NY Times’ Friedman: Netanyahu ‘too cowardly’ to take steps necessary for peace

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “too cowardly” to take the necessary actions for peace with the Palestinians, while Hamas has proved a disaster for the residents of the Gaza Strip, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote on Tuesday.

In a piece titled “Hamas, Netanyahu and Mother Nature,” the veteran Times writer lamented the intransigence he felt was exhibited by both the Israeli government and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, and said environmental and humanitarian dangers could soon force both Israelis and Palestinians to look beyond their differences to increased cooperation.

Friedman said the Netanyahu government’s settlement expansion policies have made “separating Israelis and Palestinians increasingly impossible and therefore an apartheidlike situation increasingly likely.”

Netanyahu, Freidman, asserted, “wants it all,” unable to accept any significant concessions to Palestinians that a peace accord would require. “And with President Trump and the US Congress writing him blank checks, [he] thinks he can have it all. So why bother making any concessions for peace?”

He added: “I get why Israel has no choice but to defend its border with Gaza with brute force. But I find it a travesty that a country with so much imagination in computing, medicine and agriculture shows so little imagination in searching for secure ways to separate from the Palestinians in the West Bank to preserve its Jewish democracy.”

Meanwhile in Gaza, Hamas, in Friedman’s estimation, was eligible for “an anti-Nobel Peace Prize — that is, the Nobel Prize for Cynicism and Reckless Disregard for One’s Own People in Pursuit of a Political Fantasy.”

Israel, he said, “ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005. If Hamas had chosen to recognize Israel and build a Palestinian state in Gaza modeled on Singapore, the world would have showered it with aid and it would have served as a positive test case for the West Bank. Hamas chose otherwise.”

The terror group that rules the Strip instead chose violence, using the recent marches in Gaza “to disguise its utter failure to produce any kind of decent life for the Palestinians there.”

He said the world, including Arab nations, is “fed up” with Palestinians’ demand to return to ancestral lands which today are part of Israel. “History is full of such injustices and of refugees who have reconciled with them and moved on — not passed on their refugee status to their kids and their kids’ kids.

Notably, Friedman did not criticize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which Israeli leaders have accused of repeatedly rejecting generous peace offers and of an unwillingness to truly accept a Jewish state.

The columnist warned that “Mother Nature” could soon “batter” both sides, noting that the ongoing blockade of Gaza and severe electricity shortages had led to sewage treatment in the Strip being virtually non-existent, and Palestinians dumping “about 100 million liters of raw sewage into the Mediterranean daily.” The sewage was now flowing north and damaging Israeli desalination plants.

Meanwhile Gaza was quickly running out of clean drinking water, and Israel could soon have a true humanitarian disaster on its hands.

Friedman concluded: “If there were ever a time for Israel to take a few calculated risks to try to nurture a different pathway with Palestinians in the West Bank, it’s now. Unfortunately, its prime minister is too cowardly, and America is too slavishly supportive, for that to happen. Over to you, Mother Nature.”