When Thomas Friedman Sees Israel's “Dark Hour”
By Kenneth E. Bauzon
26 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org
“The Rift Between Netanyahu and the Israeli Army: Parsing the Rhetoric in the Mainstream Media in the Case of Thomas L. Friedman’s 'Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the State of Israel-Palestine', New York Times, May 25, 2016”
The relationship between civilian and military authorities in presumably liberal democratic societies has been the subject of research and discussion in much of academic conferences and literature. The prevailing assumption has been that civilian authorities predominate over their military counterparts, with the latter serving as obedient recipient of instructions and orders from the former, including laws enacted by an elected civilian legislature. Many examples have been offered as examples particularly since the end of the Second World War, pointing implicitly to the presumed underlying superiority of the liberal democratic system over competing alternative systems. The Zionist State of Israel has been offered as one such example wherein proponents, in fact, claim this state to be the only democracy in the whole of the Middle East region.
Problems with this thesis, as illustrated in the specific example of the Zionist State of Israel, will be pointed out in this brief commentary. Researchers often ignore the hegemonizing and harmonizing role of ideology, in this case, Zionism, which makes the distinction between civilian and military lines of authority irrelevant. Thus, these researchers often miss the significance of the alternation between military and civilian roles, and the mutual dependence and support that civilian and military authorities require of each other. In the case of the Zionist State, many civilian authorities have come from the ranks of the military while the latter, in its turn, has had a not-so insignificant role in the formulation and implementation of policies at every stage of the state's growth and expansion. Indeed, even before and since its birth, this state has relied on the services of leaders of Zionist militias, e.g., Haganah, Irgun, Stern Gang, who were promptly and correctly labeled by British Mandate authorities as terrorists, to carry out the policy of cleansing Palestine of its Arab population so that new state may be inserted without much challenge. This policy continues to this day. Both civilian and military authorities have pursued a common agenda, now lasting almost half a century since the 1967 war, of expansion, land acquisition, and colonization under military rule, using failure in political negotiations and absence of any agreement towards final status, including silence of the international community, as pretexts to establish “facts on the ground”, with uncritical and overwhelming material support from the US empire, despite international law prohibiting such unilateral actions.
Gleaning from the pages of the mainstream press, however, one could hardly get a hint about such an egregious case. The overall consensus is that the Zionist State is a democracy, that it is fighting for its survival, and that it is merely defending its own security. The Zionist leaders, it has to be admitted, have also been very skillful in exploiting public sympathy for the Jews on account of the Holocaust, and in promoting the tactic of quickly labeling and branding any criticism of Zionist policies as anti-Semitic. No sooner does one realize that the mainstream or, alternately, corporate, media are a part of the problem. Because of their predominant and far-reaching influence, any presuppositions put forward by them almost always attain the status of normality, as gospel truth. Even if challenged, still they predominate because of their extensive resources to disseminate their point of view with the result that the dissenting voice is lost.
This has been the case with regards to one of the leading columnists of the mainstream press, Thomas L. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes for the paper of note, The New York Times. His column, published on May 25, 2016, presents an interesting case study about much of the presuppositions alluded to above, particularly on the nature of civilian-military rrelations in Israeli politics, the moral and legal bases of the Zionist Israeli occupation of Palestinian terrirory, and the specific policies being instituted and pursued by the Zionist authorities over the subject Palestinian population, their land, and their resources.
It is rare to see Friedman in the radical garb that he wears in this piece, this time as an apparently fierce critic of the current Zionist Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. He sums up his criticism in his concluding sentence by asserting that Netanyahu, his government, the people in his Cabinet, and his policies, “extremist” as they all are by his standards, represent Israel's “dark hour” about which those who care about Israel's future should be concerned. No doubt about the sincerity of Friedman, who invariably, through his privileged platform in The New York Times, cheered the United States' invasion of Iraq; criticized the US-Iran nuclear deal as enshrining Iran's capacity to develop and store processed uranium; claimed that Iran and Hezbollah – as part of what he describes here as Israel's “very dangerous neighborhood” -- have been provoking, not Israel threatening and courting, war; who proclaimed the world as “flat” in the era of neoliberal globalization wherein countries around the world may now be considered as “emerging societies”, not just as “emerging markets”, but who insisted that the US empire, as the leading free-market-based economy, be at the driver's seat of this globalization; and, arguing that without the empire's military might, “[t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist – MacDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas...”
For those familiar with Friedman's rhetoric through his prolific writings, it is easy enough to see how cockeyed and narrow his views are, and I dare say wrong in many of the suppositions he states in this piece. But for those unfamiliar, he is sure to appear level-headed, rational, and informed. In fact, he is one reason why he has a home in The New York Times, and why this paper has had an unbroken, consistent reputation editorially as a supporter of the Zionist State while being hostile at the same time to those that criticize its policies. Note, for example, that while Friedman tries to rally “those of us who care about Israel's future”, he casually dismisses with innuendo the proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) Movement as as being not part of the “us” but, rather, part of a sinister movement “masquerading as a political critique “out to destroy Israel”, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Much of Friedman's ire and tirade in this piece is aimed at Netanyahu's apparent arbitrary and whimsical action against Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, dismissed over an apparently controversial remark he (Yaalon) made in which he warned of “[e]xtremist and dangerous forces [having taken] over Israel and the Likud movement and are deestabilizing our home and threatening to harm its inhabitants”. Friedman rushes to Yaalon's defense describing him as “a very decent man – a soldier's soldier, determined to preserve the Israeli Army as a people's army that aspires to the highest standards of integrity in the middle of a very dangerous neighborhood.”
