Thomas Friedman's recent New York Times article "A hard no to this peace deal" is yet another in a series meant to derail the Biden administration's effort to broker a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Two points stood out in this one.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
Friedman claims that Israel's government is not normal (his italics) and therefore Israel cannot be a stable US ally or Saudi partner. Not normal to whom? How do you define normal when it comes to politics? An element of volatility has always defined Israeli politics because the proportional representation nature of Israeli democracy means that all governments are coalition governments.
Ironically, Friedman's own country, the US, is going through a difficult period characterized by increasing political polarization. It has been suggested that Saudi interest in reaching out to countries such as Russia and China is partly due to mistrust of the US as an ally.
Moreover, is the government of Saudi Arabia normal? Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ranked 150 out of 167 countries on the 2022 Democracy Index compiled by the Economist (Israel ranked 29, one spot ahead of the US). Until recently, Saudi women could not even drive a car!
Friedman also claims that the Netanyahu government's aim is to forget the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and annex the West Bank. Like Mr. Friedman, I believe in a two-state resolution, and I too think that annexing the West Bank would be a mistake. But what about some context? Do the Palestinians want a two-state solution?
In the same article, Friedman refers to the 1936 Peel Commission partition proposal. This was a proposal that would have allocated just 17 percent of Mandatory Palestine to a Jewish state and a much larger portion to a Palestinian state. Faced with the danger that would later become the Holocaust, the Zionists reluctantly accepted, while the Arabs of Palestine would not even agree to meet with members of the Commission.
This same inability by the Arab world to accept the existence of a Jewish state occurred after 1947, when, as Friedman notes, the UN voted to partition Palestine. Arab rejection of Israel as a state appeared again in 1967, after the Six-Day War when the Arab League resolved that there would be no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel.
Intensive negotiations toward a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians have included the Oslo Accords of 1993 and two occasions, 2000 and 2008 when far-reaching concessions offered by Israel toward a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank were rejected. In fact, the Palestinian suicide bombers of the Second Intifada (1987-1993) contributed to the demise of the Israeli political Left and the rightward shift of Israeli politics.
Today, the two million Palestinians of Gaza are hostages to Hamas, a terrorist organization that has no interest in a two-state solution, while Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians in the West Bank, questions the historicity of the Holocaust. Nor does Hezbollah, a terrorist-Iranian proxy in Lebanon, or the Government of Iran, support the existence of the Jewish state.
The American historian Daniel Pipes is correct when he said, in a 2023 Jerusalem Post interview with Seth Frantzman, that the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians will only end when the Palestinians give up their goal of eliminating Israel.
Today, the conflict has evolved to include a Palestinian-led international effort to delegitimize Israel. Perhaps Mr. Friedman does not get the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea," but I do.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
