Thomas Friedman: American leaders should stop debasing themselves on Israel

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On Nov. 4, 2022, just after the current far-right Israeli government coalition won election, I wrote a column with this headline: “The Israel We Knew Is Gone.” It was meant to be a warning flare about just how radical this coalition is. Many people disagreed. I believe events have proved them wrong — and the situation is now even worse: The Israel we knew is gone, and today’s Israel is in existential danger.

Israel is up against a regional superpower, Iran, that has managed to put Israel into a vise grip, using its allies and proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Right now, Israel has no military or diplomatic answer. Worse, it faces the prospect of a war on three fronts — the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and the West Bank — but with a dangerous new twist: Hezbollah in Lebanon, unlike Hamas, is armed with precision missiles that could destroy vast swaths of Israel’s infrastructure, from its airports to its seaports to its university campuses to its military bases to its power plants.

But Israel is led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has to stay in power to avoid potentially being sent to prison on corruption charges. To do so, he sold his soul to form a government with far-right Jewish extremists who insist that Israel must fight in Gaza until it has killed every last Hamasnik — “total victory” — and who reject any partnership with the Palestinian Authority (which has accepted the Oslo peace accords) in governing a post-Hamas Gaza, because they want Israeli control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza.

And now, Netanyahu’s emergency war Cabinet has fallen apart over his lack of a plan for ending the war and safely withdrawing from Gaza, and the extremists in his government coalition are eyeing their next moves for power.

They have done so much damage already, and yet not President Joe Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, nor many in Congress have come to terms with just how radical this government is.

Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow GOP mischief makers decided to reward Netanyahu with the high honor of speaking to a joint meeting of Congress on July 24. Pushed into a corner, the top Democrats in the Senate and the House signed on to the invitation, but the unstated goal of this Republican exercise is to divide Democrats and provoke shouted insults from their most progressive representatives that would alienate American Jewish voters and donors and turn them toward Donald Trump.

Netanyahu knows that this is all about domestic U.S. politics, which is why his acceptance of the speaking invitation is such an act of disloyalty to Biden — who flew all the way to Israel to hug him in the days after Oct. 7 — that it simply takes your breath away.

No friend of Israel should participate in this circus. Israel needs a pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis — and seize the offer of normalization with Saudi Arabia that Biden has been able to engineer. This can come about only by removing Netanyahu through a new election — as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer bravely called for in March. Israel does not need a U.S.-sponsored booze party for its drunken driver.

You wonder if the “friends” of Israel have any clue about the nature of its government. This government is not your grandfather’s Israel and this Bibi is not even the old Bibi.

Unlike any previous Israeli Cabinet, this government wrote the goal of annexing the West Bank into the coalition agreement, so it is no surprise that it spent its first year trying to crush the ability of the Israeli Supreme Court to put any check on its powers. Bibi also ceded control over the police and key authorities in the Defense Ministry to Jewish supremacists in his coalition to enable them to deepen settlers’ control over the West Bank. They immediately proceeded to add settlement housing units in the heart of that occupied territory by record numbers to try to block any Palestinian state there.

This nightmare coalition is now in the process of ensuring that ultra-Orthodox young men will not have to serve in this war in equal weight with secular young men and women, who are exhausted by eight months of fighting. The army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, told soldiers in Gaza over the weekend that there “is now a clear need” to draft the ultra-Orthodox to be soldiers to spare another deployment for “many thousands” of less religious reservists.

Israel’s relatively small combat officer corps has been so ground down, I cannot imagine how it could sustain a war in Lebanon.

Add it all up and you see a reckless act of economic, military and moral overstretch — committing 7 million Jews to control more than 7 million Palestinians (including 2 million Israeli Arabs) between the river and the sea in perpetuity.

That would be madness in a time of peace. In a time of war — a low-grade three-front war that could become a high-grade three-front war any day — it is insane. Israel is increasingly alone, because what ally would want to partner with that agenda?

And that is why I agree with every word that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote in Haaretz last week: Israel faces “the most serious and dangerous crisis in the country’s history. It began on Oct. 7 with the worst failure in Israel’s history. And it continued with a war that, despite the courage and sacrifice of soldiers and officers, appears to be the least successful war in its history, due to the strategic paralysis in the country’s leadership.”

