Thomas Friedman who is an expert – “expert” in this case means being able to say things with no factual support and have no one question you – wrote The Reality Principle in 2003.
Have you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as ”a senior Hamas official” or a ”key operative”? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be? We’re not talking about I.B.M. here. We’re talking about a ragtag terrorist group. By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.
Note his certainty. Killing terrorists actually is counterproductive. He did not acknowledge that fighting terrorism may be a long process. He merely assumed – with no evidence – that killing terrorists simply breeds more terrorists.
I wonder if he will adjust his thinking because of the recent news that West Bank Terrorist List Dwindles (via Daily Alert Blog via Ha’aretz)
For the first time since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, not a single security suspect is being sought by Israel in the northern West Bank.
In the southern West Bank, there are only a few names on the wanted list, a reflection of both the improved security situation in the West Bank and the increasing cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces.
The last fatal suicide bombing emanating from the northern West Bank occurred in April 2006, committed by Islamic Jihad in Jenin.
In the last year, several major terrorist attacks have been carried out in the West Bank, but Israel located the perpetrators, Fatah members from Nablus and Hamas members from the Hebron area, and killed them.
Among the few wanted figures still at large are Hamas members operating in Hebron.
Friedman, to be sure, was correct in observing that Israel needed help from the PA to accomplish this, but as Barry Rubin points out, that help came due to enlightened self-interest.
Six years ago there were hundreds of them.Israel-PA coordination helps a lot and is partly itself the product of Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip, which scared the hummus out of PA leaders lest they themselves end up deep in the humus.
However, according to Barry Rubin, the current situation is the best that can be hoped for for now. The Palestinian Authority still won’t accept any political solution that is minimally acceptable to Israel. Rather than seeking a solution, the proper approach is to maintain the status quo, until such point that the Palestinians become serious about peace.
That’s in sharp contrast to Friedman’s approach which was that further Israeli concessions would bring peace.
But then Barry Rubin is an academic who actually has studied the situation; Thomas Friedman is basically a pop star who is handsomely paid to express unsupported opinions in an entertaining fashion.
According to Friedman, Israel’s successful anti-terror strategy was playing into Hamas’s hands. I’m guessing that Hamas – in Judea and Samaria – wishes that it hadn’t been quite that successful.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Thomas who?
I love that description of Hamas as a rag-tag group, as if they’re a bunch of almost comically inept guys in the back of a bar hatching and launching ramshackle plans. They’re in effect a government, they have access to hundreds of millions of dollars provided by compliant and hopeful western governments (the lack of substantial Saudi and other Arab support is noteworthy but rarely noted). Friedman gives the impression that they have one or two worshipful lodge masters and the rest are just some guys Israel terms “senior leaders” so they can kill them.
Of course, Friedman’s ego is such that he genuinely believes the Saudi government would launch a serious peace plan by revealing it to him as opposed to, oh, say, Israeli leaders.