New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman offers two alternatives to our strongest Middle Eastern ally: "Israel Has a Choice to Make: Rafah or Riyadh." By this he means that if the IDF is sent into Rafah, Israel will be on its own, bereft of any friends, a pariah state. Even its relationship with the US will be weakened. On the other hand, if this army stays out of that southern Gazan town, they will have many supporters. Israel will strengthen its ties with the US and will be able to add Saudi Arabia, and other such countries, to the Abraham Accord.
He puts the matter forthrightly to Israel:
"Do you want to mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah to try to finish off Hamas – if that is even possible – without offering any Israeli exit strategy from Gaza or any political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians? If you go this route, it will only compound Israel's global isolation and force a real breach with the Biden administration.
"Or do you want normalization with Saudi Arabia, an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza and a US-led security alliance against Iran? This would come with a different price: a commitment from your government to work toward a Palestinian state with a reformed Palestinian Authority – but with the benefit of embedding Israel in the widest US-Arab-Israeli defense coalition the Jewish state has ever enjoyed and the biggest bridge to the rest of the Muslim world Israel has ever been offered while creating at least some hope that the conflict with the Palestinians will not be a 'forever war.'"
With the options put thusly, it will be no surprise to anyone that this author comes down foursquare on the latter side. The former, he asserts will be a disaster for Israel, the latter, no guarantee of peace and prosperity, but an excellent bet in his view.
This deliberation is not a matter of pure logic, or mathematics, or praxeology. No one can say with absolute certainly that one path is better for Israel than the other. These are empirical questions, and, here, we have to rely and history and common sense. Since Friedman makes the case for Riyadh, let us consider the argument in behalf of Rafah. We do so under three headings.
1. Self-reliance or reliance on others?
Which of these two is more trustworthy? Obviously, the former. A case in point is the behavior of the US, the fair weather friends of Israel. Let a few thousand Arab voters in Dearborn Michigan register disapproval of Biden for his "enthusiastic" support of Israel, and the president of this country changes his tune. Then there are the tens of thousands of students at elite universities such as Columbia, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, and many others too, who are busily protesting in favor of Hamas. Yes, you read that correctly. And the entire Democratic Party has to take cognizance. These young people overwhelming vote in the blue direction.
Friedman opines as follows: "Early in the war, Israeli military and political leaders would tell you that moderate Arab leaders wanted Israel to wipe out Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that is detested by every Arab monarch. Sure, they would have liked Hamas gone – if it could have been done in a few weeks with few civilian casualties."
Of course the IDF could have accomplished this task, not in a "few weeks" but in approximately six days. They had previously done precisely that, a while back. A large part of the reason that they are now into this battle not for six weeks but for six months and counting is that Hamas embeds itself into the civilian Gazan population using these people as shields, and Israel keeps looking over its shoulder, fearing the displeasure of it supposed ally.
2. Power or timidity
Staying out of Rafah, where some four battalions of Hamas terrorists are still perched, after what they did on October 7, 2023, a day that will forever live in infamy, bespeaks fearfulness and timorousness, not command and forcefulness. Yes, there are to be sure some contexts in which the former will get you further than the latter: the faculty lounges of major universities, poetry reading groups, perhaps salons on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But just try employing that strategy in tough neighborhoods such as prisons, or Harlem, or … the Middle East. In the latter cases, the bullies will kick your butt if you show weakness.
Why not go whole hog in this Friedmanian direction and call upon our Middle Eastern ally to lay down its arms, and rely upon the good offices of "the Biden administration and the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Bahrainis, Moroccans and Emiratis," the nations Friedman is asking Israel to rely upon. Hey, waitasec: What about the entire United Nations? This New York Times theoretician surprising left them off his list. Surely, that membership would be an excellent guarantor of Israeli safety? So what that the overwhelming majority of this august organization has mistreated Israel 99% of the time (that is a low-ball estimate) and that several of its employees joined Hamas in its brutalization of the Israelis.
3. Total victory
Friedman ascribes to Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman the view that "The idea of wiping out Hamas "once and for all" is a pipe dream…
If these two worthies were advising the US toward the end of the war with the Nazis, and we can extrapolate from their advice in the present scenario, they would never have called for anything like unconditional surrender. They would have said that "The idea of wiping out the Nazis 'once and for all' is a pipe dream…" And they would have been absolutely correct. Even with total victory over the Third Reich, there are still Nazis gadding about in the modern era. They have not yet been fully eradicated, and likely never will. Each generation has its new recruits. Does this mean that the US should have pulled its punches? That conclusion simply does not follow.
Friedman waxes eloquent about the supposed fact that Israel has no end game plan and will be heavily overextended: "If Israel ends up with an indefinite occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank, it would be a toxic military, economic and moral overstretch that would delight Israel's most dangerous foe, Iran, and repel all its allies in the West and the Arab world." One option is, wait for it, banishment. These fifth columnists with their murders, rapes, suicide bombers, rocket launches, might be considered to have done far more than would qualify them for this reaction. Then, there will be no "toxicity" nor "overstretch."
