In response to Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman, a pro-Israel journalist close to the ruling circles in Washington and Tel Aviv, published an article in the New York Times entitled “Israel is in Dire Danger, and an Existential Threat,” on Tuesday 9-24-2024.

Thomas Friedman criticized the Israeli government and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and wrote that "Israel as we knew it does not exist, and Israel today is in existential danger." This is due to external factors represented by Iran and its proxies in the region, and internal factors represented by the policy of the right-wing Israeli government, which adopted a retaliatory invasion launched by Netanyahu's government against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, which was characterized by bloodiness and the killing of many civilians, without any political horizon for the next day. He says: "When you fight a war like this without a political horizon for an extended period, a war that denies any possibility for more moderate Palestinians to rule Gaza, the Israeli military operation there begins to look like endless killing for the sake of killing. This is exactly what Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want."

Friedman insists that Israel is in terrible danger. It is “fighting the most just war in its history, in response to the senseless brutal killing and kidnapping of women, children and grandparents by Hamas, and yet Israel is today more of a pariah state than ever before.”

He pointed out in his article that he warned of this matter after the formation of the current Israeli government. Thomas Friedman believes that Israel’s status and acceptance level, and the legitimacy that has been painstakingly built over decades, are eroding at an increasing rate, and that Washington’s global standing will decline along with Israel’s. He believes that they do not fully appreciate the anger that is rising around the world, fueled by social media and television footage, over the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians, especially children, with weapons provided by the United States in the war on Gaza.

He considers Iran’s regional role to be the most important external threat to Israel, as it has managed to besiege Israel through its allies and proxies. He said: “What is happening now is the culmination of a major Iranian strategy based on igniting a ring of fire around Israel, using the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, and fighters in the West Bank who are supplied by Iran with weapons smuggled through Jordan.”

In the face of this threat, Israel does not enjoy the sympathy of much of the world, because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition are waging the war in Gaza and occupying the West Bank. Friedman criticized the Netanyahu government for refusing to conduct the war in the only way that could achieve success, because it conflicted with the prime minister’s political interests and the religious-ideological interests of his allies in the ruling coalition. He prioritized his personal political security, elevating it above Israel’s national security, and for months he has been misleading the world and his own people to hide this fact.

He criticized the administration of US President Joe Biden “for not being firm enough to urge the warring parties to take a better path towards exiting the raging crisis in the region,” noting that Biden and his team presented Israel with a road map that was counter to the strategy of Iran and Hamas. According to Friedman, such a map would have paved the way for isolating Hamas and pressuring it to agree to a ceasefire, under which Israel would leave Gaza in exchange for the release of all Israeli prisoners, ending the war there, and invalidating Hezbollah’s argument for attacking Israel from the north.

This article criticizes the Israeli government not from the position of a Zionist who opposes Netanyahu, but rather - and with all malice - it passes justifications for the Israeli aggression, trying to convince readers that the war was imposed on Israel, and it is in a position of self-defense, and thus places responsibility for the violence on Palestinian "terrorist" organizations, without looking at the essence of the conflict and its historical causes in the injustice of the Palestinian people and the denial of their national rights. In his article, he poses a question that is not innocent, Friedman writes: "What would you have done? Since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, and Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8, the Israeli government has not asked the world any question as much as it has asked this question: What would you have done if you were in our place? And there is only one correct answer, according to Friedman: "There is always only one correct answer to this question: invade Gaza, hunt down every Hamas leader and fighter, kill every one of them, do not surrender to civilian casualties, and then strike Hezbollah in Lebanon. And do both without wasting time planning an exit strategy for either."

In response to Friedman, we present the same formula and expression that he used in his article, but from the opposite Palestinian point of view, which is more realistically true to established historical facts, and not myths and false claims.

What would you have done? Since 1948, the year of the Palestinian Nakba, Palestinians have been expelled from their villages and cities where they and their fathers and grandfathers had lived for thousands of years. Jewish immigrants from all over the world came to occupy their homes, seize their land, and steal their property. The Palestinian national liberation movement has not asked the world any question as much as it has asked this one: What would you have done if you were in our place?

