Tom Friedman Laments

Truth be told, President Donald Trump made more progress on the Middle East than any prior president. He negotiated peace treaties between Israel and a half dozen Muslim nations, allowing them to work together, to trade together and to engage in industrial and commercial exchanges.

Trump pulled off what many would consider to be a magic trick by deviating from an error that had defined prior American policy. That error, articulated so often by the dimwitted John Kerry, was that no one could accomplish anything in the region without solving the Palestinian problem.

Considering that the Palestinians had dedicated themselves to terrorism, to the destruction of the Jewish state and the massacre of Jews around the world, one can understand why this was pie-in-the-sky thinking. 

Today, when most of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and when the Hamas leadership continues to say that it does not want a two-state solution, the Biden administration is hard at work proposing a solution that will undermine Israel and will reward Hamas.

One has suspected from the beginning, that is from the first days of the Israeli reaction to the October 7 massacre, that the Biden administration would be a fair-weather ally, and one was apparently not wrong.

Now, the Biden administration is developing a new policy toward the region. As its unofficial spokesman Thomas Friedman has said, it wants to reward Hamas for its massacre with a state while undermining Israeli determination. 

Where Trump had made significant progress by ignoring the whining of the Palestinian authority, Biden has placed the Palestinian issue at the center of the negotiation. In truth, he had done so before October 7. And one may confidently assert that the terrorists who run the Gaza and the West Bank, ever alert, saw an opportunity to cash in on Biden fecklessness and cowardice by invading Israel and massacring Jews.

Now, according to Friedman the Biden team has floated the possibility of recognizing a Palestinian state-- even though Hamas has clearly rejected a two-state solution. Several Republicans have responded that this feels like Biden wants to reward terrorist atrocities-- in order to win votes.

So, the Friedman version of the new Biden doctrine begins with a strong and resolute military action against Iranian proxies. Of course, talk is cheap and the Biden administration has been talking tough about Iran for months now. As everyone knows, this means that we are not going to attack Iran.

On one track would be a strong and resolute stand on Iran, including a robust military retaliation against Iran’s proxies and agents in the region in response to the killing of three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan by a drone apparently launched by a pro-Iranian militia in Iraq.

If the dozens of rocket and drone strikes against our troops have shown us anything, they show that the Iranians have gotten the full measure of the pusillanimous Biden administration. They understand that Biden is a coward and will not strike Iran-- because he believes that appeasing Iran through the Obama nuclear deal is the pathway to….

Truth is, Joe is afraid. The Iranians understand it. The Israelis understand it. Everyone with an ounce of sense sees it.

Friedman’s second point involves the advent of a Palestinian state. He wraps it in wild language, calling it an unprecedented diplomatic initiative. This is a fantasy; it is posturing. The two state solution has already been rejected by Hamas.

On the second track would be an unprecedented U.S. diplomatic initiative to promote a Palestinian state — NOW. It would involve some form of U.S. recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that would come into being only once Palestinians had developed a set of defined, credible institutions and security capabilities to ensure that this state was viable and that it could never threaten Israel.

The Palestinians will never agree to this. To imagine that they, given their own state, will accept being demilitarized is absurd. As for the development of institutions, this too will never happen.

When the Biden administration funded Hamas and when the Israelis decided to allow Palestinian workers into the country, the result was October 7. Gazans, in the midst of their rubble, still support Hamas.

The third part would be an enhanced relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but that, Friedman suggests, depends on the Israeli government’s willingness to work to create a viable, functioning demilitarized Palestinian state. It is a nice way to ignore Palestinian complicity and to blame Israel first.

Now, Friedman suggests that this unrealistic set of policies would be a great victory for Joe Biden. Naturally, he ignores the Abraham Accords because their author was Donald Trump.

If the administration can pull this together — a huge if — a Biden Doctrine could become the biggest strategic realignment in the region since the 1979 Camp David treaty.

Friedman understands that Iran must pay a price, but he never articulates what that price should be. Like the Biden cowards he talks tough and proposes giving Iran more outposts bordering Israel:

The rethinking underway signals an awareness that we can no longer allow Iran to try to drive us out of the region, Israel into extinction and our Arab allies into intimidation by acting through proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq — while Tehran blithely sits back and pays no price.

Dare we say that his proposals will produce precisely that outcome.

And naturally, Friedman blames it all on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. One understands that his darker purpose is to exculpate Joe Biden, whose cowardice produced the mess, and to shift the blame to Israel. At a time when Hamas is holding over a hundred Jews hostage, Friedman has the gall to call Netanyahu a hostage-taker.

And, simultaneously, it signals an awareness that the U.S. will never have the global legitimacy, the NATO allies and the Arab and Muslim allies it needs to take on Iran in a more aggressive manner unless we stop letting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold our policy hostage and we start building a credible, legitimate Palestinian Authority that can one day govern Gaza and the West Bank effectively and as a good neighbor to Israel along final borders they would negotiate together.

So, Friedman identifies two bad guys-- the Israelis and the Iranians. Thus, he draws a moral equivalence between Jews and people who want to murder Jews. 

We have tolerated Iran destroying every constructive initiative we have been trying to build in the Middle East — just as long as Tehran stays below the threshold of directly attacking us. And, at the same time, we have tolerated a Netanyahu government that is out to permanently prevent any form of Palestinian statehood, even to the point of bolstering Hamas against the Palestinian Authority for many years to ensure that there would be no unified Palestinian partner.

We can say that the Netanyahu policy toward Hamas in Gaza failed. But then, Friedman blames Netanyahu for the incompetence of the Palestinians, their inability to do anything other than to build terror tunnels and rockets.

So, Friedman suggests that no one has held Iran accountable. Donald Trump applied sanctions against their oil production. Biden removed the sanctions and allowed Iran to accumulate tens of billions of dollars, the better to fund terrorism. 

And of course, the Biden administration weakness toward the Israeli war against Hamas has made it appear that Israel is losing the war. With allies like Joe Biden, you do not need enemies.

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