Tom Friedman accidentally
describes why Israelis won't listen to him or to Barack Hussein Obama.
The full Israeli experience today is a living political science
experiment. How does a country deal with failed or failing state
authority on four of its borders — Gaza, South Lebanon, Syria and the
Sinai Desert of Egypt — each of which is now crawling with nonstate
actors nested among civilians and armed with rockets. How should Israel
and its friends think about this “Israeli experience” and connect it
with the ever-present question of Israeli-Palestinian peace?
For starters, if you want to run for office in Israel, or be taken
seriously here as either a journalist or a diplomat, there is an
unspoken question in the mind of virtually every Israeli that you need
to answer correctly: “Do you understand what neighborhood I’m living
in?” If Israelis smell that you don’t, their ears will close to you. It
is one reason the Europeans in general, and the European left in
particular, have so little influence here.
It's pretty clear to most Israelis that neither Friedman nor Obama understand our neighborhood either. If they did, they wouldn't still be pushing us to make concessions for the 'peace process.'
Tom "Will Duranty" Friedman's reputation, if he ever had one is so much in tatters that if tried to resurrect by trying to sound not like a moron it's too late. Someone tell Mr. Friedman to sit down.
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