Thomas L. Friedman on Sunday published an op-ed he titled, “The Thread Connecting Trump, Putin and Netanyahu,” which was so outlandish and chock full of unabashed antisemitism, he couldn’t run it in his own paper, The NY Times, but ran it instead in Israel’s Pravda wannabe, Haaretz.
Arguing that “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” Friedman recalls telling his fellow Upper-West Siders following the November 1, 2022 victory of Israel’s right over a bizarre coalition of anti-Arab, anti-Haredi, leftist, and Muslim Brotherhood parties: “You did not go to Camp Ramah with these people. Your family did not vacation in the Catskills with these people. Your parents did not meet these people on their last UJA tour to Israel. They are to the right of the far right. But now they have positions of real and central power.”
Turns out, Friedman’s livid hatred for us, the folks on the right, is identical to the hate we receive from the violent crypto-fascists and anarchists on Israel’s highways, in its airport terminals, trains, public institutions, and in front of coalition members’ homes at five in the morning: We are not like them.
To the students of history in our camp this is no big news. We have been hated and persecuted for not being Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Catholics, English, French, German, Polish, Ukrainians, and Russians. Friedman’s and Shikma Bressler’s antisemitism are identical and as such represents the crumbling of the last shred of liberalism on the left.
“I normally write once a week, but since the Israeli election I have often written twice a week on Israel’s judicial-political crisis,” Friedman reports. “I postponed my summer vacation to keep writing through the Knesset’s July 24 vote, which stripped the Supreme Court of its most important powers to hold an Israeli government accountable for key appointments and decisions.”
It’s common knowledge that absent facts, the left tends to lie, but to start lying this early in your article, Tom?
Three decades ago, the Supreme Court imported a rarely used concept in British jurisprudence known as extreme unreasonableness. At the time, the British courts had used it twice to challenge government action. Over the years since then, the Israeli Supreme Court has turned this into a major weapon it used to annul the most trivial government actions, including, for instance, an education minister’s choice for an Israel Prize laureate. “Its most important powers,” Tom? Seriously? Have you read the reasonableness amendment? Is the Hebrew they taught you at Camp Ramah good enough to read the original legal text?
And when the left runs out of lies, it delves into dystopian fantasy. “I basically only write about three subjects these days: Donald Trump, Ukraine, and Israel,” Friedman writes. “My view is that if America goes for Trump again, Ukraine goes Putin and Israel goes autocratic, the world I want to leave to my new grandson won’t be there for him.”
THE PROBLEM WITH DYSTOPIAS
I can understand why a Biden Democrat would be invested in promoting an endless war between Ukraine and Russia, much the way Johnson Democrats supported an endless war in Southeast Asia. The possibility that President Trump in his second term would force peace between the warring neighbors is a nightmare to Friedman, who worships a Molech that devours burnt human offerings on both sides of the Dnieper.
But how would the end of the war in Eastern Europe dovetail with an “autocratic” Israel? Tom has a vision:
“Israel will be dominated by a cocktail of far-right Jewish religious nationalists, Jewish supremacists, and ultra-Orthodox Jews, uncommitted to democracy. The European Union will be threatened by Russian religious-nationalists from the outside – uncommitted to democracy – and their own, often pro-Putin, antisemitic nationalists from the inside – uncommitted to democracy. And America will be threatened by a Trump cult of nationalists, isolationists, and white supremacists uncommitted to the peaceful transfer of power.”
The problem with dystopias is that they are often founded on irrational fears rather than political reality. Friedman’s vision of the EU is so removed from any sense of reality, that it’s hard to follow his thinking (OK, not thinking, the stuff he blurts on the blank page).
As to the cocktail of far-right and Haredi Israelis dominating the country: the most right-biased polls are giving national religious leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir 4 to 5 mandates each; and the Haredi parties 7 and 8, maybe 9. The Likud is split so badly between Likudniks who do anything to curry favor with Netanyahu and those who are steeped in resentment over his denying them the juicy ministerial jobs. At this point it is doubtful Netanyahu would be able to pass even Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s minimalist plan to alter the composition of the committee to elect judges. He may or may not be able to elicit his full 64-MK majority. And once the Supreme Court strikes down Israel’s Basic Laws, in defiance of decades of precedence and their own mantra, “The court must not revoke basic laws,” it is doubtful Netanyahu could pass corrected versions of the struck-down laws.
Today’s Likud party is very much deserving of that old Will Rogers adage: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”
Friedman is a huge fan of the anarchists in Israel and sees them as heroic defenders of democracy – very much the way they view themselves, when, for instance, they mock the father of a toddler who begs them to stop their noise after midnight to let his baby sleep, or when they invade the home of an MK with an autistic daughter and inform her she is under house arrest, and if her kid is frightened by their noise, she should put on some classical music to drown it out.
There will never be in Friedman’s hymns of praise for the anarchists the merest mention of any of the above, which Israelis have grown to accept as part of their daily routine, like the mother who was stuck on the highway with her two young children only to be attacked by an anarchist protester who smashed her car window, showering broken glass on her little ones.
HE IS IGNORANT, TOO
I don’t know about you, but I enjoy seeing self-important idiots reveal their ignorance. It’s a hobby. So, I was so delighted by this Friedman pretentious paragraph:
“To paraphrase Yitzhak Rabin, my own attitude is: I will oppose Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank as if there were no Israeli democracy movement – and I will support the Israeli democracy movement as if there were no creeping annexation.”
No, Tom, it wasn’t Yitzhak Rabin, not even close. It was David Ben Gurion who, on the eve of WW2, declared: “We must continue the fight against the White Paper as if there is no war against Hitler, and we must fight alongside the British against Hitler as if there is no fight against the White Paper.”
The White Paper, in case they didn’t cover it in Camp Ramah, Tom, was a racist policy document issued by His Majesty’s government banning European Jews from making Aliyah. It was issued in 1936, to appease the Nazi-sympathizing Arab pogromists who threatened to burn the Middle East if the Jews were allowed in. And you know, Tom, many European Jews could have used this option.
So, Tom is against the “occupation,” against the “apartheid state,” against Jews who don’t look and think like him. Anything else? Yes, the grandson thing. Here’s another bit of self-indulgence Tom’s editors at the NY Times would have probably cut because, say what you will, they do have a sense of style over there. Not so much on the Haaretz side of unabashed propaganda. Just read these demure explosions of boundless modesty:
“I have no illusions that I am anything more than a single columnist with the privilege to work for America’s most important newspaper. But when so much is on the line – for the future of Israel, for the future of the United States of America, and for the future of the United States of Europe (the EU) – I want my grandson to know that I stood with the democracy-defenders on all three fronts.”
Kumbaya, Tom. We regret that we have but one Jewish future in the Land of Israel over which you can shed your waste product.