Israel, added Barak, a former army chief of staff, is “risking a multifront war that would include Iran and its proxies. And all this is happening while in the background the judicial coup continues, with its goal of establishing a racist, ultranationalist, messianic and benighted religious dictatorship.”

Barak warned that if the current government is allowed to remain in power, Israel will not only find itself stuck in Gaza — with Hamas still able to fight and no Arab partner to help Israel out of there — it will also most likely find itself “in an all-out war with Hezbollah in the north, a third intifada in the West Bank, conflicts with the Houthis in Yemen and Iraqi militias in the Golan Heights and, of course, conflict with Iran itself.”

Every American should worry about that. It is a prescription for the United States to be dragged into a Middle East war to help Israel — which would be a Russian, Chinese, Iranian dream come true.

Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made eight trips to Israel since Oct. 7, should not make another without Israel and Hamas agreeing to a clear war-ending plan. He is debasing his and U.S. power. This is ultimatum time. Biden should be telling Israel that it should accept Hamas’ key demand: Totally end the war now and withdraw from Gaza in exchange for the return of all Israeli hostages. Israel cannot think straight while Hamas holds its people.

If Israel can end the war in Gaza, it can lead to a U.S.-mediated deal with Hezbollah to quiet the northern border war — which has been terrible for civilians on both sides. It could enable Israelis and Lebanese along their countries’ border to return home while enabling the Israeli army to recover and restock from a draining fight. It could halt the erosion in both Israel’s economy and its global moral standing and let the country do something it should have done on Oct. 8. That is: pause, rethink, strategize and not do exactly what Iran and Hamas wanted it to do — i.e., charge head first just like America did after Sept. 11, 2001 — and sink into an endless war without any plan or partner for the morning after. And, as Barak argued, Israel must then hold new elections.

Yes, yes, I can hear the criticism from the war hawks right now: “Friedman, you would let Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, come out of his tunnel and declare victory?”

Yes, I would. In fact, I wish I could be at the news conference in Gaza when he does, so I could ask the first question:

“Mr. Sinwar, you claim this is a great victory for Hamas — a total Israeli withdrawal and a stable cease-fire. I just want to know: What existed on Oct. 6 between you and Israel, before your surprise attack? Oh, let me answer that: a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a stable cease-fire. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stick around for a few days to watch you explain to Gazans how you started an eight-month war — causing the destruction of roughly 70% of Gaza’s housing stock and leaving, by your count, some 37,000 Gazans dead, many of them women and children — so you could get Gaza back to exactly where it was on Oct. 6, in a cease-fire with Israel and no Israeli troops here. Another Hamas victory like this and Gaza will be permanently unlivable.”

And to Israelis who would ask, “Friedman, are you crazy, you would let Sinwar run Gaza again?” my answer would again be — yes, for now. The alternatives — Israel running Gaza or Gaza becoming another Somalia — are far worse. Netanyahu’s idea that some perfect Palestinians — who are neither members of Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority — will run the place for Israel is a fantasy.

The only people who can defeat Hamas are the Palestinians of Gaza. They, too, need better leadership, and if they find it, we should help them rebuild. But until then, Israel would be crazy to want to stay in Gaza and be responsible for its reconstruction. That honor should go to Sinwar.

I believe that the morning after the morning after Sinwar emerges from his tunnel, many Palestinians in Gaza will want to pummel him for the disaster he has visited on them. And if not, Sinwar and Sinwar alone will be responsible when the water doesn’t flow, when the building materials don’t arrive, when the sun doesn’t shine — not Israel. And if he is so foolish as to restart the war with Israel or attempt to smuggle in weapons instead of food and housing for his people, it will all be on him.

Sadly, if all this war does is buy Israel another long timeout with Hamas, well, maybe that’s all that’s possible. After all, up to now, the real history of Jews and Palestinians, going back to the early 20th century, has been: war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout, war, timeout. And the real difference is what each side did in the timeouts.

Maybe one day that will change, but for now Israel needs to get the hell out of Gaza and back into a timeout.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

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Tyler Cowen: The real government conspiracy isn’t about UFOs

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Three months ago, following last summer’s congressional hearings on UFOs, the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office issued a 63-page report evaluating almost 80 years of evidence. Its conclusion — not altogether surprising, given the name of the office — can be summarized as follows: Not much to see here. Please move on.

