Thomas Friedman: No new economic aid to Israel unless settlement expansion ceases

[BeyondGeography]

…I’m all for helping Israelis and Palestinian civilians at this time — but not without some very visible strings attached. If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)

…For way too long U.S. economic and military aid has allowed Netanyahu to have his cake and eat it too — to fund the insane settlement project, and maintain an advanced military, while not having to raise taxes on the whole Israeli public to pay for it all. While Israel got U.S. aid in one hand, the budget of its Ministry of Defense paid to build roads for settlers with the other hand. Uncle Sam’s wallet, indirectly, was the slush fund for Netanyahu’s politics. So no, we’re not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza — Israel is a sovereign country. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

America has been indirectly funding Israel’s slow-motion suicide — and I am not just talking settlements. Look at what Netanyahu did last June. To buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties he needs in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, Netanyahu’s government gave the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers “an unprecedented increment in allocations … including full funding of schools to not teach English, science and math,” explained Dan Ben-David, a macroeconomist who has focused on the interaction between Israel’s demography and education at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T.,” Mr. Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”

Bottom line: Netanyahu has a completely incoherent strategy right now — eliminate Hamas in Gaza while building more settlements in the West Bank that undermine the only decent long-term Palestinian alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, which Israel needs to safely leave Gaza.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4Ew.GI1C.hTbyhC6EuRvg&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

[elleng]

1. I agree.

[Mossfern]

20. Me too!

[Celerity]

30. 100% agree.

[JohnSJ]

2. The start of real progress will be for Netanyahu to be voted out

[redqueen]

3. Are existing settlements not illegal?

Shouldn't requiring return of that land be where you start in a negotiation, instead of just asking them to stop expanding?

[Mosby]

4. That's not feasible

Land swaps are the only way to make the future country of Palestine Jew free like the Palestinians insist on.

[Zeitghost]

15. Return to who?

The land was lost by Jordan in the 6 day war. Israel tried to return it to Jordan, they refused to accept it and stripped all of the residents of their Jordanian citizenship.

[Big Blue Marble]

23. In researching your claim, I see no evidence that Israel ever offered to return

the West Bank to Jordan. Please link to you claim.

In 1988 after years of maintaining a relationship with the WB Palestinian, they recognized
the PLO as the governing body of the WB. At no time did Israel offer it back to Jordan.

On 31 July 1988, King Hussein announced the severance of all legal and administrative ties with the
West Bank, except for the Jordanian sponsorship of the Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem,
and recognised the PLO's claim to the State of Palestine. In his speech to the nation held on that day he
announced his decision and explained that this decision was made with the aim of helping the Palestinian
people establishing their own independent state.

[Zeitghost]

25. Israel offered to return to the 1967 border

If the Arab states would agree to peace as the pre-67 border is not safe or defendable in a state of conflict. The Arab states responded with their famous "three no's". No recognition of the state of Israel, no negotiation and no peace.

[JohnSJ]

26. and many conveniently forgot that the 1967 war was the attempt by the surrounding Arab countries

to eliminate Israel, telling the Palestinians to not accept any peace agreement with Israel because they woud destroy it.

The Six Day War

[LauraInLA]

36. The basis of Resolution 242 was that Israel would return land in return for recognition etc.

Hi there! This is my first post, so apologies if I don’t do it correctly .

Israel wanted to negotiate one-to-one with Jordan, Egypt, Syria. They were successful with Egypt. But other countries would not negotiate individually. One dilemma was: would land be returned first, or would recognition be granted first?

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oslo/parallel/8.html

I doubt Israel would have negotiated over Jerusalem, but the West Bank to Jordan was a different question.

[Goddessartist]

38. Welcome!

You posted perfectly.

[KS Toronado]

39. Welcome to DU!

[Big Blue Marble]

40. Welcome to DU and thank you for posting this article discussing the complexities of recent Middle East history.

It does not support the posters claims that Israel offered to give the WB back to Jordan
immediately as the poster claims. As you state, the article explains the stalemate that followed the
UN Resolution. 243 was an attempt by the world powers to resolve the tangle of interests in ME
at the time.

