By Barry Rubin
Well, sort of. Friedman’s remark at an Aspen Institute event was tweeted by an Arab journalist.
“Mubarak had 30 years to reform Egypt, then he tried to do it all in six days. Netanyahu is Mubarak of Israel”
This was clearly Friedman’s theme at the Aspen Institute speech cited.
In fact, Friedman went on to see similar and worse things on the Charley Rose show. The theme he was pushing (and was introduced by President Obama) has been picked up by others: Israel is stupid, stubborn, and has no understanding of its own interests. What is in Israel’s interests is to turn the West Bank over to the Palestinian Authority as fast as possible; accept an independent Palestinian state right away, and then (after having surrendered all of its leverage) some day in the future the end of conflict, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, the future of Jerusalem, and that of Palestinian refugees can be discussed.
The likely result? Palestine becomes an independent state, then declares that Israel has not really made peace and go back to demanding all of Israel, letting cross-border terrorist attacks, inciting to murder Israelis, demanding a “right of return” for all Palestinians any of whose family members or ancestors ever lived within what is now Israel’s borders, etc., etc.
So in other words Netanyahu should be overthrown because he won’t agree to this plan? President Barack Obama should call for Netanyahu to be gone right away? Or merely has Israel failed to change its policies in several decades?
Friedman’s new theme seems to echo a favorite Obama claim and to be the new anti-Israel line: Those Israelis are stupid and stubborn. If only they knew their own interests they would do whatever Obama wanted and accept a Palestinian state right away (for virtually nothing in return). Oh yes, and in the words of the ever-elegant Friedman, saying Obama is anti-Israel is “Crap.”
Actually, I think the word “crap” best describes the Obama administration’s perceptions of the Middle East, policies toward the region, and handling of Israel-Palestinian issues. The difference is that I can prove my case and Friedman can’t prove his.
Thirty years ago, Israel rejected dealing with the PLO, rejected a Palestinian state, and was expanding the size and number of settlements in the West Bank. Today it favors a two-state solution; accepts negotiations with the PLO’s successor, the Palestinian Authority; has pulled out of southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; does not create or expand settlements with a nine-month freeze in all construction at President Barack Obama’s request; and eleven years ago even offered most of east Jerusalem for a Palestinian state.
You can argue that Israel is better or worse off for these changed policies but Israel’s policies have changed dramatically, in part due to Netanyahu as well as others. To believe that Israel has been intransigent is nuts. To believe that Israel has been intransigent is also an accepted belief among many Western elites.
What Friedman is doing, as always, is speaking flattery–not truth–to power. Remember Friedman is supposedly one of the people Obama consults most on Middle East policy. I’m not suggesting that Friedman literally wants a revolution to overthrow Netanyahu, but what his writings reveal–and U.S. officials often hint–is that it is Netanyahu and Israel that are blocking peace. Israel just doesn’t know what’s good for itself and needs the great minds of Obama and Friedman to come to its senses.
Let me restrict myself to three responses:
First, although I didn’t vote for him but was a parliamentary candidate for a left-of-center party, Netanyahu was elected by the Israeli public for good reason following its experiences over the last two decades. The vast majority of Israelis think he has done a good job. Indeed, the more Obama and people like Friedman attack Israel (oops, I mean Netanyahu) the more support he has gained.
Second, while the pretense is that Friedman’s line is anti-Likud or anti-Netanyahu, the reality is that this is anti-Israel, seeking to subvert policies necessary for its survival and to destroy American Jewish support for Israel. Netanyahu is not missing any great opportunities for peace, nor is his government “short-sighted” (to use another Friedman phrase).
Third, the underlying assumption is that if only Israel took more risks and made more unilateral concessions peace would be possible, even quick to arrive. We learned eleven years ago that this was nonsense. If Friedman and others haven’t learned this yet that’s their problem. What we are seeing is a systematic campaign to misrepresent reality, the fact that the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian politics are the roadblocks to peace.
Netanyahu and Israel are dealing with the reality of the Middle East, something the Obama Administration would be well advised to do. Note also that most of the American people agree with Netanyahu and Israel according to every public opinion poll. And take another look at the video of Netanyahu speaking before the joint session of Congress, with both Democrats and Republicans going wild with enthusiasm.
Prof. Rubin.
