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I challenge you to find one Palestinian or Arab who agrees with the assessment that Friedman has "reasonably decent politics around the Palestinians" (didn't we just get on Cockburn's case for referring to "the Jews"?). Every single one that I know think he's an unreconstructed racist and apologist for Israeli butchery.
Merely saying that "both sides are bad" -- Friedman's banal, recycled line -- is not a "decent" analysis of the Palestinian question, especially when one "ulitmately chooses Israel."
The tens of thousands of activists from across the world who met in Durban, South Africa last year and concluded that Israel as an apartheid regime had it right. They were echoed by tens of thousands of committed activists at the World Social Forum in Brazil earlier this year. Only U.S. and Israeli liberals seem to feel they have the luxury of overlooking this reality.