A Fools Paradise: Thomas Friedman and the Middle East - Melvin Goodman Counterpunch

 A Fools Paradise: Thomas Friedman and the Middle East

Melvin Goodman

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author in the newspaper’s Washington, DC bureau.
Counterpunch, January 31, 2025

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/30/a-fools-paradise-thomas-friedman-and-the-middle-east/

“I am convinced that Bibi understands…that by significantly weakening Hezbollah and Iran, he has helped set in motion the possibility for Lebanon and Syria to restore their sovereignty and unity. I think he is ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal [from Lebanon] and finalize the border….”
– Thomas Friedman, “How Trump Can Remake the Middle East,” New York Times, January 21, 2025,
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ most influential columnist, has comprehensively recorded his dreamscape for the Middle East. It tells Donald Trump that “you have a chance to reshape this region in ways that could fundamentally enhance the peace and prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians and all the region’s people, as well as the national security interests of America.” Friedman believes that Benjamin Netanyahu is “ready to complete Israel’s withdrawal and finalize the border” with Lebanon, and that the United States has an “enormous opportunity to truly end the civil war [in Lebanon] and put the country back together.” Finally, he produces a threat: Iran’s nuclear program and malign regional strategy need to be eliminated, and if Trump can’t do this through “peaceful negotiations,” it needs to be “done kinetically.” That’s right: Friedman is willing to commit the United States to a war against Iran.
Friedman’s dreamscape for the Middle East makes no sense on any level. Even former secretary of state Antony Blinken eventually recognized that Israel has “systematically undermined the capacity and legitimacy of the only viable alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority.” What has happened to Friedman’s concerns about Netanyahu have no political solutions for Gaza on the “Day After” the fighting stopped.
Israel is expanding official settlements and nationalizing land on the West Bank at a “faster clip than at any time in the last decade, while turning a blind eye to an unprecedented growth in illegal outposts,” according to Blinken. The attacks by extremist settlers on Palestinians, moreover, “have reached record levels.” Friedman believes that the Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s cabinet are responsible for this aggression, but significant evidence points to Netanyahu himself as supporting these actions.
Friedman believes that Netanyahu is ready to withdraw from the border with Lebanon even as Israeli Defense Forces are ignoring the so-called cease fire agreement and continuing to bomb Lebanese villages. On the very day that Israel was to withdraw from southern Lebanon, IDF forces killed at least 22 Lebanese civilians and injured more than 100. The withdrawal agreement was fragile from the start, with no monitoring mechanism in place and no definition of what constitutes a violation of the agreement.
Netanyahu simply has no faith in the ability of the Lebanese Army to stymie the resurgence of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Lebanon itself is a failed state, and there are no indications that Israel is preparing to withdraw its forces. Meanwhile, the right-wing Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, has warned that, if there is a resumption of fighting, Israeli strikes would no longer differentiate between Hezbollah and the Lebanese state. That should come as no surprise as Israeli governments since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in1982 have made no effort to protect Lebanese sovereignty. Nor has the IDF moved to disable the six military bases built in recent months in southern Lebanon.
If Donald Trump had any interest in a solution to the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians, he never would have stated that he wanted to “clean out” Gaza by transferring some of its population to Egypt and Jordan. I’m sure that Trump has no concern with the war crimes that would be committed to “clean out” Gaza. Nor I’m sure does he understand the “nakba” or catastrophe in 1948, when Israel began its policy of displacing Palestinians whose families had resided for hundreds of years in Palestine.
I’m also sure that moderate Arab leaders who might have worked with the United States to find a political solution realize that Trump has no understanding of the deep differences within the Arab community regarding a peaceful settlement. But Arab leaders do agree that a solution cannot include a resettlement that would destabilize their own fragile governments. Trump’s efforts to get Egypt and Jordan to take in more than a million Palestinians is not just one of the mistakes that he has made in less than two weeks in the White House. In fact, it may be his biggest mistake thus far; it’ll remind people of Trump’s Muslim ban in the first few months of his first term.
Friedman’s apparent support of war against Iran, meanwhile, is his biggest mistake. Iran is now more vulnerable than at any time since the war with Iraq in the 1980s. It has lost its “axis of resistance” (Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria) to counter the regional influence of the United States and Israel. Iran could decide to weaponize its decades-old nuclear program, but it seems more interested in pursuing a comprehensive dialogue with the United States to get an end to the sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy. Unfortunately, Trump has stocked his government with militarists who favor a kinetic approach to the problem of Iran as does Friedman.
Ironically, Friedman has ignored the one step that Trump has taken that would augur for a more moderate approach to the Middle East as far as U.S. involvement is concerned. In a step that has been totally ignored by the mainstream media, Trump has named Michael DiMino as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. Not exactly a household name, DiMino has been skeptical regarding the close ties between the United States and Israel, and rejects the notion that the United States has “vital or existential” interests in the Middle East. He favors the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Syria, and he believes that Washington’s two primary interests in the region—energy resources and combatting terrorism—are exaggerations. The fact that pro-Israel Republicans as well as Israel itself object to this appointment is noteworthy. So perhaps Trump may consider ideas about the Middle East that are new and different.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org

There is No Place for the Palestinians of Gaza to Go - Vijay Prashad (Counterpunch)

 On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.”

 

February 14, 2024

There is No Place for the Palestinians of Gaza to Go

by Vijay Prashad

 

On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

Catastrophe

The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order).

Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza—said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further.

Safe Passage

Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?”

Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks.

Domicide

On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity.

The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022)