Why do you waste your time on Friedman? He’s just a hack for Pravda-on-the-Hudson. He hasn’t had anything worthwhile to say in over 20 years. And, he’s a pompous ass. From time to time, our worthless media here in Israel has an article ”Friedman says …” & the talkbacks (at least the ones that aren’t censored) are hilarious, Friedman has become a joke, a buffoon, a caricature of the brain-dead liberal spouting nonsense.
Please pardon the language, but Friedman is an asshole, no other word fits him better.
Pravda-On-The-Hudson!
What a perfect description of the Old Gray Liar.
Just out of curiousity, Prof. Rubin, you said you were a candidate for a left-of-centre party for the Knesset. Did you mean Kadima? Isn’t Likud left-wing enough?
Wild with enthusiasm for what? Those very politicians are importing muslims into the U.S. like there is some fire sale going on. It is that very immigration into the West that has enabled the BDS sanctions against Israel.
Friedman must’ve been drunk for that tweet since there are the elected and there are 30 year dictators. But as for Mubarak, he enabled a brutal dictatorship that suppressed any dissent and paid the police so little that a system of endemic corruption was in place where you had to pay under the table for everything.
I’m not sure what he changed since to hold an impromptu gay pride event downtown or to wear a Star of David t-shirt would be tantamount to suicide in Cairo. Not exactly the jewel of the orient unless you like your donkeys within the city limits rather than without and a muslim in your face for every little thing you think or do.
You like Mubarak because you perceive him as someone who held off a threat to Israel but in fact the Americans would’ve and will bribe whoever is in power in Egypt to maintain that status quo. It’s all about not letting Israel beat them up again so the oil will continue to flow. Musn’t anger the Saudis must we?
The day we suck the last drop of oil out of the ground of that odious country they should have a global celebration. Then they can go back to sleep in the hateful little 18th century backwater all the nice buildings and yachts can’t hide.
1 Terry-don`t understand that Friedman is the voice of leftist Jewish money who have helped Obama`s election and today push him to confrontation with Israel.
Apparently you have not heard what Latma, the satirical Israeli show had to say about Tom Friedman. Watch this, it’s hilarious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK7wwxkcQvU
Mark Levin had a brilliant and savage takedown of Friedman on this.
I have Israeli friends, they told me that 90% of the Israeli consider Friedman a traitor and Jihadi supporter… Friedman is just another self hating jew….
It’s quite astonishing how stupid, ignorant, yet arrogant that man can be. I think he lost his wits and needs to see a doctor before he causes more harm to himself and to others. Every time I think he hit bottom he spouts something even more shockingly absurd. Netanyahu is Mubarak? What the hell is he talking about? Revolution? We have free elections, what do we need revolution for?
Let’s examine some of the differences between Mubarak and Netanyahu:
Mubarak has been in power for about 30 years, imposing himself on the population. He was part of a party that’s been in power for about 60 years as a result of a coup d’etat and never held free elections. Netanyahu is the head of Likud party and is the PM of Israel for only about 2 years as a result of free election. Before that Kadima party was in power after winning free election. For over 60 years, since Israel’s foundation, Israel is a democracy where different parties win elections and different people become Prime Ministers. Egypt’s policies in the last 30 years were what Mubarak and the people behind him decided. Israel’s policies in the last 30 years were decided by many different Prime Ministers, ministers, parties and representatives elected by the people. So how can Netanyahu, who is the PM of Israel for only a couple of years and as a result of free election, can be to Israel what Mubarak was to Egypt? Saying something like that doesn’t make any sense.
Mubarak was an unpopular dictator hated by the people. Netanyahu is an elected PM who has wide support from the people. He will most likely be reelected. If not, he will step down quietly and someone else will be the PM, which couldn’t happen in Egypt under Mubarak. So how can Netanyahu be to Israel what Mubarak was to Egypt? It makes no sense.
The reforms Mubarak was trying to make at the last minute were internal reforms and he did so to try and save himself and his power. What kind of reforms Friedman believes Netanyahu should make? Maybe turn Israel into a dictatorship and then turn it over to Friedman and his pals so they can run it to the ground and give it away to the various terrorists and Islamists they’re so enamoured with? Because otherwise it’s the Israeli people that will decide, and most Israelis aren’t as blind, deaf, stupid and crazy as Friedman, so if Netanyahu will do what Friedman wants him to do he and his party will simply be replaced in the next election with others who are not entirely out of their minds.
Mubarak was a relative moderate (relatively to the Middle East). He will now be replaced with a radical government. Is that the kind of reform Friedman wishes for Israel as well?
