Thomas Friedman's Article in The New York Times of 4-9-2018

“Crazy Poor Middle Easterners"

8-9-2018

- The Middle East could flourish... if it threw its past... behind it. Thomas Friedman... an American journalist and writer... Jewish... born in 1953... was sent to a Jewish camp... In high school he wrote an article in the school newspaper in which he interviewed Ariel Sharon... He received a bachelor's degree from Brandeis University in 1975 in Middle Eastern studies.... He continued his studies at Oxford... where he earned a master's degree in the arts... Middle Eastern studies and Arabic... He visited Israel in 1968.

- He spent three summer holidays on a kibbutz (an Israeli collective cooperative farm) near Haifa. He was appointed The New York Times correspondent in Beirut in 1981, after spending two years, from June 1979 to May 1981, covering the civil war in Lebanon. He returned to Beirut in 1982, the year of the Israeli invasion, and covered the departure of the PLO from Beirut under the Philip Habib agreement of that time. He covered the events of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, and received three awards for excellence in international reporting, by the standards of clarity.... In 1984 he moved to Jerusalem and was appointed head of The New York Times bureau in Israel... in 1988

- During his time there he covered the first Palestinian intifada... He wrote a book titled "From Beirut to Jerusalem"... He worked as The New York Times White House correspondent in 1994... He began writing a main weekly column in the newspaper, under the heading... ”Opinion”... which is still famous to this day... He has written several books, including "Thank you for being Late", "The Lexus & the Olive Tree" and "An Ethical Compass"..... and several other books, one of them on India, where he was among the first American journalists to point out the importance of technological cooperation between India and the United States of America....

- In February 2002 he wrote an article... in The New York Times, dated 4-2-2002. This article was considered the basis of Prince Abdullah's initiative... the Arab initiative... when he was crown prince at the time, which was presented to the Arab summit known for launching the first Arab peace initiative... with Israel... In its details and framework, the Arab initiative matched the lines of the article by Friedman, its writer, who visited Prince Abdullah... the crown prince at the time, at his horse farm in mid-February 2002, before the Arab summit convened... and discussed the subject of the initiative with him... There was much talk in press and political circles that the inspiration of the Arab initiative was Thomas Friedman, whose article published in early February 2002 matched the texts of the Arab initiative announced in March 2002.... Note that Friedman had published Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz's initiative on 17-2-2002 in The New York Times, after the visit mentioned above... and not through the Saudi press, and before it was announced at the Arab summit in March 2002 in Beirut...

- Friedman is considered an expert on Middle Eastern affairs... and his articles are regarded as indicators of the course and plans of the US administration's policy in the Middle East...

- Friedman's article of 4-9-2018

· Friedman's latest article, of 4-9-2018, says that he (Friedman) enjoyed watching the film "Crazy Rich Asians" because, as he puts it, it reminded him of an important point... that rich Asia acquired real wealth... not because it has no political, tribal, ethnic and religious differences like others elsewhere... but because they (the Asians) put their differences aside and focused on building the real foundations of sustainable wealth: education, trade, infrastructure, human capital and, in the most successful places, the rule of law... Most of Asia became prosperous not by discovering natural resources... but by tapping its human resources, men and women, and giving them the tools they need to realise their potential...

· This film, Friedman continues in his article, made him think that if someone made a similar film about the Middle East, it could be called Crazy Poor Middle Easterners, since this region, with some exceptions, has never been more chaotic. More people were fighting over who owns the olive tree... many cities were turned to rubble by competing sects... and the Middle Easterners largely failed to realise their potential...

· This part of the world, which ought naturally to be rich, has made itself poor... by allowing the past to bury the future... while the region that is naturally poor (Asia) has made itself rich... by allowing the future to bury the past....

· Friedman continues his long article with many events in the Middle East, in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Israel, explaining his view of them. He says that the regime in Syria, which he described as Alawite, is trying to wipe out hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to replace them with Shiites.... using chemical weapons... in cooperation with the Shiite Iranians, in his words. He believes that the Iranians and the Russians will carry on with the regime in their plans to bomb Idlib, paying no heed to the warnings of the United States, armed with the notion that whoever has no troops on the ground has no voice on the Syrian stage...

· Friedman adds in his article: "On Tuesday (the day the article was written), the Russian air force bombed Idlib province, the last major concentration of anti-regime Islamist rebels in Syria and of hundreds of thousands of Sunni refugees who fled the regime's poison gas and other attacks", according to Friedman's claim.

· Friedman continues his article by asking what Trump's team is doing in Israel. First it moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, giving Bibi Netanyahu's right-wing Israeli government a long-awaited prize, and the US administration asked for nothing in return!! Trump could have told Bibi that he would move the embassy, but in exchange for Israel halting settlement building beyond the West Bank barrier, in densely populated Arab areas that would likely come under Palestinian control in any peace deal. That might actually have advanced the peace process. Instead, the United States gave away one of its most important free diplomatic assets. How was that? It was a foolish act, as Friedman puts it.

· Now, in contrast, Trump's team is punishing the Palestinians for not negotiating with Netanyahu, who has put no deal on the table, by cutting aid to the Palestinian Authority (aid that went to projects such as water and sewage treatment) and contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a major employer in the West Bank and Gaza and the main source of secular (that is, non-Islamic) education for Palestinians.

· Trump thinks he can just keep hitting the Palestinians and not ask Israel to do anything hard, and keep things from getting worse. Well, yes, they can get worse. The Palestinian Authority could collapse, and corrupt as it is, as Friedman puts it, if it goes, it will be hard to rebuild; Israel will have to provide governance in the West Bank at huge cost.