As you know it failed . From the article:
"Resolution 242 has turned out to be a road map to limbo."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oslo/parallel/8.html

Tragically, that stalemate continues to this day with subjugation of one people .
and the horrific loss of life on both sides, all with little hope for peace for either.

[Goodheart]

42. Return to the Palestinians, obviously.

The USA should insist that Israel give back the West Bank to the Palestinians before any further aid.

[Justice]

5. Thomas Friedman making sense.

So surprising to say that.

[mucifer]

6. Yup

[BeyondGeography]

7. I agree

I ignored him for years starting with Bush/Iraq but he has written a lot of strong pieces lately particularly on Ukraine and this conflict.

[yliza]

21. IKR?

I like this idea, regardless of the source.

[LiberaBlueDem]

8. Good idea

Sounds like a plan that may move the needle

[honest.abe]

9. Good. Exactly what needs to be done.

[maxsolomon]

10. that's a minimum.

i'd prefer to see the west bank settlements abandoned and given to Palestinians as a goodwill gesture. intact, as opposed to the dismantled Gaza settlements.

i'm hearing Hillary Clinton's 2016 AIPAC speech in my head. the one that let Trump position himself as Israel's champion.

the one with the oblique critique

“...everyone has to do their part by avoiding damaging actions, including with respect to settlements”

. that one line made my elderly jewish neighbors vote for Trump. "what choice do we have?", they told me.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hillary-clintons-full-speech-to-aipac/

[wnylib]

11. While I support Israel's fight against Hamas, I have always

opposed the settlements in the West Bank from the time they first began, decades ago. IMO, it is reasonable and just to make aid contingent on stopping the settlements immediately. Israel has zero justification for the settlements.

Stopping their spread is one step toward peace in the West Bank. Future steps might include returning that settled land to Palestinians.

It is up to Israelis what to do with Netanyahu, but, IMO, the sooner they dump him, the better for Israel, Palestinians, and the world.

[flashman13]

14. I have to disagree with you. The justification for the settlements goes like this:

We Jews have the original deed. The land of Israel, which includes Judea and Sumeria, aka the west bank is part of the deed description. The Palestinians and other muslims are all trespassers and they need to go. The Jews are just taking back their country. Most of the west bank settlers are religious zealots and it would be extremely difficult, as in bloody, to dislodge them.

Does that, "take back our country" mantra sound familiar?

[speak easy]

17. ...

[wnylib]

24. Part of the deed description? Not in the modern world.

Going by your logic, the land does not belong to Israel, either, then. It belongs to Canaanites. Or, in part, to Phoenician descendants and also in part to the descendants of Philistines for whom the land was named. The closest modern descendants of the Philistines are Greeks. Should part of the land go to Greece?

I have posted on DU many times about the fact that there have been Jews living in Palestine continuously since the ancient kingdom of Israel and therefore they are entitled to have a homeland there. But much has changed regarding the boundaries of Israel over the past 2000 years that can't be erased.

You don't even have to go back that far to use the same logic for Native Americans. Only 500+ years ago there were no Europeans in the Americas. (The Native population drove the Greenland Vikings out of Newfoundland 1000 years ago.)

Should we give NYC and Long Island back to the Lenape? The Seneca village of Buffalo Creek is today's Buffalo, NY. Should we give it back to the Seneca? You could go across North, Central, and South America with the same land claims.

What about people like me, who have both Native and European ancestry? Should we use the King Solomon solution and put part of me in Europe and the other part in North America? Due to frequent mixing of populations, many tribally enrolled Native Americans have some European ancestry. Do they still belong in America?

During Greek and Roman rule, there were mixed marriages between them and Jews. Do Greece and Italy have a stake in Palestine today? During the caliphate rule and later Ottoman Empire, there were intermarriages and religious conversions between Muslims and Jews. I'd bet that many Palestinians today have some Jewish ancestry. Doesn't that give them some claim?

What you are suggesting is that all of Palestine should become Israel, disregarding intervening centuries of non Jews living there. That is just as extreme as Palestinians claiming all of the land for themselves.

