{"id":99660,"date":"2022-11-18T17:05:34","date_gmt":"2022-11-18T15:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99660"},"modified":"2022-11-14T08:12:22","modified_gmt":"2022-11-14T06:12:22","slug":"14-05-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=99660","title":{"rendered":"Tom Friedman Column Is So Wrong It\u2019s Funny"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Tom Friedman Column Is So Wrong It\u2019s Funny<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Photo: Charles Haynes via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\nSo wrong it\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s one way to to describe the latest column<\/a> from Tom Friedman in the New York Times<\/em>, which appears under the apocalyptic headline, \u201cThe Israel We Knew Is Gone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wrong as in just plain factually inaccurate, to the point where a correction is warranted. Friedman claims, \u201cYou have not seen this play before, because no Israeli leader has \u2018gone there\u2019 before.\u201d Writing about Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Friedman writes, \u201cNetanyahu has increasingly sought over the years to leverage the energy of this illiberal Israeli constituency to win office, not unlike how Trump uses white nationalism, but Netanyahu never actually brought this radical element\u2026 into his ruling faction or cabinet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t actually true that Netanyahu \u201cnever actually brought this radical element\u2026into his ruling faction or cabinet.\u201d In fact, Smotrich was Minister of Transport in Netanyahu\u2019s government from 2019 to 2020. The sky did not fall. Friedman doesn\u2019t tell readers this, perhaps because it would undercut his thesis that \u201cThe Israel We Knew Is Gone.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What makes it funny is that Friedman and the New York Times<\/em> have been proclaiming the death of the Israel they supposedly once loved for forty years now. In the 1992 collection of essays With Friends Like These: The Jewish Critics of Israel<\/em>, a chapter by Jerold Auerbach described Friedman in the early 1980s as watching \u201can Israel he had deeply believed in while in high school and college recede from gilded, heroic mythology to the shadows of bleak reality.\u201d And, as Auerbach notes, Friedman\u2019s disillusionment with Israel even predated the 1980s Lebanon War. \u201cBy the time he graduated from Brandeis University in 1975, he had already identified himself with the Palestinian national cause, with apologies for PLO terrorism, and with the single organization so reflexively critical of Israel that it quickly became a pariah group within the American Jewish Community.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Friedman writes basically the same falsehood-riddled column after every major or minor news development in Israel. He predicts that this time this latest event \u2014 whatever it might be \u2014 is going to lead the world and American Jewry to shun Israel. Each time, Friedman\u2019s fear turns out to be wrong. In 2017, for example, Friedman claimed<\/a>, \u201cthe foundations of Israel\u2019s long-term national security are cracking\u2026 Under the leadership of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Israel is \u2026 drawing a line between itself and the Jewish diaspora, particularly the U.S. Jewish community that has been so vital for Israel\u2019s security, diplomatic standing and remarkable economic growth.\u201d Five years on, Israel\u2019s economic and diplomatic standing is stronger than ever, thanks to the Abraham Accords and to Netanyahu\u2019s leadership, and Friedman looks foolish.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other commentators have already made interesting additional substantive points responding to Friedman\u2019s hysteria. For the Jewish News Syndicate, Jonathan Tobin noted<\/a> that any gaps between Israel and American Jewry may be more attributable to assimilation among American Jews than any Israeli electoral outcome. \u201cIf Jews don\u2019t care about being Jewish, then they aren\u2019t going to be inclined to support Israel, no matter who is in its government,\u201d Tobin writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Elliott Abrams, writing<\/a> at his Pressure Points blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, advises, \u201chold off on the doomsday talk. Netanyahu is a known quantity as prime minister because he was Israel\u2019s longest-serving prime minister ever. His party is by far the largest in his coalition and as his long record shows he is as canny a politician as Israel has produced. Moreover, he has in the main been pretty prudent as a leader, avoiding war and conflict whenever possible and watching carefully where the voters are. It is not at all to be assumed that the government will be under the thumb of Ben Gvir and or Smotrich.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And Daniel Gordis, in a detailed rebuttal<\/a> on Substack, takes on the \u201cFifth Column\u201d issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Tom Friedman writes that \u201cNetanyahu has been propelled into power by bedfellows who see Israeli Arab citizens as a fifth column who can\u2019t be trusted,\u201d intimating that Israeli Arabs are not a fifth column. Some are, some aren\u2019t. In our podcast series, I\u2019ve interviewed many Arab women and men who are quite the opposite. But if you live in the Negev, if you have farmland you can\u2019t protect from Arabs in the south or the north, you\u2019re fearful. If you\u2019re a young Jewish Israeli woman afraid to walk in downtown Beer Sheva, you don\u2019t think a \u201cfifth column\u201d is a ludicrous claim.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ben-Gvir knows that. Friedman can dismiss it, but Israelis increasingly don\u2019t. The left and center ignore the issue, and now, Israelis are ignoring them.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s ironic that the New York Times<\/em>, which has taken in its news columns to calling Israeli Arabs \u201cPalestinians,\u201d is faulting Israeli Jews for expressing concern on this issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gordis writes that he lacks Friedman\u2019s \u201ccertainty\u2026 that things are going to be horrible,\u201d and cautions that when it comes to Israel, \u201clittle about this place plays out as we expect.\u201d Indeed, little about Israel turns out as Tom Friedman expects.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main utility of Friedman these days is as a humor columnist. It\u2019s actually a relief to read him with the knowledge that all the dire things he predicts: \u201cprofound effect on U.S.-Israel relations\u201d or an erosion of \u201cbipartisan support in Washington,\u201d are figments of Friedman\u2019s hyperactive imagination aimed at his far-left New York Times<\/em> readers, rather than reflecting a nuanced understanding of Israeli reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Friedman\u2019s been warning for 40 years that Likud governments and policies will undercut Israeli security. Israel is far more prosperous and secure now than it was when Friedman started issuing the warnings back in the 1980s, as Netanyahu drily put it in his recent autobiography, back when \u201cnewspapers\u2026still wielded a powerful influence over public opinion.\u201d That influence has eroded not only owing to technological trends but because readers have learned that columnists such as Friedman are not trustworthy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ira Stoll<\/strong> was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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Tom Friedman Column Is So Wrong It\u2019s Funny Ira Stoll New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Photo: Charles Haynes via Wikimedia Commons. So wrong it\u2019 That\u2019s one way to to describe the latest column from Tom Friedman in the New York Times, which appears under the apocalyptic headline, \u201cThe Israel We Knew Is Gone.\u201d Wrong as in just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99660"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99660"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99770,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99660\/revisions\/99770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}