Now, I am prepared to concede that it is possible – though highly unlikely –that Friedman somehow got it right and the Kahan Commission somehow got it wrong. Maybe the 58 witnesses who testified before the Kahan Commission all lied. Maybe the four investigators, one of whom later rose to become president of the Israeli Supreme Court, all missed evidence of the unheeded cry.
What I cannot concede is the honesty of a reporter who cites a study in support of a proposition without telling his readers that the study actually concluded the opposite. It would be like citing the Warren Commission Report in support of the assertion that there was a second gunman in the Kennedy assassination, without bothering to mention that the Warren Commission examined that very question and concluded there wasn’t any second gunman.
There’s more. According to Friedman, “The Israelis knew just what they were doing when they let the Phalangists into those camps.”
The proof? “The Kahan Commission itself reported…Israeli officials ‘heard things from [Bashir Gemayel] that left no room for doubt that the intention of this Phalangist leader was to eliminate the Palestinian problem.”
Here’s what the Kahan Commission really found: “Contentions and accusations were advanced that…the entry of the Phalangists into the camps had been carried out with the prior knowledge that a massacre would be perpetrated…. These accusations too are unfounded.”
It speaks to Friedman’s single-minded determination to prove Israeli guilt that he would ignore the passages quoted above and use the Kahan Commission Report to support his wild accusations. Incidentally, the Kahan Commission asked Friedman to appear and give testimony. He refused to show up, claiming it was contrary to the editorial policy of his newspaper. The commission noted wryly that “[w]e did not receive a satisfactory answer as to why the paper’s publisher prevented its reporter from appearing before the commission and thus helping it uncover all the important facts.”
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But why focus on the past? In recent years, from the ethereal heights of his New York Times column, Friedman has launched a steady stream of attacks against Israel and what he terms its “ugly occupation” of the West Bank.
Here’s one example (Aug. 1, 2012): “It is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to test, test and have the U.S. keep testing creative ideas for a two-state solution…. Otherwise, Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa.”
Here’s another (May 25, 2011): “Israel will gradually absorb the whole West Bank, so together with Israel proper, a Jewish minority will be ruling over an Arab majority. Israel’s enemies will refer to it as ‘the Jewish apartheid state.’ ”
In a piece that ran on December 14, 2011, Friedman laid out the stark choices confronting the Jewish state: “If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a bi-national state.”
These arguments would have merit were it not for one critical fact that Friedman invariably ignores: apart from a few gadfly politicians who can be counted on the fingers of one hand, there is virtually no one in Israel’s body politic who advocates holding on to the entire West Bank. The leadership of the Knesset’s twelve political parties can’t even agree on the wording of a national anthem. But on this point they all concur.
