Peace in Our Time

Imagine that you are facing a predicament. Such is the case for the Biden administration in regard to the war currently raging in Gaza.

The administration wants to pretend that it supports Israel fully. Yet, it also claims that Israel cannot win. So, it wants Israel to call it all off, to engage in a complete cease fire.

What can it do?

Well, it can float a peace plan, or something that resembles a peace plan. The plan more closely resembles an Israeli surrender, but you sell it as an Israeli victory. You also add that the peace plan is the best that can be done.

Obviously, you cannot have members of your administration float the plan, so you find a journalistic tool to do it for you. Who better fits that role but Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. From time to time we read about the greater fool. Perhaps we should bet discussing the role of the greater tool.

In his column yesterday Friedman acted as though he was making policy, not offering commentary on policy. One might say that he is colossally arrogant, or, alternatively, that he is speaking for people who make policy.

Consider this:

Quite honestly, I thought back to America after 9/11. And I asked myself, what do I wish I had done more of before we launched two wars of revenge and transformation in Afghanistan and Iraq for which they and we paid a huge price?

Those are the words of a self-important tool. 

Given that Friedman knows very little about military tactics, he has to resort to impugning motives. He assumes that he knows the state of mind of Israeli leaders,, and he does not approve. I am sure that they have been awaiting the Friedman seal of approval:

The reason I was so wary about Israel invading Gaza with the aim of totally eliminating Hamas was certainly not out of any sympathy for Hamas, which has been a curse on the Palestinian people even more than on Israel. It was out of a deep concern that Israel was acting out of blind rage, aiming at an unattainable goal — wiping Hamas from the face of the earth as one of its ministers advocated — and with no plan for the morning after.

How does he know that the goal is unattainable? True enough, it is unattainable until it is attained. And it has not yet been attained. 

Beyond the world of facile analogies, Hamas in Gaza is not the same as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Confusing the two constitutes mental dereliction. If America was unwilling to do what it needed to do to win in Afghanistan, that does not mean that Israel will make the same mistake. One needs to distinguish between the rightness and wrongness of getting involved and the rightness and wrongness of getting involved and failing.

It is always possible that Israel will get stuck in Gaza forever. So says Friedman, but why does he assume that the Israeli military has not considered worked to overcome the possibility:

In doing so Israel could get stuck in Gaza forever — owning all its pathologies and having to govern its more than two million people amid a humanitarian crisis, and even worse, discrediting the very Israeli military that it was trying to restore Israelis’ trust in.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is the fault of Hamas. Using civilians as human shields is a war crime. 

And then Friedman claims to know what the Israeli cabinet was thinking and what it was planning. Evidently, he has inside sources, but should we really expect those sources to be telling him the truth? Or are they using him as a convenient vehicle to undermine the Israeli government:

For starters, because the military and cabinet rushed into Gaza in this war and seemingly never game-planned for any endgame, Israel now finds itself in a difficult predicament.

Apparently, Israel is now faced with the problem of Southern Gaza. Since Friedman is not a military strategist-- duh?-- he rejects this plan because it will displace a lot of people. Has he called on Egypt to take in these people? Obviously not.

But now, the only way that Israel can take the ground war to southern Gaza — around Khan Younis, where Hamas’s senior leadership is suspected of hiding in tunnels — is by moving through this mass of displaced people and by creating even more.

What is the solution to Israel’s predicament? Why Friedman has the answer: surrender. He does not put it quite this way, but he is proposing a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza-- as though Israel had not done precisely that many years ago.

Facing this predicament, the Israeli Red Team would suggest a radical alternative: Israel should call for a permanent cease-fire that would be followed by an immediate Israeli withdrawal of all military forces in Gaza on the condition that Hamas return all the hostages it has left, civilians and military, and any dead. But Hamas would get no Palestinian prisoners in return. Just a clean deal — Israeli withdrawal and a permanent cease-fire in return for the 130-plus Israeli hostages.

He adds this, creating a false analogy between the October 7 massacre and the Munich massacre. He ought to have recalled an earlier Munich agreement, from 1938:

Israel reserves the right in the future to bring to justice the top Hamas leaders who planned this massacre. As it did after the Munich massacre, though, Israel will do that with a scalpel, not a hammer.

Now, Friedman seems barely to recognize that a unilateral ceasefire will appear to Hamas and to nearly all Gazans as a victory. It might not produce prosperity-- such has never been the Hamas goal-- but it will, to Friedman’s limited mind, make Gazans hold Hamas responsible for living conditions in the territory. Attributing rational thought to Gazans seems to have been the mistake that Israel made before October 7. Why repeat it?

Dare we mention that Hamas has been in charge in Gaza for more than a decade and the people of Gaza have never held them accountable. Hamas has wasted resources trying to kill Jews, leaving nothing for the people of Gaza. To say that Gazans will tell Hamas to engage in a ceasefire is silly.

First, it would argue, all the pressure for a cease-fire to spare Gazan civilians more death and destruction will fall on Hamas, not on Israel. Let Hamas tell its people living out in the cold and rain — and the world — that it will not agree to a cease-fire for the mere humanitarian price of returning all the Israeli hostages.

Apparently, Friedman cares mostly about world public opinion. You know, the kind that has motivated the United Nations to condemn Israel more than any other nation on the planet:

No, no — it would just be a clean deal: permanent cease-fire for Israeli hostages, period. The world can understand that. Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.

And then, Friedman pretends that the solution lies in legitimizing the Palestinian Authority, run by notable anti-Semite Mahmoud Abbas. This same organization pays people to kill Jews. 

Of course, Vice President Kamala Harris floated the same idea, so you can assume that it has some administration backing:

Second, some, maybe many, in Israel would complain that the military did not achieve its stated objective of eliminating Hamas, therefore it was a Hamas victory. The Red Team would respond that, for starters, the objective was unrealistic, especially with a right-wing Israeli government unwilling to work with the more moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to build an alternative to Hamas to run Gaza.

From there, he sets about dreaming:

In the wake of such a permanent cease-fire, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader, would have to come out of his tunnel, squint into the sun, and face his own people for the first time since this war started. Yes, the morning after he comes out, many Gazans will carry him on their shoulders and sing his name for dealing such a heavy blow to the Jews.

… many of those carrying him around would begin whispering to him: “Sinwar, what were you thinking? My house is now a pile of rubble. Who is going to rebuild it? My job in Israel that was feeding my family of 10 is gone. How am I going to feed my kids? You need to get me some international humanitarian assistance and a new house and job — and how are you going to do that if you keep lobbing rockets at the Jews?”

And then, Friedman opines, the humanitarian crisis will be Hamas’s problem.

With Israel out, the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem — as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.

How stupid can you be? As long as Israel exists, the people of Gaza will blame Jews for their conditions. How many Hamas supporters blamed Israel for October 7. Friedman is clearly smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes.

He is offering a blueprint for failure. Surely, he has the support of the Biden administration, but one hopes that the Israelis will be more circumspect and less easily gulled.

Note well, he is not advising Hamas to surrender.

Please subscribe to my Substack.