Both extremes are the cause of the modern warfare. Both extremes would require ethnic cleansing and genocide to achieve. I can't agree to that, and neither does the rest of the modern world.

[Chainfire]

27. Just a personal opinion, but I believe that this post illustrates why peace in the region is

so difficult to achieve. In my opinion, the "deed" statement is absurd.

[people]

29. The original deed to North America

The United States and Canada do not have the original deed to North America. Our lands should go back to the native americans - they were here many thousands of years before Europeans. You and I are the trespassers.

[moondust]

12. Maybe an independent commision

should draw the borders. Maybe UN peacekeepers would need to keep the peace.

Old Cynic wonders if the end game in pushing Gazans out of the north half of Gaza could be another big land grab by Ben Gvir and his settler allies.

[Zeitghost]

16. Israel tried to return bothe the West Bank and Gaza

To Jordan and Egypt respectively after those countries lost the territory attacking Israel in the 6 day war. Both Jordan and Egypt have refused to take back the territory.

[JohnSJ]

28. Yes. In fact when Israel offered to return essentially all the territory it captured in the 1967 war, Judea and

Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights, if the Arabs would only agree to peace, the Arab League responded with its infamous three no's. No recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no peace with Israel.

This rewriting of history that some do, mostly I suspect due to ignorance, is a large part of the problem.

[Zeitghost]

32. Agreed

The number of people who don't understand that the West Bank and Gaza were not stolen from "Palestine" and were instead lost by Egypt and Jordan in their wars of aggression against Israel is shocking.

They also don't understand that the Palestinians are not a unique culture/ethnicity/people fighting for a homeland. They are Jordanians, with whom they share a culture, genetic background, language, religion, history and until just a few years ago, citizenship.

The analogy I use is this:
Imagine the US attacked Canada and in the ensuing war lost North Dakota. In the peace process Canada offers to give back North Dakota if the Americans promise to recognize Canada's right to exist in peace. The Americans refuse and eventually revoke American citizenship from the Dakotans and insist they are entitled to their own country in their historical homeland.

[JohnSJ]

35. I realize that, and what is disgraceful is much of the media propagate that myth.

[The Magistrate]

45. This Is Just Silly, Sir

I suppose the best of the misconceptions to begin with is the nationality question.

We take the nation-state for granted nowadays, but it is actually a quite recent concept. Prior to the late seventeenth century at the earliest, and more generally among smaller ethnic bodies by the late nineteenth century, 'nation' was employed to indicate a people of common descent in a locality, not any political entity. The political entities were tribal, dynastic, and imperial.

Arabs throughout the Near East were subjects of the Ottoman empire, and increasingly unhappy about it as the twentieth century began. The last years of Turkish rule in Palestine were grim indeed, including one concocted famine and numerous executions of rebels who styled themselves Arab nationalists.

The claim regarding Jordan is flat nonesense. England received a Mandate from the League of Nations to administer a great tract of land on both sides of the Jordan. In Arabia, England had backed the Hashemite family, prominent at Mecca. When these were defeated by Ibn Saud's Wahhabbi followers and expelled, England felt the need to maintain their clients in some dignity. The eldest son was given a crown and Iraq, and his brother Abdullah was given land east of the Jordan river, calved off from the Mandate proper, and the title Emir of Trans-Jordan. This gives no basis whatever for declaring Jordan is 'really' Palestine, and the native and proper home for Arabs living west of the Jordan.

Saying that the western side of the Jordan valley, and the Gaza strip, were captured from Jordan and Egypt is superficially true, but false at its root. The United Nations, heir to the League, decided to partition the area west of the Jordan into Jewish and Arab zones, with Jerusalem to remain under UN authority. The intent, and to some degree the expectation, was that each 'zone' would become a state for its residents. In the course of the war commenced by Arab refusal of the arrangement, Gaza was seized by Egypt, while the western portion of the Jordan valley, and part of Jerusalem, was seized by Abdulah's army. These remained in those countries' control when the Armistice turned the front lines into borders (ones considerably less favorable to the Arabs of the place than the original lines of the partition).

