For as long as I have been writing about the Middle East, Thomas L. Friedman has been one of my favorite foils.
I don’t mean that personally. Friedman is an accomplished journalist, a gifted writer and the possessor of perhaps the most influential foreign-policy column in America. The problem is that when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, he has been spectacularly, repeatedly and confidently wrong.
More remarkably, being wrong never seems to alter the prescription.
Now he has turned his attention once again to AIPAC.
Writing in The New York Times about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Friedman advised him that he can remain true to his pro-Palestinian views, appeal to Jewish voters and still “stick it to AIPAC.”
That phrase deserves more attention than Friedman probably intended.
AIPAC is fair game for criticism. So is every political organization in America. Its spending can be questioned. Its endorsements can be questioned. Its political strategy can be questioned.
But “stick it to AIPAC” is not a policy argument. It reflects an increasingly fashionable idea that there is something distasteful, or even illegitimate, about Americans organizing politically in support of Israel.
Friedman should know better. And this is not his first trip down this road.
In 2011, Friedman notoriously wrote that the standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received in Congress had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Two years later, he suggested that lawmakers would do what the Israel lobby wanted because they needed Jewish votes and campaign contributions.
The implication is difficult to miss.
When environmental organizations spend millions trying to influence elections, that is democracy. When organized labor does it, that is democracy. When gun-control or gun-rights organizations do it, that is democracy. When Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations lobby Congress on Middle East policy, that is democracy.
But when Americans who support Israel organize, contribute money, lobby Congress and vote according to their beliefs, Friedman repeatedly treats their influence as something requiring special suspicion.
Why?
The conclusion somehow always remains the same
There is an old and ugly history behind the notion that Jewish money purchases political obedience. Friedman may have no intention of invoking it. But someone with his experience should recognize the danger of language that comes perilously close to it.
What makes his latest column particularly revealing is that Friedman himself identifies the real question confronting El-Sayed.
El-Sayed says Jewish voters should trust his commitment to their physical safety. Friedman correctly responds that American Jews want something more: recognition that Jews, like other peoples, have a right to national self-determination. Precisely. That is Zionism.
So perhaps instead of telling El-Sayed to “stick it to AIPAC,” Friedman should ask why an organization devoted to preserving the U.S.-Israel relationship is such an inviting target in the first place.
This fits a much larger pattern.
In 2016, I wrote about Friedman’s claim that Israel was determined to “permanently occupy” Palestinians between the Mediterranean and Jordan River. The inconvenient fact was that Israel had withdrawn from the major Palestinian population centers under the Oslo Accords more than two decades earlier.
In 2020, Friedman suggested that climate change and water shortages strengthened the case for sweeping territorial concessions. Then the Kinneret reached its highest level for that time of year in nearly three decades.
And in 2022, after Friedman declared that “the Israel we knew is gone” following another Netanyahu victory, I pointed out an inconvenient piece of history: He had been sounding alarms about Israel long before Netanyahu.
He criticized Israel under heads of state Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon.
Left-wing governments changed. Right-wing governments changed. Israeli policies changed.
Friedman’s conclusion somehow remained the same: Israel was always the country that needed correcting.
That’s what makes his record worth examining. Friedman has spent decades offering advice to Jerusalem that history repeatedly rendered obsolete, only to return with another version of the same advice.
Israel should withdraw.
Israel should compromise.
Israel should understand Palestinian frustrations.
Israel should worry about world opinion.
And Americans who defend Israel should exercise less political influence.
Meanwhile, reality has been conducting its own experiment. Israel withdrew from Gaza. Hamas turned it into a terrorist enclave. Israel made far-reaching offers of Palestinian statehood. Palestinian leaders rejected them. Iran built a regional network of terrorist armies.
Hezbollah accumulated tens of thousands of missiles on Israel’s northern border. And Hamas carried out the massacre of Oct. 7. Yet somehow the analytical spotlight keeps swinging back toward Israel—and toward those bothersome Americans who insist on defending it.
AIPAC is not above criticism. Israel is not above criticism. Neither am I.
But supporting Israel is not a defect in American democracy. Organizing politically to support Israel is not corruption. And Jewish Americans do not require Friedman’s permission to advocate vigorously for the survival and security of the Jewish state.
If Abdul El-Sayed wants Michigan’s Jewish voters to trust him, he does not need to “stick it to AIPAC.”
He needs to answer a much simpler question: Does he believe that the Jewish people possess the same right of national self-determination that he so passionately demands for Palestinians?
And when Israel is threatened by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or others who openly seek its destruction, will he stand with Israel—or lecture it about the concessions it should make next?
Those are the questions Friedman should be asking.
Instead, after decades of predictions overtaken by events and prescriptions disproved by experience, he has once again found the culprit: Israel and the people who defend it.
Some things, apparently, never change.
