Melvin Goodman
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.
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