Thomas Friedman on the current Israeli government

Writing in the New York Times,  Thomas Friedman is clearly among the liberal Jews who have become intensely critical of the current Netanyahu government. It’s a problem that will only worsen as time goes on because the fanatics will only get stronger because they are the ones having the babies. But despite all the hand-wringing, I rather doubt that when push comes to shove, liberal Jews will really abandon Israel. And I doubt that Iran and its proxies are strong enough militarily to really do damage to Israel—and the ever subservient United States and the rest of the West will be there if things get really dicey for Israel. And Friedman hopes that Israel will establish a “pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis”—just about the most ridiculous pipe dream I have ever heard. Sorry but the fanatics are in charge and that’s not going to change—probably ever.

But Netanyahu is biting the hand that feeds it, complaining that U.S. is Holding Up Some Weapons Deliveries.  Netanyahu “said he had told the American secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, last week that it was “inconceivable” that the Biden administration was holding up delivery of some heavy bombs and artillery shells to Israel, which he called “America’s closest ally, fighting for its life.” He said Mr. Blinken in turn had assured him the White House “is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks.” In Washington, Mr. Blinken declined to say at a news conference whether he had given that assurance. He said only “one shipment” of 2,000-pound bombs was still under review over concerns about their use in densely populated parts of Gaza, but other weapons shipments were still flowing.

Meanwhile the much-hyped pier for Gaza aid Is Failing, and Could Be Dismantled Early, likely due partly to sabotage from the fanatics who basically want every Gazan killed: “Aid workers say the deliveries of food and other supplies have been slowed by bottlenecks for shipments at border crossings caused by lengthy inspections of trucks, limited operating hours and protests by Israelis.”

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 — Gaza, 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 President Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and many in Congress have not come to terms with just how radical this government is.

Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow G.O.P. 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 Joe 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 the 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. …

Add it all up and you see a reckless act of economic, military and moral overstretch — committing seven million Jews to control more than seven million Palestinians (including two 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 Thursday: 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.”