Tom Friedman’s faulty Algiers/Jerusalem analogy

This week Verso publishes The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, by Belén Fernández. “A long overdue takedown of a dangerous fraud,” says Nir Rosen. And Dahr Jamail: “The hubris, fallacy, consistent hypocrisy, and buffoonery of the New York Times’ most widely read columnist is systematically deconstructed and laid bare.” An excerpt copyright Verso Books:

Friedman condemns Arafat for unleashing the second Intifada in 2000 in accordance with his preference “to play the victim rather than the statesman” but later determines that “when this intifada started it was directed partly at [Arafat’s] corrupt leadership,” despite his alleged launching of it. At the 2001 Davos World Economic Forum, Friedman accuses Arafat of “torch[ing]” the “olive branch” extended to him by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres “in the wake of an 11th-hour Barak bid to conclude a final deal with the Palestinians in Taba,” Egypt, site of the post–Camp David negotiations. In reality, the 11th-hour bid and “far-reaching offer” consists of Barak canceling a meeting with Arafat, after which the talks do not resume. As for Arafat’s alleged “torching,” this consists of “denounc[ing] Israel for its ‘fascist military aggression’ and ‘colonialist armed expansionism,’ and its policies of ‘murder, persecution, assassination, destruction and devastation.’”

Keep in mind that Friedman himself accuses Israel of colonialist expansionism, and that he used to report instances of murder and persecution with greater frequency prior to assuming the role of “tourist with an attitude.” By currently refusing to integrate these details into an overall picture of systematic repression and brutality by the state of Israel against Palestinians, however, he deprives the victims of a context legitimizing their complaints. Friedman meanwhile concocts this analogy for Arafat’s behavior at Davos: “It would be as though [French President Charles] de Gaulle had offered to withdraw from Algeria and the Algerians said: ‘Thank you. You’re a fascist. Of course we’ll take all of Algeria, but we won’t stop this conflict until we get Bordeaux, Marseilles and Nice as well.’” 

In the event that one wants to take Friedman’s analogical recklessness seriously, one might infer the following from his comparison:

1. In exchange for granting independence to Algeria, which it did while simultaneously inundating the country with more colonists, France was able to maintain its eternal and undivided capital at Algiers as well as to annex the ever-expanding portions of Algeria with a high concentration of pied-noirs. Algerians are currently permitted to collect garbage in certain parts of Algiers and to maintain their own capital in an irrelevant village outside the city.

2. Accusing Israel of crimes of which it is guilty, such as colonialism, is equivalent to demanding possession of various Israeli metropolises.

3. Since Friedman also accuses Israel of colonialism, this indicates that he too is harboring territorial designs.

It is easy to see why Friedman’s immunity from editing should occasionally be challenged. It is more difficult to see the logic behind his prediction that Israeli settlement “expansion is a shameful act of colonial coercion that will meet the fate of all other colonial enterprises in history” when all other colonial enterprises do not commence with the very founding of the colonizer state on the land to be colonized.