Thomas L. Friedman Deconstructed

Jews, Israel and America

By Thomas L. Friedman

I was speaking the other day with Scott Pelley of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” about the mood in Iraq. He had just returned from filming a piece there and he told me something disturbing. Scott had gone around and asked Iraqis on the streets what they called American troops—wondering if they had nicknames for us in the way we used to call the Nazis “Krauts” or the Vietcong “Charlie.” And what did he find? “Many Iraqis have so much distrust for U.S. forces we found they’ve come up with a nickname for our troops,” Scott said. “They call American soldiers ‘The Jews,’ as in, ‘Don’t go down that street, the Jews set up a roadblock.’ “

I have no idea how widespread this perception is, but it does not surprise me that some Iraqis would talk that way. Our communications in Iraq have been so inept since we arrived, many Iraqis still don’t know who America is or why it came. But such talk is also indicative of a trend in the Arab media, after a century of Arab-Jewish strife, where if you want to brand someone as illegitimate, just call him a “Jew.” Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA— “Jews, Israel and America,” all lumped together in a single threat.

This wider trend has been fanned by Arab satellite TV stations, which deliberately show split-screen images of Israelis bashing Palestinians and U.S. forces bashing the Iraqi insurgents. The trend has also been encouraged by some mosque preachers looking to explain away all the Arab world’s ills by wrapping all the Satans together into JIA. This trend has been helped by the Bush team’s failed approach to the Arab-Israel problem, which is to tell the truth only to Yasser Arafat, while embracing Ariel Sharon so tightly that it’s impossible to know anymore where U.S. policy stops and Mr. Sharon’s begins.

This trend of JIA is now metastasizing from the core of the Arab-Israel conflict, across the Muslim world and into Europe. There is no quick fix. One thing that Israel can do is push harder to defuse the conflict with the Palestinians in order to deprive the Arab media of the raw images that help to feed this phenomenon, not because the continuing conflict is all Israel’s fault—it is not—but because Israel has such an overriding interest in forging a partnership with a legitimate Palestinian Authority, and getting this poisonous show off the air. A generation of Muslims raised on these images on the Internet is enormously dangerous for Jews, Israel and America.

This brings us to this week’s vote in the Israeli Parliament about whether to proceed with Mr. Sharon’s plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Mr. Sharon, a man of the right, has finally realized the demographic threat posed by Gaza to Israel and wants to get out. He is being opposed by the Israeli far right—the Jewish Hezbollah. This includes settler rabbis who have urged soldiers to disobey orders and, with winks and nods, have let it be known that if someone were to eliminate Ariel Sharon he would be acting out God’s will. In this struggle between Jewish fanatics and Ariel Sharon, we must stand with Mr. Sharon. These settler rabbis are a blot on the Jewish people.

But in the struggle between Mr. Sharon and common sense, America should be with common sense. The late Yitzhak Rabin wanted to get out of Gaza to make peace with the Palestinians, because he understood the danger of “Jews, Israel and America” all getting melded together in the nuclear age. Mr. Rabin knew that no peace deal would resonate in the Arab-Muslim world if it did not have a legitimate Palestinian partner. Mr. Sharon seems to want to get out of Gaza to make peace with the Jews. His aides have made clear that he is getting out of Gaza in order to entrench Israel even more deeply in the West Bank and the Jewish settlements there.

In the face of this plan, the Bush team is silent. This is partly because the Palestinians continue to stick with Arafat as their leader, even though this bum has led them to ruin—so the U.S. has nothing to offer Israel. And it’s partly because the Bush team, which is so inept at diplomacy, has never had the energy or creativity to shape a better Palestinian alternative to Arafat. As a result, the Sharon vision of getting out of Gaza in order to take over the West Bank will probably win by default. If that happens, “Jews, Israel and America” will be bound together more tightly than ever as the enemies of Arabs and Muslims.

If Thomas Friedman were to extend his great concern for the safety of Jews, Israel, and America to the victims of Israeli and U.S. power, perhaps the conflict could then truly be ended, the injustices ended, and the pictures turned off.

Why I Liked Thomas Friedman’s Latest Column Before I Didn’t

By Kathleen Christison

I read two articles on Sunday that made quite an impact. The first was a Thomas Friedman column. Reading Friedman is always an interesting, usually an angering, experience. This one didn’t anger me right off the bat, but his thesis disturbed me.