· Friedman continues his article by talking about Saudi Arabia. He says: then there is Saudi Arabia. I have no doubt that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was the only one in his family who would have started the vital social, religious and economic reforms he has dared to undertake all at once, and that he is the only one in that family who launched the bullying foreign-policy initiatives, the domestic power plays and the excessive personal purchases he has dared to undertake all at once. (Friedman refers to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, by the abbreviated initials of his name in English, M.B.S.) As he puts it, our job is to help curb his bad impulses and nurture his good efforts. But Trump, who still has not named his ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is a cheerleader for him. Democracy is not on the agenda in Saudi Arabia, but social, economic and religious reform is. M.B.S.'s government has, for the first time, just appointed women to several key posts in municipal leadership. And given the enormous role Saudi Arabia played in the Arab Muslim world when, after 1979, it began spreading its hard-line form of Islam, which helped spread the events of 11 September (according to Friedman's claim), the idea that the kingdom today has a leader who may start turning Sunni Islam onto a more open and sophisticated path, one that would isolate radical Islamists and strengthen moderates everywhere, deserves American attention and care.

· Recently, although M.B.S. (the crown prince) has taken a series of ill-considered steps that hurt him, Saudi Arabia and us, M.B.S. has a few extremist advisers who keep encouraging him to follow the "China model", in which China asserted itself in the South China Sea, the world complained, and in the end the world backed down. So when Canada mildly criticised Saudi Arabia's human-rights abuses, the crown prince lashed out frighteningly at Canada and cut ties. His reaction was absurd, according to Friedman's claim. Saudi Arabia is not China. It needs friends. It should be softer and less of a bully, as Friedman puts it.
The writer, Friedman, goes on to say that the Saudi crown prince, on the advice of some of the old guard, has put security and politics ahead of attracting investors and talent and appointing the right ministers to seize opportunities while telling him the truth. This has cost him the sheen of his initiative... and the crown prince is thereby creating instability instead of establishing respect.

· Friedman adds that Trump and his team do not understand that the United States cannot subcontract the giving of orders in the Middle East to Israel, Russia and Saudi Arabia and write them blank cheques, when what their leaders actually need from the United States is for it to draw red lines

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for them too, so that they can tell their bosses and their extremists, "Hey, I'm with you, but the Americans won't let me do that."

· Friedman ends his article by asking: if we now give up the role we have had as fair mediators since the seventies, we will end up creating more crazy poor Middle Easterners.

· For my part, I say briefly to Mr Thomas Friedman, with his Eastern features:

· Clearly Friedman has drawn on a mechanism that was used, and is still used, in negotiations between conflicting parties: "Forget the past, let us stay in the present to build the future", that is, "we are the children of today"..... This sign is dangerous, as it is now being used in the Middle East question, and for the sake of building a new Middle East, Friedman's theories and initiatives are being marketed these days. This burying of the past was launched by Thomas Friedman after the creation of Israel and its settlements, its declaration as a Jewish state, making Jerusalem united and the capital of the Jewish state, and the denial of the question of the Palestinian refugees, the owners of the land since ancient times. All these measures were based on the religious past according to the holy books of the Jews, and on the ancient history that the Zionist movement and the West fabricated in the last century. And we, as Arabs and Palestinians, Muslims and Christians alike, are required to forget all our history, our five hundred destroyed villages, and a Palestinian people expelled from its land, who are the true owners of Palestine according to all the books, some of whose texts are recorded at the United Nations and its agencies, and according to what Western historians themselves say. This is what Friedman demands. He portrays the conflict in the Middle East as if it were over owning the olive tree, shrinking the conflict and trivialising it. And I ask: do Friedman and his circle know who owns the olive trees over which the conflict is being fought!!...

· He also states in his article that there is a conflict that is destroying cities in the Middle East, and, as his article implies, he attributes it to the Arabs themselves and the terrorism rampant among them, since they destroyed their own resources. This sign that Friedman suggests is that this is the solution to the Middle East question, which reeks of bringing Israel in among the names of the countries that have a foot, and not just any ordinary foot, but the big foot!!! in making a new Middle Eastern world that removes the rights of the past from people's minds, buries the past and builds a new future in which Israel is the undisputed big power of the Middle East, and history is then recorded from that zero point, without memory, as if events were newly born. And I say to Mr Friedman: we have taken part in burying part of our past. The Palestinians recognised the existence of Israel in the Oslo Accords and accepted a small part of historic Palestine, which was treated as the past, in order to find a future after burying the past. But that did no good. The Palestinians spent twenty-five years in negotiations that ended only with the settlers seizing most of what remained of the new Palestine?? "what remains of the 1967 borders"... Many Arab states recognised Israel and established normal relations, apart from the de facto relations some of these states maintain, in some cases undeclared and in others openly, under the name "we are the children of today"...... with no result, until the deal of the century came. Israel obtained recognition of the Jewishness of the state and recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, and passed racist laws that leave the fate of the remaining Palestinian owners of the land in historic Palestine hanging in the wind....... All this after the past, with its historic rights for the Palestinians, was buried in an attempt to establish a state for them on a small patch of their past. But they got nothing except doubt cast on the United Nations' statistics of their refugees, and the claim that they are a small group of the grandparent refugees still alive only, with nothing for their descendants, who are to be distributed among the countries of their cousins..... Is this what you want, Mr Friedman, you who did not even mention that the Israelis are an occupying power by military force... over the reality, history and existence of the Palestinian people in its holy land..

· We will not bury our past!!