After traveling around Israel and the West Bank, I now understand why so much has changed. It is crystal clear to me that Israel is in real danger — more danger than at any other time since its War of Independence in 1948.Friedman sees three major threats: fanatical Islamists who are better-armed and better-organized than they ever have been, surrounding Israel on all sides; the need to maintain international support from as many other nations as possible even as Israel pursues the kind of house-to-house combat that inevitably kills many innocent civilians and therefore arouses international condemnation; and finally, "the worst leader in [Israel's] history — maybe in all of Jewish history", who is temperamentally incapable of taking any steps toward a two-state solution, the only way for Israel to survive (or so I gather is Friedman's opinion).
Here's Friedman's recommendation for the first step Israelis should take toward finding a way out of this disaster.
The sooner Israel replaces Netanyahu and his far-right allies with a true center-left-center-right national unity government, the better chance it has to hold together during what is going to be a hellish war and aftermath.Um, okay, yes, in the abstract, that's a good idea. But haven't you missed something, Tom?
Yes, those far-right fanatics who are slavering for a fully Orthodox Jewish state, shorn of the secularism that has been part of Israel's body politic since the beginning, are indeed unfit to govern. They proved it by leading Israel into this crisis. Bibi himself is an awful leader for Israel right now: by thoroughly dividing and distracting Israelis, convincing many that they had more to fear from his power grab than from any external enemy, he likely kept the military from noticing the signs of the impending attack.
However, Bibi and his allies didn't gerrymander their way into power, as Republicans have in the U.S. The extremists who surround Bibi reflect a large and growing fraction of the Israeli population.
How, Tom, is Israel supposed to create your magical center-left-center-right unity government when a huge chunk of the population is hard-right?
Bibi is in some ways uniquely bad as a leader but getting rid of him wouldn't change the bitter divisions in the population that put him in power.