(The actual language from the report: “AARO has not discovered any empirical evidence that any sighting of a UAP represented off-world technology or the existence a classified program that had not been properly reported to Congress.”)

The Senate Intelligence Committee isn’t buying it. The Intelligence Authorization Act , which it passed this month, among other things calls for review of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The bill would also limit research into what are now called UAPs (for unidentified anomalous phenomena) unless Congress is informed and add whistleblower protections for anyone who might wish to step forward and speak their minds.

Less plausible claims about UAPs have been achieving greater circulation in part because of the efforts of David Grusch, who testified before Congress last year about hidden alien bodies, crashed vehicles and secret conspiracies. Those claims, which primary witnesses have not corroborated, defy belief, and the ensuing controversy has helped make concerns about UAPs appear silly.

Nonetheless, the truth remains that there are systematic sightings and sensor data of fast-moving entities that the government cannot explain. You don’t have to think they are space aliens to realize that they are threats to national security. At the very least, the mere fact that some experienced military pilots entertain the more speculative alien-linked hypotheses suggests that the military is not processing information effectively. Does it make anyone feel better when reports from pilots are dismissed as crazy?

UAPs will remain an issue as long as China and Russia (and possibly other nations) remain national security threats, because the US military will always want to identify possible entrants to its airspace. No report or bureaucratic process can make those concerns go away. And so there is a kind of paralyzed equilibrium, where a very strong force — the desire to know — has met an immoveable object — a lack of knowledge.

In this sense, the frustration of the Senate Intelligence Committee — as expressed by its unanimous 17-0 vote — is understandable. The Pentagon’s report presents many of the weaker UAP allegations and notes that there is no serious evidence to back them up. And it simply dismisses some of the stronger UAP puzzles, such as the Nimitz or Gimbal incidents.

It is not until Page 26 that the report concedes: “A small percentage of cases have potentially anomalous characteristics or concerning characteristics. AARO has kept Congress fully and currently informed of its findings. AARO’s research continues on these cases.” Those sentences should have been on the first page, and then the report should have presented the evidence about those cases. If this were an undergraduate term paper, I would have given it a D+.

The chatter among insiders, some of which surely reaches senators, is that some of the data is very hard to explain. Some people, such as John Brennan, former head of the CIA, have even speculated that the available evidence might imply contact with a non-human civilization. Agree or disagree, the admission is a marker of our ignorance.

The conspiracy, to the extent there is one, is not to suppress evidence of different life forms; it is to avoid admitting the embarrassing absence of any real answers. So at the very least, the Senate Intelligence Committee deserves credit for reopening the issue.

It can be hard to wrap your head around such huge questions. People are often more concerned with dismissing the possibility of alien life than with admitting the possibility of genuine uncertainty. And since even partial evidence of aliens might scare the public too much, there is an overriding incentive to keep matters under wraps.

When I think about all this, I try to keep two questions separate. First, is there a major puzzle to account for? And second, what is the best explanation for that puzzle? It helps to focus on the first question in isolation, since we can’t seem to keep our heads on straight when it comes to the second.

By admitting that there is a real puzzle to be solved, the Senate Intelligence Committee has moved decisively to answer the first question. Once we clarify exactly what the puzzle is, maybe we’ll be able to make some progress explaining it.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

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Letters: Too concerned about the pursuit of happiness by vandals and thieves?

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What about the residents’ rights?

I was genuinely pleased to read about the proposed expansion of the St. Paul Downtown Improvement District.

Now, given that I am a condo owner in the Lowertown district, that might seem a bit odd as the plan would essentially mean additional taxes I would be paying for what I believe the City already has an obligation to provide.

However, I am a realist and if it means paying more to create a safe, clean and well-maintained environment, so be it. However, my elation was quickly dashed upon reading the comments by the city attorney on the proposal. Among other things the proposal provides to add a dedicated attorney to pursue perpetrators of non-felony, quality-of -life issues downtown, especially chronic offenders.

I gather from the comments from the city attorney that she is more concerned about the First Amendment rights of the graffiti artist, the pursuit of happiness by the vandals and thieves and the due process rights of the guy peeing on the sidewalk in broad daylight.