Until very recently I used to be center-left and never voted for Likud in my life. And I supported the Oslo Accords and the so-called peace process. But the Arabs rejected two maximalist proposals by Labor’s Ehud Barak government in 2000/1 and by Kadima’s Ehud Olmert government in 2008, and launched a war of terror and rockets since the mid 90s when we made the mistake of letting the PLO in. Now Hamas rules half the Palestinian Authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and other radicals are gainig ground all over the Middle East with the assistance of a West who lost its mind. I’ve been stupid enough to “give peace a chance” over and over again with these people who just use fools like me in their Machiavellian plans, but even idiots like me finally have to wake up and face reality. These people don’t educate their children for peace, they educate them to become shahids, keep fighting Israel until it’s destroyed, and exterminate the Jews.
These people don’t mean peace and never did. They only used diplomacy as a Trojan horse to get as much territory as possible to continue the war against Israel from there with as much support, financially and politically, from the decadent West. It’s the PLO’s Phased Plan from 1974. Phase 1, as was set in the Phased Plan, was to get as much territory as possible and establish a Palestinian National Authority on it. Phase 2 is to use the Palestinian Authority as a base of operations against Israel. And the final phase is to provoke a total war where the rest of the Arabs will join in to destroy Israel. That plan is what we’ve seen implemented since 1993, and not a “peace process”.
The tragicomic part of it is that people like me were aware of the good ol’ Phased Plan, but we are so desparate for peace and so willing to “turn every stone” that we were willing to take the chance, and for a long time continued in spite of the mounting evidence that the other side means something entirely different. But enough is enough. There’s a limit to our stupidity and naivete. Is there a limit to Friedman’s stupidity?
You know what? Friedman is the Party’s mouthpiece, so whatever he says should be seen as Party propaganda. If he praises China and ascribes its economic success to planning by the central goverment, which he says is superior to democracy in certain respects, then we should see it as advocating a socialist dictatorship for the US. Of course, he won’t say it so bluntly, but the method has always been the Gramscian strategy of gradual cultural transformation and not a frontal attack, so they promote those ideas bit by bit. When he attacks Netanyahu rather than Israel, what should me make of that?
Well, the US has adopted this pattern of going to war against a head of state, making a distinction between him and the people. They did so in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq. They now fight in Lybia to topple Qadaffi. So if a Party’s mouthpiece now goes against the Israeli PM, trying to demonize him by comparing him to an ousted Middle Eastern dictator, and pretending all decisions are made exculsively by him with the people somehow excluded, it might signal the beginning of a propaganda campaign for a NATO attack “against Netanyahu”, pretending it’s just to topple Netanyahu and save the poor enslaved Israelis from his evil grip. Sounds farfetched? I hope it is, but I put nothing beyond the Obama administration.
At the very least it is designed to pressure Israelis to elect someone else, someone the Obama administration likes better. I wonder if they already have their own agents installed in our political system. It was naive of us Israelis to believe there aren’t politicians in our political system who are American and European tools. We have some Arab and Muslim politicians who are the PLO’s and Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood tools, Syrian tools and Iranian tools. They hardly even bother to hide it. So why not American and European tools? Everyone is doing that.
In the end it won’t be only Israel that’ll be isolated, but the United States as well. That might be the more ambitious goal. If the American president is attacking the US’ allies while encouraging its enemies, in the end the US will be isolated. If the US tries to force Israel to commit suicide Israel might try to ally with America’s rival China. We don’t want it, but we don’t want to die either. But if the US allienates, weakens, subverts, endangers or outright obliterates allies one after the other, while not succeeding in turning its enemies into friends, where will the US be in the end of this process?
You must mean Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and Tzippi Livni. I’m sure there are others. Of course, with our politicians, it’s hard to tell if they’re ”moles” or agents of a foreign power or just miserable opportunists who would sell out their country for political advantage.
Bill Clinton, supposedly a ”friend”, succeeded in pushing Netanyahu out, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that the low-lifes from Kadima would like a repeat performance.
I have to comment on your transition from ”peace-supporter” to sanity, I think this is a voyage many Israelis have made over the last few years but congratulations nonetheless.
Come on, many of them did believe it’ll solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’m quite sure Peres believed his delusion of the New Middle East, where people will live side by side in peace and cooperate for mutual development and prospeirty. Kinda blew up in his face.
Friedman has always been a pompous arrogant man.
