York Times piece, Bazelon uses the phrase “violence broke out,” instead of explicitly stating that the Arabs assaulted the Jews, though she does concede that in 1929 Jews were massacred in Hebron and Safad). The Canadian Derek Penslar of Harvard University, one of the three Jewish panellists, explains that “Muslims thought … that the Jews were planning to take over the Temple Mount” and recommends to readers Israeli historian Hillel Cohen’s book Year Zero of the Arab–Israeli Conflict: 1929, which argues that the Jews and the Arabs were equally to blame for the violence of that year. Indeed, Cohen writes that Jews—not Arabs—initiated the cycle of murders in Jerusalem that set off the countrywide violence. Penslar’s sympathies seem clear here and elsewhere—as when he remarks that “Many Zionists wanted to believe that they represented progress,” the implication being that he thinks otherwise.
The panellists then discuss the crucial years 1936–39, when the Arabs rebelled against the British—the Arabs like to call the previous bout of violence, of 1929, a “rebellion,” though it wasn’t—and the British, partly in response, eventually switched from supporting Zionism to supporting the Arabs. In November 1936, during a pause in the fighting, the British sent the Peel Commission to investigate matters and propose a solution. The commission, composed of eminent jurists, ex-diplomats, and academics, recommended that the British abandon the Mandate and that Palestine be partitioned into two states: a Jewish state, on 17 percent of the land; and an Arab state on most of the rest. The British were to retain Jerusalem and Bethlehem, together with a thin corridor to the Mediterranean.

Penslar admits that the Palestinians “rejected partition out of hand.” This is true. But he adds: “The Zionists split over the proposal. Some [opposed partition] … More pragmatic Zionists accepted partition in principle but rejected [the 17 percent share, as they desired a larger state].”

This is a misleading attempt to project even-handedness. The inexpert reader is left with the impression that neither the Zionists nor the Arabs endorsed the proposed compromise. In fact, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt and the looming threat of the Holocaust in Europe, the representatives of the Zionist movement, led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, abandoned their traditional claim to all of Palestine and resigned themselves to partition—although they did hope to negotiate a greater share of Palestine to be earmarked for Jewish statehood. As Weizmann at one point put it, because of the acute need for a safe haven for European Jewry, the movement would accept a state “even the size of a tablecloth.”

The New York Times describes the 1948 War in the same euphemistic terms as the Arab attacks of 1920, 1921, and 1929. The 1948 War, Bazelon explains, simply “broke out.” This is an obfuscation. What actually happened is that the Arabs of Palestine and the surrounding Arab states rejected the United Nations General Assembly partition proposal of 29 November 1947, Resolution 181, and the following day, militiamen/terrorists ambushed two Jewish buses near Tel Aviv and snipers fired at Jewish passers-by in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thus initiating the civil war between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine. In May 1948, following the Palestinian failure to halt the establishment of a Jewish state, the armies of the neighbouring Arab states invaded the country.

A similar distortion of the historical record informs the experts’ discussion of the international context of the conflict. Blame is laid at every doorstep except that of the Arabs. The British, who ruled Palestine from 1917–18 until mid-May 1948, are portrayed as gung-ho pro-Zionists and Arab bashers. The reality was more nuanced. True, in November 1917, London issued the Balfour Declaration, which expressed support for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. But during the first years of British control, the rulers were frankly hostile toward the Zionist enterprise and in the years that followed, while they protected the Zionist enterprise—albeit avoiding any explicit endorsement of Jewish statehood—the British sporadically curbed Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1938–1939, the British definitively switched sides: they turned against Zionism and supported Arab majority rule over Palestine, as presaged in the White Paper of May 1939. This remained British policy until the last days of the Mandate. Even as World War Two was raging, the British naval blockade prevented Jews from escaping the Holocaust in Europe and reaching Palestine’s shores. London stopped supporting Jewish statehood and abstained from the crucial November 1947 UN vote on partition. In the 1948 war, the British supported the Arabs in various ways, including by supplying them with arms, continuing the anti-Jewish blockade of the country’s shores until mid-May 1948, and threatening to intervene directly against the IDF in the south (though it is true that the Mandate government in Jerusalem and the withdrawing British troops generally behaved even-handedly—a fact misrepresented in both Israeli and Palestinian historiography). Panellist Tamari is therefore quite mistaken when he concludes: “The British were largely complicit in the [1948] Arab defeat.”

But the article’s worst historical distortions concern the events surrounding the Second World War. Penslar claims that “between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought for the Allied forces in World War II.” In fact, as far as I know, it is doubtful whether any Palestine Arabs actually “fought” during the war, though perhaps some 6,000 of Palestine’s 1.2 million Arabs signed up with the British and served as cooks, drivers, or guards in British installations in Palestine. By comparison, around 28,000 of Palestine’s Jews—out of a population of around 550,000—joined the British army, and many of them actually fought in North Africa and Italy in 1941–1945.

This talk of Palestine Arabs “fighting” alongside the British is, at best, misleading. Palestine’s Arabs—like most of the Middle East’s Arabs—would have preferred a Nazi German victory and the defeat of the Western democracies. The British were seen as the common enemy of the Germans and the Palestinians. As Sakakini, a Palestinian nationalist, relates in a diary entry of 1941, the Arabs of Palestine “had rejoiced when the British bastion at Tobruk fell to the Germans,” and “not only the Palestinians rejoiced … but the whole Arab world.”

This support for Hitler wasn’t merely a matter of the old adage that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestine national movement, was an outspoken antisemite. He aided the 1941 pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad. When it collapsed, he fled to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war years enjoying a handsome salary for his work as a Nazi propagandist and a recruiter of Balkan Muslims for the SS.

Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust; and they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war. In radio broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against Britain and “kill the Jews.”

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian and author. His books include 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (Yale UP, 2008) and most recently Sidney Reilly: Master Spy (Yale UP, 2022).

[Rach3]

...Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust; and they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war. In radio broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against Britain and “kill the Jews.”

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian and author. His books include 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (Yale UP, 2008) and most recently Sidney Reilly: Master Spy (Yale UP, 2022).

I see, so the massacre in Gaza is justified.Who knew ?

[jserraglio]

Bibi’s to blame. He is the very model of a modern Right-wing nativist!!

This is silly, shallow, partisan and low resolution - like almost all your hate-fuelled rants.

Beware, La Belle Dame sans Merci. Strongmanidolatry hath thee in thrall!!

First, it was tripping the light fantastic for that Hungarian Hercules, NATO's Vacillating Viktor. Followed by dirge-dancing the "Andrzej-the-Exiled Polka" for Duda.

When your head stops spinning, will a feminazi be next? Italy's Circe, PM Meloni? Gorgeous Giorgia?