What would your people do if massacres were committed against their sons by the Zionist gangs of Haganah, Stern, Irgun, Betar and Palmach, killing, maiming, kidnapping or sexually assaulting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remained in their homes in Deir Yassin and Tantura, and the list of massacres goes on, all with the encouragement and assistance of the British Mandate authorities, what would you do?

For many years, Gaza was besieged, turned into a large prison, bombed heavily many times, and the most heinous massacres were committed against its residents, all with the encouragement of the United States of America and its political cover for Israel’s crimes. What would you have done?

It is a powerful and valid question. It is one that critics of the Palestinian resistance movement often evade. But they are not the only ones who evade it.

The resistance movements, led by the PLO, want us to believe that you and I, every free person, every person of conscience—even Israelis—have only one correct answer to this question: Resisting occupation is a legitimate right. Friedman’s only correct answer to this question is a call to kill and not care about civilian casualties, as he puts it in his article: “Invade Gaza, hunt down every Hamas leader and fighter, kill every single one of them and do not surrender to civilian casualties, then strike Hezbollah in Lebanon. And do both without wasting time planning an exit strategy for either.”

From day one it was a trap, I am sorry to say that humanity and international organizations could not avoid falling into the trap. They were not firm enough to prevent transfer and stop the genocide, and they were not firm enough to insist on a better way, a way that has not been taken.

This is not the time for complacency. International legitimacy, its resolutions and the national rights of the Palestinian people are in grave danger today. The danger comes from settlements, annexation and the overall policies of the current racist, extremist and bloodthirsty Israeli ruling coalition.

You see, I had no illusions about the major reasons for this war. It unfolds as a grand Zionist-American strategy to destroy the possibility of a fully sovereign, independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, to pressure Arab states to normalize relations with the usurping entity, and to enable American colonial influence in the region—while allowing Israel to maintain its nuclear arsenal and, using American and Western-Atlantic weapons of mass destruction, to exterminate an entire people. That’s the big story.

The direct motivation and goal of the war was Israel and America’s interest in preventing international bodies from implementing their decisions to achieve a just and comprehensive peace that would restore rights to their owners.

The strategy against Palestinian rights was to set fire to civilians in the Gaza camps, to kill the largest number of them, and break their national will, using weapons and unlimited American support and covering up the crimes of the occupation army. In the West Bank, settler gangs spread corruption, desecrate holy sites, and violate human rights to own property and move freely. Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir arms them and encourages them to attack Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, destroy property, uproot olive trees, and burn them. The Israeli strategy is brilliant from Washington’s point of view: kill as many Palestinians as possible so that Israel becomes a state for Jews only. The Iranians, as Muslims, are prepared to die in order to protect the Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, which are subject to Judaization. This is something that no Muslim, Shiite or Sunni, Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni or Iraqi, would accept, even if it required eliminating Israel (the world’s attention must be drawn to the seriousness of Israel’s violations of Islamic and Christian holy sites, and the role of the American imperialist veto in protecting the Zionist entity must be exposed, and the countries of the world must be prevented from condemning its brutal practices, and a UN resolution must be issued to stop the Israeli holocaust against the people of Palestine).

The problem for Israelis is that while the Netanyahu government lied in its narrative of the Al-Aqsa Intifada that the fighters committed inhuman and immoral offenses, it conducted its war in the only Nazi way it knew how to do and believed in, through genocide and a scorched earth policy. This strategy does not conflict with the political interests of the prime minister and the ideological interests of his right-wing fascist government coalition.

Israel is facing a real challenge to its aggressive policies from the Axis of Resistance, and its prime minister and his allies have prioritized their political and ideological interests and the imposition of their Nazi dictatorship. They have even revived their attempted judicial coup to crush the Israeli Supreme Court, in the midst of the war of annihilation in Gaza, and the indiscriminate bombing that threatens the lives of hostages in Gaza. The Hannibal Code is one of the most shameful episodes in Jewish history, and shame on the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington for standing with the war of annihilation.