Friedman is to be admired for his ability to pack so much suppositions in that one sentence, designed obviously to elicit sympathy for Yaalon and direct anger towards Netanyahu but nonetheless intended to obscure the history of the Israeli army's role – for nearly fifty years -- in the colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories, the suppression of the Palestinian people, in providing security to workers sent out to demolish Palestinian homes and destroy agricultural crops, in imposing the siege on Gaza, destroying its civilian infrastructure, and in serving as gendarme for the illegal settlers, policies in which Yaalon has played a prominent and active role in implementing. Not only does Friedman ignore this history, he also manages to validate the occupation and all actions taken by the Israeli Army which he implies to be unblemished as “a people's army”, the “world's most moral army” as others would claim and, therefore, could find no fault in it.
Friedman also directed criticism at Yaalon's appointed successor, Avigdor Lieberman, as another fine example of an extremist hot head for, among other faults, once advocating blowing up Egypt's Aswan Dam, vocally criticizing and excoriating those who advocated Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, and praised medic Sgt. Elor Azaria who, in March of this year, shot in cold blood to the head a Palestinian youth already lying wounded in the ground, instead of calling for an ambulance, an act praised by a demented, blood-thirsty Israeli public as a hero. Again, if Friedman is concerned with Lieberman's extremism on account of these positions, Friedman implies that this brand of extremism is rearing its ugly head just now, that it has no history in Israeli politics, and that its ideology, based both on selective interpretation of the Torah and on pragmatic political expediencies dictated by Israel's desire to be the preeminent and unchallenged regional, nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, is not worth investigating and criticizing. And, while critical of Lieberman's praise for Azaria's action, Friedman fails to tie this action to the harsh military laws, rules, and regulations, adopted under conditions of so-called military occupation, designed to be imposed upon Palestinians only, exempting Jews, providing rules of engagement that, in the end, justify any and all measures intended to cow the Palestinian population from even talking back or throwing a rock at any symbol of Israeli authority. The result of these measures has been an accumulated series of unpunished gratuitous murders, harassments, the manhandling of ordinary Palestinians going about their daily lives, including the molestation, harassment, abduction, interrogation, and detention of Palestinian children, all amply documented by human rights organizations, but hardly meriting a meek comment or slight notice from Friedman.
If Friedman's article is to represent anything, it is that it normalizes what has been the long-standing Zionist Israeli policy of occupation of – and not ever wanting to vacate from – the Palestinian territories in open defiance of international law and of the emergent international public opinion. Friedman is correct in one respect, that this policy of occupation has produced a “binational' state, but one he says that is controlled by the extremists. But Friedman's commentary falls short of recognizing that a de facto binational state has predated the current crop of extremist leaders, that this state has been anticipated either as a conscious policy decision or as an inadvertent consequence, early on, as in the early 1980s, notably by presumably cool-headed and respected Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri. But in failing to define further the nature of this de facto binational state, Friedman has chosen to ignore, and consequent legitimize, its apartheid nature, a state in which the Zionists would benefit from the land and the resources therein but deny rights to Palestinians as equal citizens in this so-called binational state, subject to the whims of Israeli authorities and the enforcement of discriminatory laws.
There was a good reason why former US President Jimmy Carter referred to the Zionist rule over the Palestinian territories even if he could have been right also in calling the Israeli proper as apartheid, but he was being coy and careful, sensitive to wanton criticisms of anti-Semitism.
In a way, Netanyahu was being brutality honest when he admitted that under his administration, there will not be – and cannot be – a two-state solution. His ban on the Palestinian flag, the erasure of Palestinian culture, the cultivation of Zionist supremacy in the school books, and his display of utter contempt towards those critical of Zionist policies, described in chorus by his acolytes as anti-Semitic, all affirmed implicitly or explicitly by Friedman, apparently make it all but impossible the attainment of a sovereign, self-determining, and self-respecting Palestinian State. But most likely not really. This is because Friedman is right about one more thing: in its moral blindness, the Zionist State, particularly under Netanyahu's leadership, is destroying itself, although this self-destruction again predates the current crop of extremist leaders. This process has begun, and will continue until the Israeli public will one day wake up to this nightmare, or for that mater the dream-world, that they have helped build and fantasized about.
Reference
Friedman, Thomas L., “Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the State of Israel-Palestine”, The New York Times, may 25, 2016. In: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/o....)
(Note about the author: A former Fulbright Fellow to Egypt and Israel, Kenneth E. Bauzon is Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph's College – New York, Brooklyn, New York, USA. Comments welcome. He may be reached at: [email protected].)