Friedman’s analysis of the Palestinian uprising is silly, offensive — and leaves out key words, ‘Israeli apartheid’

The explosive news from Israel/Palestine gave Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist who portrays himself as a Middle East expert, a chance to start explaining why Palestinian resistance and Israeli repression have reached the highest level in years. In his column yesterday, he failed.

He nowhere wrote the words “Israel apartheid,” or mentioned the landmark Human Rights Watch report that appeared on April 27 and that provides the best framework for understanding not only the Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, but also to the uprisings among Palestinian citizens of pre-1967 Israel. Instead, he flails about, making several silly, sometimes offensive points that explain little.

First, the silliness. He repeatedly cites the TikTok video app, implying that “young Palestinians” have been getting “inspiration” from watching an “Orthodox Jew” being attacked. His assertion distorts and trivializes; Palestinians have been resisting the theft of their land and their second-class citizenship for decades before the internet was invented. 

He also attacks Hamas, which he says “has failed to produce either significant economic growth in the Gaza Strip that it rules or political progress with Israel.” Can Friedman really be this ignorant? You can dislike Hamas without blaming it for economic stagnation in a territory that Israel blockades and has turned into an open-air prison.

Friedman also makes a more substantive point, but hides his own responsibility. He says

[A] dangerously naive consensus has emerged in Israel in recent years suggesting that Israel basically has the Palestinian conflict suppressed and those Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are basically resigned to living under permanent Israeli control.

Friedman is right, but where was he as this “dangerously naive consensus” was congealing? He was busy gushing over Israel’s normalization of relations with the United Arab Emirates and other conservative Arab states: “A Geopolitical Earthquake Just Hit the Mideast.” Friedman occupies some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world, and he could have been issuing warnings.

Next, he waits until paragraph 18, but he finally does say that beleaguered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could benefit politically from the unrest “by inflaming the situation so much that his right-wing rivals have to abandon trying to topple him and declare instead that this is no time for a change in leadership.” Surely this is a more important point than Palestinian youths watching Tik-Tok videos, and he should have put it right at the beginning of his article.

Netanyahu’s maneuvering is definitely worth analyzing, and skilled Israeli journalists have been doing just that. The Israeli prime minister would have gained by provoking the U.S. into attacking Iran, but embroiling Israel in another conflict in Gaza is another matter, which could damage him at home, especially if Hamas can prolong the armed resistance. He is probably genuinely conflicted. 

Friedman has a top job because he is supposed to have special insights. He surely has seen Netanyahu up close for years, and he should have analyzed the Israeli leader further — and he should also have risked putting forward his own opinion on what Netanyahu will do. 

But Friedman’s larger failing is that he nowhere cites the Human Rights Watch report on Israel’s apartheid. (His whitewash is right in step with his Times colleagues; after one original article, the paper has not mentioned the 213-page report a single time.) Friedman doesn’t even have to accept all the Human Rights Watch findings, but he should acknowledge that it frames the current events there better than Tik-Tok:

* The Palestinian uprising in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is not “a real estate dispute,” as the Israeli government contends, but the latest resistance to a many decades-long pattern of Israeli ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine.

* The sudden resistance among Palestinian citizens of pre-1967 Israel is not a complete surprise, but the consequence of being treated as second-class by an Israel that proudly proclaims itself “a Jewish state.”

Let’s turn to Haaretz, the Israeli daily, to see a vital angle that Thomas Friedman might have written about. In an editorial yesterday headlined “Israelis don’t need more lethal muscle-flexing,” the paper said that the recent flare-ups are largely the fault of Israel’s government, abetted by far-right groups, who carried out “provocations planned in advance to demonstrate mastery and control. They have carefully marked a path that has led to violence and could drag Israel into a war.”

You won’t see anything like this in Thomas Friedman’s column.