To be honest, we didn't need to wait for Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times piece to understand who we're dealing with. The hero of the enlightened class has again displayed the most Orientalist kind of Western arrogance imaginable – even though it's dressed up in the guise of liberal democratic rhetoric.
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Need we remind you who he is? He swooned over the Arab Spring, said the Taliban were history, and declared that the young generation of Islam had abandoned extremism. Such is the nature of his expertise.
The problem is that he is still regarded in certain influential circles as some kind of authority on Israel and the Middle East. And if it needs spelling out, let's be blunt for a moment: It's no coincidence that he was close to President Barack Obama, and that he's considered a regular "house guest" at the White House – he's the kind of person his critics use the term "messenger" to describe, meaning a "mouthpiece," to characterize the relationship between the journalist and the most important and dominant center of power in the world.
Precisely for this reason, it's hard to sit idly by as he makes his pronouncements, which should be understood as almost foundational tenets of American policy towards Israel. A month ago, he declared that "Israel has the worst leader in its history – maybe in all of Jewish history" making no secret of his hostility towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ten days after the Oct. 7 attack, he stated that "President Joe Biden needs to understand that Netanyahu is not fit to manage this war."
Even before the recent Israeli military campaign, he published details of the conversation in which Biden gave Netanyahu the unambiguous message to stop it. He also reported that the US had decided to "reassess" its relations with Israel. Incidentally, this happened the previous time a little over a decade ago, with President Obama.
So now Friedman is pleading with the White House, meaning his friend Biden, to have the Israeli war machine halt, to draw a red line, "to declare victory in Gaza and go home," because at this point "Israeli prime minister is utterly useless as a leader" and "prioritizing his own electoral needs over the interests of Israelis."
He suggests a framework: IDF withdrawal, return of captives, and a permanent ceasefire under international supervision. The captive issue, he reckons, "makes rational military decision-making there impossible," and he believes that there is "increasing discomfort in the Israel Defense Forces leadership over the fact that it is being asked by the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu to fight a war in Gaza without a clearly defined political objective."
The problem is that such words could make the Western world – and worse, Hamas – conclude that Israel's international credit is running out, that there's a rift between Washington and Jerusalem. Nothing can give Hamas a better lifeline than that. Friedman might as well have written in his column to Yahya Sinwar: "Hold on a little longer, comrade. It's almost over."
Incidentally, he reckons that after an Israeli withdrawal, Gaza's population will take care of Sinwar themselves. You'd need outbursts of obsessive hatred for Netanyahu and the Right, as well as emotional numbness, to put a stick in Israel's spokes right now, to cast aspersions and make terrible accusations against a Jewish state fighting for its existence and its leadership, and to call on its ally to tie its hands.
It's almost ironic that the most hollow oracle of the liberal-Democratic wing, the one vocally opposed to the "occupation" and Israeli control in the West Bank, is calling on the leader of the great empire to leverage its weight against what he apparently sees as a vassal state – an impudent province that has reared its head higher than it should. It's even more astonishing to see how little respect, if any, this great democrat has for Israeli democracy and sovereignty.
It's one thing to criticize Israel, its government, leaders, military on the pages of a newspaper. But Friedman's explicit call for the superpower to impose policy on Israel as it fights for its survival is a frightening vestige of the imperialist master-subject mentality. It's stunning how such a voice emerges from the heart of the Democratic establishment that effectively views US-Israel relations as analogous to Iran-Hezbollah.
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