Thomas Friedman Fails a Critical Thinking Test—An Analysis (23 MAY 2024) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I — Thomas Friedman of the New York Times
Thomas Friedman is a well known, prize-winning correspondent and editorial writer for the New York Times (NYT). His area of interest has long been the Middle East and he has lived in both Lebanon and Israel. Given the history of American media coverage of this area, led first and foremost by the NYT, that reputation might mean less than you think.
In a May 8, 2024 NYT editorial, Friedman stated that the campus protests against the Israeli war in Gaza had become “too big to ignore.” In addition, he confessed that he found them “very troubling.” Why was that? Because he thought that the message and aims of the protesters “reject important truths about item numbers added here how the Gaza War started and (2) what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable conclusion.” And, finally he asserted that (3) student protesters ignored the feelings of Palestinians who object to Hamas and its October 7 attack on Israel.
Part II — Thomas Friedman “Troubled”
Let’s take a look at the positions that Friedman fines troubling:
— (1) How the Gaza war started. According to Friedman, “they [the protestors] are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on October 7.” That helps make the protesters “part of the problem.”
Here Friedman’s understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is distorted by his (albeit liberal) Zionist predilections. He asserts that Hamas’ October 7 attack “triggered” the ongoing massive Israeli response. This assertion ignores the historical context. Israel’s violence against the Palestinians, including its blockade of Gaza, has been a long-term constant—denying the Palestinians a stable society and economy. Indeed, Hamas’ action on October 7 was itself provoked by years of Israeli aggression during which 5000 Palestinians were killed (as against 170 Israelis). What the Hamas’ action did on October 7 was trigger a significant ratcheting up of otherwise nonstop Israeli aggression. As to the student’s perspective, their emphasis on Gaza means that most don’t see the behavior of Israel and that of Palestinians as anywhere near equal—and neither should Friedman.
I am not exactly sure if Friedman is referring to anything meaningful when he claims that the Palestinians breached a “cease-fire” on October 7. As Atallah Al-Salim points out “Just three weeks before the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map of ‘The New Middle East’ during his speech to the UN’s General Assembly in New York. The map did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. This reaffirmed what Palestinians knew, that there was no chance that Netanyahu’s government would proceed with peace talks with Palestinians.” Hamas noted this behavior even if Friedman appears to have missed it.
Thus, it is sad but true, the Israelis have provoked every rocket launched against them, as well as their losses on October 7. They did so by their unending brutality, the goal of which has always been ethnic cleansing. That being the case, the October 7 Palestinian attack was basically defensive—an act of anti-colonial resistance. Did it involve violence against Israeli civilians? Yes, it did. Has that violence been exaggerated by Israeli propaganda, swallowed whole by Western media? Yes, it has. Should we be surprised by resistance violence given Israeli treatment of the Palestinians over the decades? No, we should not. Friedman’s anger at the protesters for ignoring Israeli victims suggests his own failure to understand the imbalance of violence over the entire history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
—(2) What will be required to bring the war to a close? Friedman is put off “when people chant slogans like liberate Palestine and from the river to the sea.” He believes that this sloganeering is calling for the erasure of the state of Israel. They are arguing, he asserts, “that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense.”
This is a questionable assumption on his part. Actually, the slogan referencing the land from river to sea was originally an Israeli Likud Party one and, in that case, it certainly was calling for “the erasure” of the national rights of Palestinians. In the case of the protesters, it is a reported fact that most are calling for a cease fire, university divestment from Israel, and the institution of a democratic Israel/Palestine with equal rights for all citizens.
Unfortunately, the non-racist goal of a democratic solution of one Israeli/Palestinian state is unacceptable to Friedman. He insists on a “two state solution” which he is convinced is “the only just and workable solution.” He believes this despite the fact that it is now known to have been made impossible by Israel’s own imbedded Zionist ideology. That ideology dictates an exclusively Jewish state from “the river to the sea”—a vision made real by incessant Israeli expansion. So in what sense is a two state solution “workable”? One might also question the “justness” of Friedman’s two state scheme. The way Friedman describes a Palestinian state is, to put it mildly, suicidal. There are half a million Israeli settlers in Friedman’s would be Palestinian state. Yet, he would want the Palestinian entity to be “demilitarized.” Considering that it has been the Zionist state and its settlers that have aggressively sought to ethnically cleanse Palestinians for the last seven decades, one would think that the best way to achieve “workability would be to demilitarize Israel.
—(3) According to Friedman, “the third reason that these protests have become part of the problem is that they ignore the view of many Palestinians in Gaza who detest Hamas’s autocracy.”
The Washington Post, and other major U.S. media outlets which, as far as I know, have never considered the possible popularity of Hamas and the other resistance groups operating in the Gaza Strip, have recently given coverage to about a dozen Palestinians who do not like Hamas. Though the sample is very small, Friedman tells us that “These Palestinians are enraged by precisely what these student demonstrations ignore: Hamas launched this war without permission from the Gazan population and without preparation for Gazans to protect themselves when Hamas knew that a brutal Israeli response would follow.”
There is something a bit screwy about Friedman’s thinking here. How was Hamas, and the other resistance groups, to acquire formal permission from the Gaza population to “launch a war” (when in fact there was already a decades long war going on) without alerting the Israelis? And, given the lack of effective anti-aircraft weapons, how was Hamas, or anyone else, to protect the population from Israeli/American jet fighters—which had periodically bombed Gaza no matter what the resistance did? Finally, Israel’s response—which turned the Gaza Strip into a latter-day version of 1945 Dresden—was in fact out of proportion to Israel’s previous appalling violence in Gaza. So how was the Palestinian resistance suppose to know that the Israeli’s would now be “brutal” to the point of genocide?
Part III — Thomas Friedman and the “TikTok Generation”
In the end, Friedman comes up with a really wild conclusion: “Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.” And from this we are to conclude that Thomas Friedman himself “knows how to think critically.”
Here Friedman comes close to sheer fantasy. I doubt very much if the Palestinian resistance leaders, stuck as they have been within the world’s largest open air prison, were thinking at all about “the next global TikTok generation.” More likely they were concerned with reactionary Middle East governments which were kowtowing to the Americans and Israelis. And the insult that “campus culture has become too much about what to think and not how to think” is, quite likely, the psychological projection of the skewed outlook of this particular Zionist editorial writer for the NYT.
Part IV — Conclusion
Thomas Friedman describes himself as “a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous peoples.” We have already considered how far the Israelis (the “indigenous” status of some of them is dubious) will let this dream be realized—even if Hamas was willing to go along.
So, what else does he want us to do, in order to save both the Israelis and the Palestinians from themselves? “What Palestinians and Israelis need most now … is a way to build more partners for peace. Invest in groups that promote Arab-Jewish understanding, like the Abraham Initiatives or the New Israel Fund. Invest in management skills … for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza …” Quite frankly, at this stage of the game, these are palliatives that will not do.
Let me juxtapose what I believe the Israelis and the Palestinians need most: a democratic and equalitarian one state solution. To attain this, the BDS movement must succeed against apartheid Israel as it did against apartheid South Africa. Pressure to that end must be kept up by rational people everywhere and, in the U.S., by those few politicians who understand what is at stake.
Here in the U.S., Israeli agents such as AIPAC are corrupting the American political system through bribery and blackmail. And, they are doing so for the sake of a racist regime that is destroying Judaism and its ethics. In the end, the biggest problem in this struggle is Zionist Israel, not the Palestinian resistance. The two groups are not equal in strength or in their levels of violence. Does Mr. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winner that he is, understand any of this? Doubtful. That makes him “part of the problem.”
