An about-face in American liberal newspapers’ views of the Middle East reached a new extreme Sunday with The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writing, “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play.”
Most of the largest American newspapers in the past two decades have followed the Palestinian Authority policy that eastern Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza are “occupied territories,” the dateline usually used in their articles from those areas.
However, U.S. President Barack Obama’s switch of gears from the Roadmap Plan has left his policy in quicksand, according to influential newspaper columnists. The liberal Washington Post surprised observers this past summer with a number of editorials and op-ed articles highly critical of President Obama for driving up expectations in the Arab world by demanding Jews stop all building in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
The newspaper’s senior columnist Jackson Diehl wrote three weeks after President Obama’s “reaching out to Muslims” speech in Cairo, “How foolish it would be to squander it over a handful of Israeli apartment houses.”
Friedman, who once equated Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria with terrorists, wrote Sunday, “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play….This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.”
Echoing sentiments voiced for years by nationalists in Israel and in the Diaspora, the popular columnist added, “Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here…. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture….
“Stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”
Friedman’s “radical” approach was published two days before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is to meet with President Obama, whose administration is being blamed by many observers for the announcement by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas that he will not run for reelection in January.
His announcement came after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly praised Prime Minister Netanyahu for “unprecedented” steps in reducing Jewish construction.