Some of Israel’s worst critics are fond of saying that Israel behaves like America’s spoiled child. I’ve always found that analogy excessive.
It is far more accurate to say that the U.S. acts as Israels' suzerain, paying Israel billions of dollars a year in military tribute. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only U.S. President to ever contravene Israel's politico-military aspirations (during the Suez Crisis) could do so because he did not need the support of the Jewish vote in America, according to George Ball's little known and seldom read stinging critique and history of U.S. - Israeli relations from 1947-1992, The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present
Of the Suez Crisis, Wikipedia says:
The Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression was a war fought by Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt beginning on 29 October 1956.
The attack followed Egypt's decision of 26 July 1956 to nationalize the Suez Canal, after the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the building of the Aswan Dam, which was partly in response to Egypt recognizing the People's Republic of China during the height of tensions between China and Taiwan.
The three allies, especially Israel, were mainly successful in attaining their immediate military objectives, but pressure from the United States and the USSR at the United Nations and elsewhere forced them to withdraw. Britain and France completely failed in their political and strategic aim of controlling the canal.
"The Most Dangerous Man in America," Daniel Ellsberg then a marine, was on board one of the U.S. ships that sailed to intervene. Of this experience, Ellsberg wrote that it was his proudest moment in being part of the U.S. military; he was proud for his country's principled stand in calling down the dogs of war.
But back to the serially lying Friedman:
Say what you want about Israel’s obstinacy at times, it remains the only country in the United Nations that another U.N. member, Iran, has openly expressed the hope that it be wiped off the map.
This tripe results from a mis-translation of a speech given by Iranian President. Red meat to incite, a lie that has legs to this day. Professor Juan Cole American's most astute student of middle-east politics, a speaker of Arabic and Persian, has frequently debunked that sound-bite lie. Cole writes:
As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for ‘this occupation regime over Jerusalem” to “vanish from the page of time.’ Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street).
If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn’t he start at home if that was what he is really about?
I was talking to two otherwise well-informed Israeli historians a couple of weeks ago, and they expressed the conviction that Ahmadinejad had threatened to nuke Israel. I was taken aback. First of all, Iran doesn’t have a nuke. Second, there is no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Third, Ahmadinejad has denied wanting a bomb. Fourth, Ahmadinejad has never threatened any sort of direct Iranian military action against Israel. In other words, that is a pretty dramatic fear for educated persons to feel, on the basis of . . . nothing.
I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or “Iran”!) has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations.
It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change. Since then, Iranian media working in English have themselves depended on that translation. One of the tricks of Right-Zionist propagandists is to substitute these English texts for Ahmadinejad’s own Persian text. (Ethan Bronner at the New York Times tried to pull this, and more recently Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute.) But good scholarship requires that you go to the original Persian text in search of the meaning of a phrase. Bronner and Rubin are guilty [of] disregarding philological scholarship in favor of mere propagandizing.
...
So here are some things Ahmadinezhad has said that make clear his intentions, and which are translated by the United States government Open Source Center. He is hostile to Israel. He’d like to see regime change (apparently via a referendum on the shape of the government ruling over geographical Palestine, in which all “original” residents of any religion would get a vote). Calling for a referendum on the dissolution of a government is not calling for genocide. Ahmadinejad also says he has no objection to a Jewish state in and of itself, he just thinks it should be located in, say, German territory set apart for the purpose, rather than displacing Palestinians from their homes. He may be saying unrealistic things; he is not advocating killing Jews qua Jews, or genocide.
Note that Ahmadinejad below denies being an anti-Semite (why deny it if he supposedly glories in it?); points out that he supports Jewish representation in the Iranian parliament; and compares his call for an end to the Zionist regime ruling over Jerusalem to the Western call for the dissolution of the old Soviet Union. Was Ronald Reagan inciting to genocide when he called for an end of the Soviet regime?
Back to Friedman's serial dissembling:
And that same country, Iran, is trying to build a nuclear weapon.
The Internaional Atomic Energy Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have both stated that Iraq is NOT have at nuclear weapon's program. (The DO however, have a nuclear program, which, as a signatory to the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, they ARE entitled to have.)
Israel is the only country I know of in the Middle East that has unilaterally withdrawn from territory conquered in war — in Lebanon and Gaza — only to be greeted with unprovoked rocket attacks in return.
Israel is also the only country in the Middle East to have taken territory conquered in war, at least in the 20th & 21st centuries. What Israel is doing with its ever encroaching settler occupations, and its so-called security wall, is a pure and simple land grab. An effort to achieve so-called "facts on the ground" to justify its continued devouring of Palestinian lands. Hell, the whole of the middle east were tribal societies with undefined borders until after World War I when the allies divided the spoils of war.
FINALLY, by Friedman gets one thing right:
Indeed, if you want to talk about spoiled children, there is no group more spoiled by Iran and Syria than Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia. Hezbollah started a war against Israel in 2006 that brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese — and Hezbollah’s punishment was to be rewarded with thousands more missiles and millions more dollars to do it again. These are stubborn facts.
That's a long way to have to wade through a column to get to a factual statement!
Of course, Israel's reward for its massive punitive retaliation against Lebanon was billions of U.S. dollars and military hardware, and that too is a stubborn fact.
Friedman goes on to chastise the government of Israel for its policies. But by the end of paragraph one, the damage was already done. The lies already perpetuated. The militant anti-Iranian narrative recapitulated.
It's enough to make one ask the question, "Just what does it mean to win a Pulitzer Prize?" Friedman has won three.
It's enough to make one ask the question: "If you can't believe the New York Times, just who can you believe?"
