[NY Times columnist William] Safire regularly takes phone calls from Mr Sharon (and then insists on telling us of Mr Sharon's latest fantasies), but my old chum Tom Friedman in his ever-more-Messianic column in The New York Times, has almost gone one better. "Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay,'' he announced last week. What, in God's name, is an American journalist doing when he urges Mr Sharon to go to war? Friedman was with me in the Sabra and Chatila camps. Has he forgotten what we saw? Last week, however, Friedman was also amiably advising the Palestinians to turn to non-violent resistance à la Gandhi.
For Friedman, "a non-violent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago...'' Needless to say, when Westerners, including two Britons, protested peacefully in Bethlehem – and were wounded by an Israeli soldier who shot at them, Friedman was silent.
The reason why the Palestinians turned to suicide bombing, according to Friedman, was not despair over the occupation – occupation which, of course, Safire tells us we mustn't refer to – but because "the Palestinians are so blinded by narcissistic rage'' that they have lost sight of the sacredness of human life.
And so it goes on. Having bestialised the Palestinians over so many years, why should we be surprised when a society eventually produces the very monsters we always claim to see in them? Even Mr Bush's speech last week in which he dispatched Mr Powell on his "urgent'' mission of peace – allowing him a lazy seven days to reach Israel, reserved its venom for the Palestinians. And yet, after all that, he fails to see why Mr Sharon might choose to keep his army in the field.
So this week will be a crucial one in the American-Israeli relationship, a real test of the Bush presidency. We shall find out who – the US or Israel – runs America's policy in the Middle East. It would be nice to think that it was the former. But I'm not sure.
[http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=282652]
Carl
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