He thinks if Israel just surrenders there will be peace. He is the creator of the phrase Hama Rules, but is magically silent about the Hezbollah, Iran and Syrian realities that prevent ANY peace from happening.
There should not be programs for peace studies, there should be victory studies- how tranquility, to what ever extent it ever exists in this world, stems solely from the utter crushing defeat of an enemy.
Finally there is the bs factor, it might have even been a link Prof. Rubin provided to a 2011 PA “ceremony” awarding benefits to imprisoned terrorists and their families. This in and of itself ought to be grounds to arresting Abbas and sending him off to use that Jordanian citizenship he took out (really!) but what shocked me most of all was the spontaneous chant that broke out- “Kaybar kaybar ya yahud! Jaish Mohammed sawf ya’ud!” “Kaybar, Kaybar oh Jews! the Army of Mohammed is returning !” Kaybar was Mohammed’s famous massacre of Jews, the chant is a call to genocide. The US gives the Palestinians $100 million a month to encourage peace.
They learned the wrong lessons from WWII:
- Never crush an enemy (like Germany in WWI) because then it will have grievances and will go to war again. And nevermind the lessons that can be learned from crushing Japan and Germany in WWII. Therefore if the enemy has grievances you should make more and more concessions until the enemy is satisfied and ready to make peace. And nevermind that’s what Britain and France tried to do with Hitler to no evail.
- Nationalism causes wars and therefore to prevent war we should abolish the nation state. The results of that folly we are already beginning to see.
It’s a more fundamental change that needs to happen.
If Netanyahu goes another supporter of the Palestine genecide will follow just as those before him. The illegal occupation needs to be stopped. The arrogance of statements such as “and eleven years ago even offered most of east Jerusalem for a Palestinian state” is mind blowing. How very nice of Israel to ‘allow’ Palestine to have back land they took from them.
I’m not expecting much support to this outlook on here! but you really should know how cold, heartless and completely biased you all sound. At least be honest and say you hate Palestinians, you think you are much better than them and want them all gone. At least then we could take ‘liar’ off your list of traits.
Read, watch and learn…
http://www.thirdeyeforum.com/2011/07/02/palestine-issue/
I don’t want them ”all gone” – I just want them in Jordan. Jordan is the real Palestinian state. The whole Palestinian narrative is BS, make-believe for useful idiots. You sound like you swallowed the propaganda whole. ”Genocide” – if we wanted genocide, don’t you think we’d be finished by now? I mean, it’s been 63 years. You know what – I don’t even bother to hate Palestinians, they’re not worth that effort. But, I do have a total lack of respect for them, they’re hate-filled bungling failures, used & manipulated by corrupt leaders. You just regurgitate slogans like some perverted parrot.
Give me a break. This pile of steaming rubbish is something we should learn from?
1. Israel didn’t take anything from the Arab-Palestinians because there was never in history an Arab state called Palestine, nor was there a nation called Palestinians (unless you refer to the ancient Philistines who weren’t Arabs and who were long extinct as a distinct people even back when the Romans renamed Judea Palaestina). There was only the Arab nation that has 22 states stretching on most of the Middle East and who want a 23rd Arab state on the ruins of Israel because they believe every last grain of sand they ever conquered must be theirs forever.
2. Israel didn’t take anything from the Arabs since the entire land was part of the Ottoman empire. More precisely it was a small and negelected part of an Ottoman province whose capital was Damascus. It was a small part of an Arab empire for a short while after the Arabs conquered it in the 8th century. Before that it was a small part of the Byzantine empire and the Roman empire. Before that it was a Jewish state.
3. Jerusalem had a Jewish plurality, if not majority, since the late 19th century, which endured regardless of the oppression and brutalities on part of the Muslims who relegated Jews and Christians to the status of dhimmis. In the 48-49 war the Arabs launched on Israel, when Israel captured west Jerusalem and the Arabs captured east Jerusalem the Arabs cleansed east Jerusalem of its Jews. The fact the largest religious community in Jerusalem was Jewish and not Muslim also refutes the current Muslim claim that Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. I mean, think Mecca and Medina – infidels are not even allowed to enter them, so how could the third holiest city in Islam have a Jewish majority while still under Islamic rule?
