by Rafael Medoff
Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, claimed in a recent article that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “making it a pariah state.”
Like the shepherd boy in Aesop’s fable, Friedman has been crying wolf—warning that Israel will become “isolated in the world”—for 36 years now. Yet it still hasn’t come true.
Earlier this year, Friedman predicted that President Trump’s Jewish grandchildren “will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.” A few weeks later, Friedman updated that soundbite, telling the “GZero” podcast that he fears his own grandchildren will grow up in his imaginary Israel-as-a-pariah world.
Last April, Friedman charged that Israel’s policies in Gaza “will only compound Israel’s global isolation,” and turn it into “a global pariah with no friends left.” In a second column that month, he stretched the forecast to include the incendiary accusation that Israel’s Gaza policy also was “isolating America, imperiling our regional and global interests.”
But Friedman’s gloomy forecast long predates the Gaza war. More than ten years ago, in March 2015, he wrote in the Times that Israel’s reluctance to establish a Palestinian state in its back yard would “isolate Israel globally.”
In 2013 and again in 2014, Friedman warned that the lack of a Palestinian state would make Israel “a pariah state” and subject it to “international delegitimization.”
Go back another two years, and you find, once again, Friedman claiming that the sky is falling (on Israel). A September 2011 column was headlined “Israel: Adrift at Sea Alone.” Israel needed to make “a peace overture” (translation: create a PLO state), or it would be “plunged into deeper global isolation and drag America along with it.” Yet that never happened.
This pattern of unfulfilled doomsday prophecies by Friedman actually goes all the way back to his 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. And there he was surprisingly frank about the reason he and other critics of Israel harp on the theme of “isolation.”
Most of Chapter 15 was devoted to Friedman, in the role armchair psychiatrist, diagnosing Israelis as “obsessed” with “what the outside world thinks of them.” According to Friedman, Israelis “frantically grab the world by the throat” to give their side of the news because they “have a deep need to be visible, to be loved, to be admired, to be ushered out of their sense of loneliness…”
In Friedman’s view, Israelis’ collective mental illness has deep roots: it’s the result of “the trauma of two thousand years of Jews being rejected by the outside world.”
It may seem far-fetched that memories of ancient Romans or medieval Crusades are what prompt contemporary Israelis to be concerned about media bias. But Friedman has proof: during a recent visit to Jerusalem, “the semi-literate moving men” whom he encountered (think about the racist implications of that casual phrase) “asked me, not in passing but with real concern, whether I had enjoyed my stay.” And they even asked him a second time!
As a result of such “congenital insecurities,” he continued, Israelis “read everything I wrote with the scrutiny of copy readers examining Torah scrolls for mistakes.” Yet Friedman viewed such scrutiny as proof that Israel is weak and can be manipulated; the Israelis’ psychotic “need to be loved” makes them vulnerable to warnings that their actions will turn the whole world against them. Thirty-six years of predictions of “isolation” have followed.
The fact is that there have always been ups and downs in Israel’s international relationships. There have been times when various countries ganged up on Israel, but also plenty of times when they didn’t.
In 1960, the UN Security Council condemned Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann as a violation of Argentinian sovereignty. Seventy-two countries supported the 1975 UN resolution branding Zionism “a form of racism.” Forty-seven countries condemned Israel’s rescue of hostages in Entebbe as a violation of Ugandan sovereignty. The UN Security Council condemned Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.
Yet the UN later repealed the Zionism-is-racism resolution; many countries that condemned the strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor are now glad Israel did it; and more than a few governments that publicly denounce Israel continue to quietly do a lot of business with it.
Why? Because international relations are governed, first and foremost, by interests, not by principles or emotions. Most Israelis realize that fact, which is why Thomas Friedman’s attempts to use the “pariah” argument to pressure Israel have always failed.
Some governments may grumble about this or that Israeli policy, but at the end of the day, they need Israeli weapons to defend themselves, or Israeli medical technology to improve their citizens’ health care, or Israeli scientific inventions that make life easier in a hundred different ways. It’s those kinds of needs that ultimately play the decisive role in shaping their relations with Israel.
https://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2011/05/04/peace-at-last-palestine-in-2013-steven-plaut/