Nadene Goldfoot
Thomas Loren Friedman , born July 20, 1953) is an American political commentator and author. He's 5 months younger than my son. When he wrote "From Beirut to Jerusalem describing his experiences in the Middle East. He was only 31 years old. I read it and didn't like it at all, thinking he didn't know a thing about Israel at the time. I was a worldly 50 years old then and reading about Israel was my preferred subject to study.
In June 1984, a very young Friedman was transferred to Jerusalem, where he served as the New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief until February 1988. That year he received a second Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, which cited his coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada. He wrote the book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describing his experiences in the Middle East, which won the 1989 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Now I understand that being so young when he had these experiences had a marked difference in how we understood the history and position of Israel. When I made Aliyah to Israel in 1980, I had read every book in the library on Israel; every piece of information and history on ancient Israel up to 1980's happenings. I was making a giant move to leave my family and live there with my husband. We saw Israel through different lenses. I haven't read his book since, and wonder if I could bear reading it again.
Yet, Friedman is Jewish. He attended Hebrew school five days a week until his Bar Mitzvah, then St. Louis Park High School, where he wrote articles for his school's newspaper. He has characterized his high school years as "one big celebration of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War." Surprisingly, St. Louis Park, Minnesota has at least four synagogues: Darchei Noam, Kenesseth Israel Congregation, B'nai Emet Synagogue, and Beth El Synagogue. Darchei Noam and Kenesseth Israel Congregation are Orthodox, while Beth El is Conservative and B'nai Emet is also Conservative. The population was 50,010 at the 2020 census. It is a first-ring suburb immediately west of Minneapolis.
He had become enamored with Israel after a visit there in December 1968 at the age of 15, and he spent all three of his high school summers living on Kibbutz HaHotrim, near Haifa. After my experience in reading his book, this amazes me. My memory tells me I thought he was too critical of Israel and didn't know what had been going on.
I caught this program on Youtube: In this special edition of Washington Week (June 7, 2024) with The Atlantic, moderator Jeffrey Goldberg who sits down with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to discuss the conflicts in the Middle East and President Biden’s response. Friedman was on the web being interviewed on a program listed as Trump's Cascade of Conflicts from The Atlantic, which I watched.
Friedman has been criticized by organizations such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for defending Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon as a form of "educating" Israel's opponents; according to FAIR, Friedman was explicitly "endorsing terrorism by Israel" against Lebanese and Palestinians.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald and professor Noam Chomsky also accused Friedman of endorsing and encouraging terrorism by Israeli forces. Ah ha! I also had the experience of writing to Chomsky and we carried on quite a lot of e-mails where I tried to debate him and win, which I didn't. Faced with facts, he just sluffed them off. He was maddening. Now, to know that Friedman also battled Chomsky makes me wonder if his book wasn't half bad after all. Maybe I should give it another try.
Political reporter Belen Fernandez heavily critiques Friedman's commentary regarding Israel. Among other criticisms, Fernandez singles out Friedman's suggestion that Israeli forces were unaware that their allied Lebanese militias carried out the Sabra and Shatila massacre while under their guard, contradicting the assessments of other journalists and observers; his encouragement of strong-armed force by the Israeli army against Palestinians; and his opposition to settlements only on the grounds that they are counter-productive, rather than because they violate international law or cause suffering for Palestinians. I also agree with Friedman on these poor points and can join him in proving the other journalists have their facts messed up.
Fernandez suggests that Friedman is most worried about successfully maintaining Israel's Jewish ethnocracy and actively opposing a "one-man, one-vote" system of democracy. If Friedman is worried about Israel's ethnocracy, why shouldn't Israel have the right? Saudi Arabia has it. Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. We have over 48 Muslim countries who want to wipe it out. There are hundreds of Christian countries. Our one Jewish state and journalists are complaining? How anti-Semitic ! Also, the Semitic Arabs are as bad! Only the Abraham Accords creation is now starting to bring peace and prosperity to those who joined and are finding that Jews aren't as bad after all. Believe me, Arabs, most likely the Jews' 20th cousins, are of the same cloth in many respects.