Abdullah annexed to Trans-Jordan the area his forces had taken. This was considered illegal, and not recognized as legitimate by the UN. Egypt dummied up a client 'government' in Gaza, which was annexed in all but name. Both areas, therefore, allotted to a 'soon to be open in this space' Arab Palestine by clear UN intent, were indeed taken from Arab Palestine, but not by Israel. When Israel defeated Jordan and Egypt in '67, it did indeed take the land from those countries, but neither was the original possessor.


"Only three people ever understood the Schleswig-Holstien affair. One is dead, another gone mad, and myself, I've quite forgot the details."

[bagimin]

13. k& highly recommended

[IsItJustMe]

18. I am all for Isreal having its own country

and I am also all for the Palastinians also having their own country. Allowing all of those settelers into the West Bank is making that possibility unrealistic. I am sure that is the purpose of allowing it. If there is ever going to be a lasting peace that will have to change.

[Bucky]

31. Unfortunately both sides are rejecting the two-state solution

The two-state solution has been steadily losing support on both sides for two decades now.

Part of this problem is that, after Clinton's efforts in 2000, the Bush Admin dropped the ball on pushing for two-state arrangements. Then 9/11 happened and we got distracted. Then Hamas took over Gaza and never held another election. Then Gaza went through several flare ups and everyone acted like ignoring it and tamping down the side effects of the problem was a solution.

As Dr. King said, "True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice." We (the US and Israel) should've been pushing for healthy economic development in Gaza for the last 20 years. Dropping the ball has led us to this problem. You can't open up your fridge for the first time in 3 weeks and start griping about all the veggies having gone bad. Peace is a chore. Mold and mildew like Hamas (and Iranian goading for violent action) has to be countered every year.

[Zeitghost]

33. The people of Palestine

Have their own country, or at least did until that country, Jordan, refused to take back a large section of its land and people.

[mysteryowl]

19. I agree, a good start. More is needed.

Point - Netanyahu is a RW extremist and indicted for corruption. WTF is he doing in office, again! Bad move by Israel leadership.

[Arthur_Frain]

22. Yeah, but I believe that after all of this there's no refloating the two state solution.

Continued settlement made it obvious quite some time ago that Netanyahu and the hardline regime in command of the israeli government never really had any interest in it at all.

I’m sure some Israelis did, obviously so did some Palestinians. Rank and file citizenry, but sadly, no one who was in charge.

Two state solution was probably always a pie in the sky hope.

[Bucky]

34. If there's no two-state solution, then here's your options

a) ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank (don't ask me "to where?" since Jordan and Egypt say flatly they won't take more refugees)
b) perpetual IDF occupation of all Gaza like they do in multiple West Bank communities
c) let Israel get used to non-stop war.


Sadly, I can't think of other alternatives.

[msfiddlestix]

37. I'm surprised to read this o.p. from Thomas Friedman. hmm. Interesting. n/t

[LymphocyteLover]

41. His latest column is very important too "Israel Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/opinion/biden-speech-israel-gaza.html

"I have great admiration for how President Biden has used his empathy and physical presence in Israel to convince Israelis that they are not alone in their war against the barbaric Hamas, while trying to reach out to moderate Palestinians. Biden, I know, tried really hard to get Israeli leaders to pause in their rage and think three steps ahead — not only about how to get into Gaza to take down Hamas but also about how to get out — and how to do it with the fewest civilian casualties possible.

(snip)
However, from everything I have gleaned from senior U.S. officials, Biden failed to get Israel to hold back and think through all the implications of an invasion of Gaza for Israel and the United States. So let me put this in as stark and clear language as I can, because the hour is late:

I believe that if Israel rushes headlong into Gaza now to destroy Hamas — and does so without expressing a clear commitment to seek a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority and end Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank — it will be making a grave mistake that will be devastating for Israeli interests and American interests.

It could trigger a global conflagration and explode the entire pro-American alliance structure that the United States has built in the region since Henry Kissinger engineered the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

[MyNameIsJonas]

43. How about no economic aid to Palestine until they push Hamas out of Gaza?

We have given them over a half a billion dollars under Biden alone.

[prodigitalson]

44. This!