Jewish American journalist and author Thomas Friedman began his career covering the Middle East in the 1980s. Friedman minted himself as a balanced observer of Israel, advancing a critique of the Jewish state while still maintaining his allegiance to the idea of a Jewish national homeland. Sensitive to Israel’s human rights problems, Friedman has argued for a more nuanced approach on the part of the U.S. government about what it means to be a “friend” to Israel. In similar fashion, he has appealed to fellow Jews to demand that Israel respect Palestinians’ rights. But his commitment to the fundamentals of the Jewish homeland project has never wavered, even now, as awareness of Israel’s crimes has increased, and the public image of Israel as an embattled victim has begun to crumble. Instead, he is serving as a rearguard for Zionism.
Friedman allowed himself to be used as a mouthpiece for U.S. President Joe Biden in a February 12 New York Times opinion piece when he conveyed Biden’s opposition to Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul. Several weeks later, he urged the White House and Congress to join in “marching” with Israeli protesters “to ensure the 75th anniversary of Israeli democracy will not be its last.” Most recently, Friedman weighed in on the conundrum besetting diaspora Jews observing the current crisis, asserting that most Jewish American organizations and lay leaders now have to choose between “Israel’s prime minister and its fighter pilots.”
But it’s a false choice based on a false premise.
A false premise
For Israel’s entire history, the judiciary has been useless in stopping the illegal annexations, land theft, violations of the human rights of Palestinians living under Israel’s control, and the institutionalized discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Few Palestinians have been in evidence in the current protests, both by design on the part of the organizers and because Palestinians are sitting out this campaign to defend a court that has done nothing to challenge a system of laws that has deprived them of their rights and has allowed Israel’s merciless project of colonization and ethnic cleansing to go forward. Friedman ignores the real problem, which is not democracy, but Israel’s record of war crimes and flagrant human rights abuses.
In furnishing the vehicle by which Biden delivered his message, Friedman played Biden’s game of appearing to criticize Israel while continuing to shore up its crumbling foundation. But both the Democratic president and the liberal columnist are flailing — trying to defend the indefensible, find a way to salvage a project nearing its inevitable collapse, and forestall Israel’s isolation and condemnation by the world at large.
Why has this particular move by Netanyahu’s government incensed so many Israelis? Reaching beyond the facile talk of “preserving democracy,” British-born Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeiffer points out that any problem the religious parties have with the Supreme Court has nothing to do with the land-grabbing illegal settler project carried out by the most zealous among them. “At most,” observes Pfeiffer, the court “has been a rare and inconsequential nuisance” in that regard. What they are after, he maintains, is removing the court as an obstacle to the theocratic, ethnically-based Israel that they envision. The protests, therefore, are not about the court itself but “about a secular middle class recognizing that this may be its last chance to preserve what it has always seen as Israel’s essential character…a struggle for Israel itself.”
In identifying religion as a factor in the current crisis, Pfeiffer has named the elephant in the room. But in his talk about “Israel’s essential character” and the “struggle for Israel itself,” Pfeiffer misses the mark. The fact that Israel’s religious minority has taken control of the government is not an artifact of Israeli politics or a troublesome problem to be managed. For Israel, it is the inevitable outcome for a state founded on ethnic nationalist principles. To understand what is happening in Israel today, it is necessary to shine a light on Zionism itself.