The Ukraine conflict shows how effective sanctions can be, but they should be applied wherever imperialism is present. (Photograph by Mostafa Alkharouf/ Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Today, as I admire the widespread and magnanimous resolve to help Ukrainians fleeing from and fighting Russian imperialism, I am reminded that many leading liberals in the West — people such as Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist — remain a hopelessly biased and unbelievably regressive lot in regards to Palestine. In a piece titled In the War Over Ukraine, Expect the Unexpected, published on 15 March 2022, Friedman is effusive in his praise of the many “surprises” that the ”democratic West” has generated in opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Such developments include “everyone from McDonald’s to Goldman Sachs” withdrawing from Russia, and people from 165 countries booking 430 000 rooms and spending $17-million on the Airbnb platform to help Ukrainians financially. He adds that: “I have always argued that globalisation is not just about trade. It is about the ability for countries, companies and now, increasingly, individuals to connect and act globally.”
Friedman’s abundant enthusiasm for economic sanctions and global action has its limits: it excludes acting against the Middle East’s sole colonial power, Israel. In 2015, when asked about his views on the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an international movement designed to put pressure on Israel to dismantle its apartheid structures and respect Palestinian human rights, Friedman didn’t marvel at the ability of the world to act against the violent and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.
Instead, he developed a false moral equivalence between sanctions and illegal settlements, disingenuously claiming both are equally damaging to what he terms “Jewish democracy”. And he vowed to “fight the BDS movement as if there are no settlements” and “oppose the settlements as if there is no BDS movement.” Today, at least 27 states in America have adopted laws or policies that penalise businesses, organisations or individuals that engage in or call for boycotts against Israel.
In 2001, Friedman questioned why university students were calling for sanctions against Israel, when the governments of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt had not been sanctioned for their repressive rule. And he labelled sanctions as “deeply dishonest and hypocritical”.
Try explaining such an illogical rationale to the long-suffering Palestinian diaspora: six million refugees whose precarious lives are connected to their indelible right of return home as per UN resolution 195. Yet Friedman has all but dismissed the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and made it clear that the US cannot help to promote a peace plan that acknowledges the brutal annihilation of Palestinian society.
In a satirical piece titled Bush’s First Memo, Friedman writes, “If you want to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, we will help you. If you want to reverse the outcome of the 1948 war, we will not help you. If you want to reverse the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which first supported a modern Jewish homeland in Palestine, we will oppose you.”
Friedman is not alone in repudiating basic and foundational Palestinian rights and echoing right-wing sentiments. Susie Linfield, Professor of Journalism at New York University, has disputed assessments by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that have concluded Israel is an apartheid state in an opinion piece titled “Ferguson is not Palestine”. She claims otherwise, because “Israel has become less isolated from other nations, its economy has flourished, and Arab Israelis have made impressive gains in education and employment”.
Furthermore, she contends that Israel is incomparable to apartheid South Africa because, regarding the founders of Israel, “The inhabitants of the Yishuv were a varied lot, but many, indeed most, were immiserated refugees fleeing oppression and then extermination”. Conveniently, she doesn’t mention how Donald Trump’s administration pressured the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco to conclude so-called normalisation deals with Israel.
She doesn’t mention the increasing number of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, repeated and deadly attacks on young Palestinians by Israeli security forces, demolitions of schools and houses in the occupied territories or controversial evictions of Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
Indeed, she doesn’t state that Palestinians have no legal right to claim the land they owned in historic Palestine, but Jews do. And she doesn’t mention the 260 people, including 39 women and 67 children, killed in Israeli’s war on Gaza in May 2021 — simply to obfuscate Israel’s apartheid and settler colonialism. Additionally, Linfield describes Israel as “one of the most multicultural societies on Earth”, but fails to highlight the establishment of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. It defines Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
On 25 March 2022, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories concluded Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory is “apartheid”. It is clear that Freidman and Linfield (and others who hold similar views) have invalid and insincere reasons for opposing sanctions and pretending that Israel is not an apartheid state. They know that international isolation and economic sanctions are bad for business and absolutely wonderful for exposing state-sanctioned violence and social injustice, and for inspiring global action: apartheid South Africa and Russia lend testimony to that fact.
America’s liberals don’t have to reinvent themselves to grasp the glaring truth that Palestinian lives are as important as those of Ukrainians or Israelis. Or that sanctions could possibly help to expedite a progressive and substantial change in Israel. Clearly, the bothsidesism perpetrated by the likes of Friedman is enabling Israeli belligerence and constraining Palestinian rights.
Instead of feigning objectivity unendingly while practically advancing white supremacy, America’s left should focus on connecting with the neglected victims of Israeli repression, backing an ICC investigation into potential war crimes in the occupied territories, advocating for Palestinian rights and opposing the Middle East’s erstwhile colonial project.