I am completely unmoved by the comments by the city attorney alluding to preserving our core principles of democracy and constitutional protections. What about the residents’ rights? Procedures and rules certainly could be established to prevent abuse by the attorney’s office to ensure that prosecutions are fair and equitable to all.

Dave Cassman, St. Paul

 

Wake up, GOP

What has happened to MY Republican Party? The party that believed in less government, that life began at conception, advocated for lower taxes and small business and respected law enforcement and accountability for those who broke the law?

“Trump is king of the hill for GOP” was the headline in last Friday’s paper. A vast majority of Republicans in Washington, including the congressmen and woman representing Minnesota, have turned into Trump’s puppets. They refuse to take a stand and denounce him for his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, turn a blind eye to his insults, whining and lack of accountability , and above all his deplorable narcissistic behavior.

Wake up GOP! Let’s see your backbone. I for one will not be voting for “the King”.

Ann Helvick, Apple Valley

 

Bump-stock ban is up to Congress

In “Gun bump stocks banned” the news report makes it appear that the Supreme Court decided against banning bump stocks. While their 6-3 decision certainly has that immediate effect, it is by no means the final word on banning bump stocks.

This Court has the unique, and welcomed, practice of reading the law, considering its applications to a case, comparing it with the Constitution’s intent, and issuing an opinion. They have been consistent in this. Bravo. We have missed this for generations.

The Court also clearly stated, Congress had not passed a law that specifically bans bump stocks. I’d vote for it. I bet it would get bipartisan support in Congress, if it wasn’t for the sad reality that Congress has disdain for bipartisanship.

Write your federal House and Senate member and ask them to get this done.

Dave Racer, Woodbury

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Oakdale child care center reeling after theft of bounce house

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The Carol Matheys Center for Children & Families in Oakdale kicked off its summer session last week with a bounce house that featured inflatable pop-ups, a basketball hoop and two separate climbing walls to reach the top of two slides.

Children who attend Carol Matheys Center for Children & Families in Oakdale play in a bounce house on Tuesday, June 11, 2024. (Courtesy of Carol Matheys Center for Children & Families)

The center paid more to rent the Sports Dual-Lane Slide Combo Bouncer from Froggy Hops Inflatable Jumpers for an extra couple of days so the 64 children who attend Carol Matheys would have even more time to play, said Stacie Penn, the center’s executive director.

But when center staff arrived at work at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the 300-pound deflated bounce house was gone.

“We feel pretty violated by it, and the kids were so disappointed by it,” Penn said. “I’ve been here 30 years, and we’ve never had anything like this. It was huge, so it definitely was more than one person. They had to have a truck or a trailer. It wasn’t a random thing. Somebody had planned it, for sure.”

Police say someone stole the $2,200 bounce house and the $150 blower required to inflate it sometime between 8 p.m. Tuesday and 6 a.m. Wednesday. The large metal stakes used to hold the bounce house in the ground were not taken, according to police.

Per the terms of the center’s contract with Froggy’s, Carol Matheys must cover the full cost of the stolen bounce house and blower.

Given the high deductible on the childcare center’s insurance plan, Penn said center officials decided to pay for the bounce house and blower outright rather than submit it to insurance. Center staff were able to raise the amount needed through an online GoFundMe fundraiser.

A rental bounce house was stolen from the Carol Matheys Center for Children & Families in Oakdale sometime late June 11, 2024 or early June 12, 2024.  (Courtesy of GoFundMe)

The fundraiser had raised $2,915 of its $2,500 goal as of Wednesday afternoon; center staff plan to use any extra funds to pay for the installation of a security camera around the entire center. The center’s current security cameras do not cover the back area where the bounce house was located, Penn said.

Center staff have been monitoring Facebook Marketplace to see if someone is selling the Sports Dual-Lane Slide Combo Bouncer online. “I really don’t think they were teenagers,” Penn said. “This took a little more planning. My guess is that this was somebody who was trying to make some money.”

Penn said the theft has led to some difficult conversations with the children, who range in age from 3 to 12.

“They were disappointed, but also really worried because somebody stole it,” she said. “We had to have conversations about ‘Sometimes people do bad things.’ It was a lesson on, ‘That’s why we don’t take things that don’t belong to us.’”

Police said the case remains under investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call 911 or submit a tip at cityprotect.com/agency/oakdalepdmn. Once a crime tip is sent, it will send alerts to police staff.

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