This site has been second to none in our biting criticism of how the influential New York Times opinion journalist Thomas Friedman covers (or ignores) Israel/Palestine. But his latest column is a pleasant surprise. The headline is: “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.” He goes on to indict the next Israeli government, using far tougher language than we would have expected from him, and he does his own reporting to back up his harsh view — instead of relying on the timid news articles in his own newspaper.
Friedman’s strongly-worded column is not just valuable on its own. He might also have emboldened Times editors to allow their own reporters in Israel/Palestine to start telling more truths.
Here’s some of what he relayed to his readers. He said that Benjamin Netanyahu’s winning electoral coalition included “outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics.” He quoted Israeli journalist Amos Harel’s explanation that the right-wing victory was partly inspired by “hatred of Arabs and the desire to keep them out of positions of power.” The New York Times’s own post-election reports were mostly less explicit, continuing the paper’s long tradition of downplaying Israel’s violent, messianic racists.
Friedman’s apostasy is particularly important because he has spent decades protecting Israel’s image. In the late 1980s, when the first Palestinian intifada broke out and prompted a harsh Israeli crackdown, he promoted the often-repeated line: “Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood.” His intention was clear; Israeli repression could no longer be hidden — especially after Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered his soldiers to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian resisters. Israel’s image was being tarnished. But living among “dangerous neighbors” meant you might — regrettably — have to use harsh methods.
In today’s column, Friedman to his credit also did some of his own reporting about the rising danger to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel inside its 1967 borders. He noted that such Palestinians are 21 percent of Israel’s population, and he quoted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosopher at Hebrew University, who warned that:
What we are seeing is a shift in the hawkish right from a political identity built on focusing on the ‘enemy outside’ — the Palestinians — to the ‘enemy inside’ — Israeli Arabs.
Here’s another area where Times reporters could take their cue from Friedman. The paper has historically ignored Palestinian citizens of Israel. So Ayman Odeh, one of the community’s most influential leaders, an impressive man who supports nonviolent resistance and tells everyone his hero is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, has never been profiled. And the Times also missed the news that Israel’s summer Olympics team last year — a 90-member delegation — did not include a single Palestinian.
Why did Friedman write this column? Maybe he hopes he can influence Netanyahu to try and form a coalition that excludes the extreme racists? But Friedman surely knows that the far right-wing alliance is Netanyahu’s best chance to disrupt the corruption cases against him and keep him out of prison.
Over the past few years, we’ve noticed that Friedman’s new strategy was simply to hide when bad news from Israel broke. In 2020, for instance, he wrote nothing while the Trump administration and a previous Netanyahu government were on the verge of annexing large stretches of the Palestinian West Bank, a move that would have also damaged Israel’s image in the U.S.
But this week’s election was too significant and dangerous for him to hide from. His closing paragraph is worth repeating:
I have reported from Israel for this newspaper for nearly 40 years, often traveling around with my dear friend Nahum Barnea, one of the most respected, sober, balanced, careful journalists in the country. To hear him say to me minutes ago on the phone that ‘we have a different kind of Israel now’ tells me we are truly entering a dark tunnel.
Editor’s Note: The New York Times has never profiled Ayman Odeh but did run an Op-Ed by him in September 2019.
“Why did Friedman write this column?”
Simple. To get ahead of the fallout. He’s been carrying water and covering up for the racist, supremacist, Apartheid state for decades. The only difference now, is that the government which has ALWAYS been racist and right-wing now includes a highly public and influential chunk that have no inhibitions when it comes saying the quiet part out extremely loud and clear for all to hear.
Friedman knows that there is no amount of lipstick in the world that’ll make this pig look good any longer, especially not with Benjamin & Sarah Netanyahu back on the stage to headline for this grotesque double-feature.
Friedman’s modus operandi in recent years has been to go comms dark in light of any utterly indefensible behavior by Israel and to scream from the rooftops when there has been some, heck, ANY Hasbara to amplify, like the Abraham Accords. However, now he’s getting out in front of the wave so that he can distance himself from his own complicity up to this very open and public turning point.
This is his pure and selfish survival instinct kicking in. Nothing more, nothing less.
Thomas Friedman is a day late and a dollar short. We “entered a dark tunnel” long ago. Now, as the tide turns, Friedman wants to jump off the “Israel, right or wrong” bandwagon. Witness (1) that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have correctly branded Israel as an apartheid regime, (2) the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign gathers steam, and (3) more commenters and media outlets decrying the cowardly Israeli Defense Forces and “settler” attacks on Palestinians, including unarmed women and children. Friedman is a pathetic excuse for a journalist.
This strikes me as an oddly trusting reaction to Friedman’s latest, because it implicitly assumes that the esteemed NYT columnist’s humanity is somewhere in sight. It is not. He has known perfectly well these long decades what was happening, and did what he could to insulate it. He is now protecting his “liberal” façade by wringing his hands at his success. Sorry, I don’t buy it.
He’ll be back. The only distinction between Ben-Gvir and the ‘israeli’ man in the street is that he has a political position. The only distinction between Ben-Gvir and the old guard of ‘israeli’ politicos is that he talks openly and honestly all the time about his goals.
If Israel has lost the Tom Friedman …..