Friedman has also come under criticism from supporters of Israel. In an op-ed, Yitzhak Benhorin criticized Friedman's alleged suggestion that Israel relinquish territory it had occupied in the 1967 Middle Eastern War. This sounds like something I would have agreed with Benhorin.
Friedman sparked criticism for writing that congressional ovations for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were "bought and paid for by the Israel lobby." Oh no!
A letter from the American Jewish Committee objected that "Public opinion polls consistently show a high level of American ... support for and identification with Israel. This indicates that the people's elected representatives are fully reflecting the will of the voters." Friedman responded to criticism by writing: "In retrospect, I probably should have used a more precise term like 'engineered' by the Israel lobby – a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don't subscribe to." It's still bad, and he's assuming and doesn't know at all !
Friedman hailed the Trump-brokered peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as "exactly what Trump said it was in his tweet: a 'HUGE breakthrough."
In July 2023, as the Netanyahu’s government proposed new laws leading to judicial reform intended to limit the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court, Friedman wrote an opinion piece supporting the Biden government’s changing diplomatic approach toward Israel. This is where we part ways. No, I don't have to re-read his Jerusalem book. I was right after the first reading.
Following the outbreak of the Gaza war, Friedman urged Israel against military over-reach and further settlement expansions, saying to do so otherwise would risk destabilizing the region and the US-Israel alliance. Israel has waited since 1967 and has done nothing, waiting for peace. It hasn't arrived. She's going to go ahead and claim the land that is hers in the first place, as Jews are indigents of Judah; with ancestors from the original Israel after all. In other words, The Jewish people have a very ancient history in the land known both as Palestine and the Land of Israel. The Jewish claim to indigeneity is based on a three-thousand-year-old continuous history and the status of the land since ancient times as the focus of Jewish life and yearning. Jews are indigenous to Judah, a part of what was later called by the conquering Romans, as Palestine.
Friedman said Sharaa has made some "incredibly positive moves towards Israel, and is under pressure from a very pluralistic front within Syria, Christians, Muslims and others to make a pluralistic Syria."
"Why don't we at least give him a chance? Give him a reputation to live up to. So I think the president made a very good move there and I support it and I hope the Israelis pick up on it," Friedman continued.
In his conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, Friedman also discussed the president's goals for Gaza and the wider region as well as Israel's response to Trump's approaches."
As I mulled over my research on Thomas Friedman I realize that Israel has also had many Prime Ministers as well as Presidents, and that Jews populating Israel have been desperate people seeking refuge from every corner of the earth, even mine, since I entered in 1980. It no doubt is the hardest audience to please as well as the neediest. We've been like the rabbis in the Middle Ages who met together to debate the Torah and get to its meaning. I see that every leader we've had since is like one of them, seeing a different view, trying to get a consensus. Some have been on the extreme left, and now we're led by the right. It's bounced back and forth through the ages. No wonder Friedman has seen different views of what to do. Even arms and armies have to change in order to survive.
Update: 6/7/25 PS: Friedman again being mentioned: By Walter E. Block; Walter Edward Block (born August 21, 1941) is an American Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist. "Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is at it again. He represents the same Newspaper of Record that bought us Walter Duranty, famous for assuring the public that Stalin was a pretty good guy, in the midst of his infamous mass murders. What pray tell is Friedman’s message for us plebians today? It is that Israel is not a good ally of the United States. Why ever not? This is due to the fact that the only civilized country in the Middle East does not welcome the Gazans as neighbors. Instead, this world class journalist avers that the Jewish state seeks to expand, to take over the enclave located immediately to the west of it, plus Judea, Samaria, which he mistakenly labels as the “West Bank.” Even more egregious Israel does not relish the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as a partner in a two state solution. According to Block, Friedman is showing his anti-Israel side."
Resource:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_L._Friedman
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