4. The region the Europeans called Palestine included what is today Jordan. The British gave 78% of the Palestine mandate to the Arab emir Abdallah, renamed it Trans-Jordan and declared that from now on Palestine refers only to the part west of the Jordan river. Then the UN decided to partition the remaining 22% of the Palestine mandate between the Arabs and the Jews. The Jews accepted it, the Arabs rejected it and went to war to destroy Israel. In the war they lost territories that Israel annexed to create more defesible borders. So after 49 Israel had about 15-16% of the original Palestine mandate. Every time Israel captured any land it was the result of Arab aggression.
5. The only side of the conflict always talking about committing genocide is the Muslim side.
6. In war there are always also civilian casualties, except the Arab side systematically targets civilians on purpose, so where are the photos of the slain Israeli babies on your website?
7. I’m sick and tired of hearing about the poor innocent Arab victims of evil Jews who stole Arab land. The Arabs conquered the entire Middle East and beyond and forced, and continue to force, their identity, language, culture and religion on the conquered populations. Arab imperialism is one of the most successful imperialist projects in history since they succeeded in ruthlessly and methodically uproot and erase whole populations and their original identities and cultures and replace them with Arab identity, so even most of their victims have no recollection of their ancestral origins – it’s not something they study in history lessons in school. Still there is a large minority of peoples in the Middle East who manage to remember and preserve their original identities. Yet nobody cares about their right to self-determination. The entire world cares only about the ARAB Palestinian people that has never existed as a nation or a country or a distinct culture before. I wonder why is that. Maybe it’s because the Arabs control so much oil and have so much money to invest in propaganda, in “donations” to Western universities and intellectuals, and in Western businesses and politicians, while the Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Assirians, Nubians etc. are weak, don’t control the oil, and don’t target Western targets for terror attacks?
You ask:
The entire world cares only about the ARAB Palestinian people that has never existed as a nation or a country or a distinct culture before. I wonder why is that.
and a logical answer is that the world having permitted the emergence of a Jewish state soon wished it gone and has been using those Arabs as the stone to grind down the Israeli Jews.
Look back at the actions of the Western world (politicians and media) over the past 40 years and you will find the incitement that has built into the resurgence of antisemitism so blatantly exhibited in Europe today.
You should call your drivel-laden site the “Browneyeforum”
The entire left has an anti-Likud bent and Obama had his revved up long before Friedman became a ripple in the cesspool.
They don’t like Netanyahu precisely because he will not scrape and bow to the leftist idiocy.
Anyone who is not a leftist is an “enemy” and they treat Bibi just as they treat any non-leftist. The takedown of Israel and the takedown of the U.S. are on similar tracks.
Leftism is a vicious disease, filled with lies and masquerading as peace, love and understanding. The Daily Duranty has been filled with leftist lies for generations now.
It has declared itself an enemy of free market democracy in America and a very stout anti-Israel voice.
When Friedman isn’t playing the Walter Duranty role for China, he is browbeating America or Israel like a good little leftist.
When those who love Israel finally…finally…wake up to the fact that leftism is not liberal, it is fascist and totalitarian…then and only then will Israel have a chance to survive. Not a moment before.
And, I fear, that the U.S. is in the same sort of peril. We need to start making it clear. This is not conservatives vs. liberals. Liberals are not the problem. They barely exist any longer.
Until we understand the difference…and stop allowing the leftists to pose as liberals, we will be annihilated.
The call for Israel to make unilateral concessions is nothing new. Nowadays this call is made in order to tempt the Palestinians back to the negotiating table but just few years ago it used to be made in order to get the Palestinians to make peace with Israel.
Unilateral Israeli concessions didn’t work then and they won’t work now. But the Friedmans and the Israeli Left still make these demands because they are desperate, they have run out of delusional ideas to achieve their bizarre version of peace. Besides, demanding any sort of concessions from the Palestinians is a waste of time, the Palestinians won’t even honor the agreements they have signed much less give up anything.
And by the way, the Friedmans and the Israeli Left have been successful in the past in forcing unilateral Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, so it is no wonder they are still trying to draw water from that well. I would point out that two Israeli governments, one Left wing under Rabin, and one Right wing under Sharon, made two of the most sigificant and stupidest unlateral concessions in modern Israeli history. Rabin of course signed off on the unlateral territorial withdrawals of the Oslo Accords along with resurrecting Arafat and bringing a PLO terrorist army into the heart of Israel. And no Israeli will ever forget the Sharon unlateral territorial disengagement from the Gaza Strip which has allowed the almost daily unprovoked terrorist missile attacks on Southern Israel which plague us to this day.