Friedman said some startling things, for him. It was gratifying to see that, after three post-9/11 years of blaming the root causes of terrorism on Arab backwardness and lack of democracy, he is finally ready to acknowledge that the obscenely close U.S. relationship with Israel and what he frankly called Israeli “bashing” of Palestinians has something to do with arousing Arab and Muslim anger and the kind of hatred of Israel and the U.S. that provokes terrorism. He even went so far as to remark that the Bush administration’s embrace of Ariel Sharon is so tight that “it’s impossible to know anymore where U.S. policy stops and Mr. Sharon’s begins.” Way to go, Tom!

But something about the main thrust of Friedman’s column gnawed at me until finally I realized what was wrong. After recounting a conversation with another journalist, just returned from Iraq, about the fact that Americans are frequently referred to by angry Iraqis as “the Jews,” a handy moniker for anyone seen to oppress Arabs, Friedman worries that this identification of Americans with Jews and Israel seriously endangers all three parties and makes them vulnerable to Islamic terrorism. The widespread perception across the Arab and Muslim world that these three are one and that they together constitute the “great enemy of Islam” seriously endangers all three.

So far so good. But what became clear upon closer reading is the fact that Friedman, although finally showing some wisdom in accepting the relevance of this perception to the terrorist threat, nonetheless still believes the perception is unfair and biased, still believes the fact of the perception is the Arabs’ fault. The problem for him is not that the woman is being raped, but that the woman’s friends have noticed and are calling attention to the rape.

The trend toward identifying Americans with Jews and Israel, Friedman notes, has been “fanned” by Arab television stations, which “deliberately show split-screen images of Israelis bashing Palestinians and U.S. forces bashing the Iraqi insurgents.” The word “deliberately” clearly indicates that Friedman thinks this comparison is unfair.

Friedman’s solution would be for Israel to “push harder to defuse” its conflict with the Palestinians. It is not clear whether his principal interest here is in the defusing or in the pushing harder—whether he wants the bashing of Palestinians to stop, or simply wants Israel to bash harder in order to induce a Palestinian surrender. But you get a clue to his true thinking with the rest of the sentence: the defusing should be accomplished “in order to deprive the Arab media of the raw images that help to feed this phenomenon [i.e., the spreading perception of U.S.-Israeli-Jewish collusion].” In other words, don’t worry about the Palestinians, don’t be concerned that Israel is on a wantonly destructive, murderous rampage through the civilian population of Palestine that is provoking justifiable rage throughout the Arab and Muslim street, just worry that Arabs and Muslims are seeing pictures of this rampage. Just work to get the cameras turned off—get “this poisonous show off the air,” he says later—and Americans and Israelis will be safe. Never mind about Palestinian safety, never mind about justice, just hide the injustices.

Then I read the second article, and focused on how very evil Friedman’s prescription is. The second article is a mid-October piece in the British Medical Journal by a British physician who visited the occupied territories in March and recorded the abysmal state of medical care under Israeli occupation. Derek Summerfield counts the numbers of Palestinian children (621, two-thirds of them under the age of 15) killed since the intifada began four years ago; notes that over half of these children were shot in the head, neck, or chest (“the sniper’s wound,” he says); enumerates the numbers of innocent bystanders (186), including women and children (26 and 39), killed in Israeli assassination operations; recounts the documented cases (87, including 30 children) in which denial of access to medical treatment has led directly to death; notes that 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals are isolated by the wall from the populations they are supposed to serve; reports that 20 percent of Palestinian children under the age of five are anemic and another almost one-quarter are acutely or chronically undernourished. Finally, he observes poignantly that these statistics attract far less publicity than the suicide bombings carried out in desperation by Palestinians (and now—one might add—by Iraqis, Afghans, occasional Saudis, and possibly other nationalities in locations as widely scattered as Taba and Djakarta).

In Palestine, there are few pictures of Summerfield’s statistics. Thomas Friedman doesn’t know and clearly doesn’t care about these statistics, so long as none of the dead children appear on Arab television. The Arab and Muslim street doesn’t know the precise numbers either, but they do know the situation even when there are no pictures. There are no pictures of the 108 clinics and hospitals unable to serve their patients because of the separation wall, but the phenomenon is well known throughout the Arab world. It’s well known that people die and women give birth and newborns stop breathing at checkpoints all the time because they can’t get out and ambulances can’t get in, even though there are no pictures of suffering heart and kidney patients or mothers in labor or dead infants. This is what makes for rage and terrorism.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. This article first appeared in CounterPunch, <www.CounterPunch.com>, Oct. 26. Reprinted with permission.