So you see, a combination of Israeli Left wing persuasion by way of a compliant Israeli Left wing media, coupled with at least two really delusional Israeli Left and Right wing government’s policies have created the impression that Israel is weak, corruptable, and able to be pushed into policies which are actually dangerous and ineffective.
My thirty years of experience living in Israel and watching the politics here have convinced me that the only reason that the last several Israeli governments have not made more unilateral concessions to the Palestinians is that there are very few, if any, left to make. The issue of Jerusalem is too sensitive, the settlements now have real political power, and even the average Tel Aviv Israeli realizes that the only way to peace with the Palestinians requires some Palestinian quid pro quo.
Sharon’s party wasn’t right-wing, it was centrist. It’s center-left today.
The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza WAS delusional. This is really a scary thought.
Of course, to you everything was delusional, but I disagree. It may not have been smart to give Yasser Arafat the benefit of the doubt, but there was room for doubt, it wasn’t delusional, it was a dangerous bet. But then everything started to deteriorate. I won’t go into all the details of the evolution of the mass delusion because that requires a book, maybe many books, but the withdrawal from Gaza was the apex of that delusional thinking. And I supported it back then.
Of course, I see things much more clearly now. At some point I realized how easily I was manipulated – I’d almost call it brainwashed – by the media. I wasn’t as angry with them as I was angry with myself for letting this happen. Of course, it wasn’t only the media, but most of the academia, and the left wing politicians. Well, it’s the same everywhere. They simply take over and use their position as the gatekeepers of information to create this fantasy world that serves to push their political agenda. This way, – by hiding a lot of critical information, spinning and coloring news, occasionally lying, and regularly propagandizing – they prevent the public from critical thinking and use them as pawns, use the power of the masses in a democracy to navigate the state in their desired political direction. You get glimpses of the truth as distorted distant voices through a thick solid wall. People finally guess enough using their common sense. I guess that’s how the Soviet citizens did it. But if it wasn’t for the Internet I’d have very little solid information about so many things that are critical to make a judgement.
I was among those who protested the Oslo Accords because like most sane Israelis I knew instinctively that Arafat, the scourge of the Jews, hadn’t changed one bit. What had changed was that Israel had elected Yitzchak Rabin, a drunken sot with a foul mouth, who because of his military background, could be used by the ultra Leftists Peres and Aloni to lull the genuine and ultimately proven fears of the Israeli public and implement dangerous policies like Oslo. Most Israelis knew that sooner rather than later Arafat would use his terrorist army to attack and kill us, but the Leftist media and our Leftist intellectual elite convinced too many Israelis to take a “chance” for peace. Well thousands are dead and maimed for life because of that chance for peace. And those who brought Oslo to fruition remain unrepentant and still believe that they did the right thing. Talk about delusional!
And if you want one more ridiculous and dangerous unilateral withdrawal, put together by an obtuse and delusional Israeli Left, check out Ehud Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, how he abandoned the SLA, and manged in just a couple of days to put Hizballa missiles and terrorists within meters of Israel’s Northern Border. This act of lunacy led directly to the Arafat Intifadas and a real shooting war between Hizballa and Israel just a few years later.
For your information, Ariel Sharon ran as a Right wing icon because of his supposed security/military credentials as the Likud leader, and only when the Likud members rejected his dangerous Leftist unilateral disengagement policies in Gaza and the Shomron did Sharon pull out and set up the Kadima gang.
So you think that Oslo wasn’t a dangerous Left wing Israeli delusion, go talk with those of us who survived Oslo, who fought it tooth and nail, who were derided as warmongers and racists. We were treated as the bitterest enemy of Israel while Arafat was accorded the status of Jewish royalty.
was Freidman circumcised(Is he even Jewish) and if so is he still circumcised or has he sewn his foreskin back on? What Jewish credentials does he have? Does he eat kosher? put on tefillin? Observe the Jewish Sabbath in a Jewish manner? Does he have a Jewish wife?
What credentials does he have to tell Israelis what to do? Does he live here? Is he a citizen? Does he have voting rights? Did he serve in the IDF? Does he celebrate Israel Independence day? Does he have an Israeli flag in his home?
Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are more qualified to give advice to Israel than Freidman and they for sure aren’t Jews!
Friedman, a good example of how the Stockholm Syndrome (submission to islam) can blow someone’s brains out.
Here is Latma’s version on Tom Friedman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK7wwxkcQvU
must watch