Liberal Media's new messaging on Gaza hides key facts

On August 25, Thomas Friedman wrote a column in the NY Times. ( (Design: Palestine Chronicle))

The apartheid matrix of control exercised by Israel over Palestinians, in place many years prior to October 7, is not even mentioned by Friedman as a major contributor to Israel’s collapsing legitimacy.

By Richard Falk, Reposted from The Palestine Chronicle, September 03, 3035

On August 25, Thomas Friedman, always a weathervane for political and economic establishment thinking in the West, wrote a notable column in the New York Times that was pragmatic in tone, misleading in substance, and regressive in intention. Yet it reflects a growing ambivalence toward Israel’s prolonged genocide, even among longtime supporters of Israel, that now highlights starvation, famine, and a gross distortion of the delivery of humanitarian aid under emergency conditions. But expressed dangerously without hiding the hope that Israel could even now restore its legitimacy without being held accountable for crimes in Gaza, and despite all, still expecting to be rewarded by excluding Hamas from any further governance role in Gaza and continuing to move toward the annexation of the West Bank by formal action or through further settlement expansion.

It is notable that the headline of the Friedman opinion piece is titled “Israel’s Gaza Campaign is Making It a Pariah State.” This Israeli misfortune is blamed by Friedman almost totally on Netanyahu and his ultra-right religious coalition partners, usually as represented by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who both serve as important cabinet ministers in Tel Aviv’s coalition government. Neither the apartheid matrix of control exercised by Israel over Palestinians in place many years prior to October 7, nor Jewish supremacist demographic policies and territorial ambitions embedded in Zionist ideology and written into Israel’s 2018 Basic Law, are even mentioned by Friedman as major contributors to Israel’s collapsing legitimacy. What is not said is often more important than what is said.

Beyond this, Friedman, in his telltale and flip opening sentence, writes, “I will leave it to historians to debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” To begin with, at this stage, the reality of the Gaza genocide is no more debatable than that of the Holocaust, or, for that matter, the genocide carried out some years ago against the Rohingya people living in Myanmar. And the continued evasion of naming is no longer acceptable, although it could be responsibly personally hedged by being described as reflecting a now unchallengeable consensus among genocide scholars and legal experts.

At most, an authoritative pronouncement of genocide awaits only a definitive legal judgment by the International Court of Justice in responding to the 2023 South African submission invoking the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948). Early in 2024, nearly unanimous rulings of the ICJ in an interim decision have already affirmed the plausibility of genocide allegations and the wrongfulness of Israeli disruptions of international deliveries of humanitarian aid. To refrain at this juncture from naming the onslaught in Gaza as ‘genocide’ is to avert one’s gaze from the gigantic elephant in the room.

At the very least, Friedman might have written as follows: “In deference to the ICJ, I will leave it to the jurists to settle any lingering debate as to whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” Even such a revision still casts an agnostic eye on the gruesome realities daily confirmed by the images and words of brave photographers and journalists on the ground who have too often paid with their lives for acts of truth-telling professionalism

A second level of evasion on Friedman’s part is to fall in line with those who call the Israeli violence of the past two years in Gaza acts committed during a ‘war.’ Such a designation enables atrocities to be sidelined in public consciousness as, at worst, regrettable incidents of ‘collateral damage’ or ‘mishaps’ attributable to ‘the fog of war,’ explained away as combat tactics reasonably relied upon as matters of ‘self-defense’ and ‘military necessity.’ Yet by now, such an Israeli-dominated public discourse on the violence, suffering, and cruelty inflicted on over two million entrapped Palestinians lacks any credibility, and so the war discourse should be disregarded as state propaganda. The conflict, as has been widely observed by many close observers, bears a closer resemblance to ‘a massacre’ than a war because it is so one-sided with the most modern weaponry of land, sea, and air possessed on the Israeli side and primitive weaponry or none at all on the Palestinian resisting side.

The casualty statistics, although confirming this interpretation, are diversely measured at present, with the Gaza Ministry of Health as of July 2025 officially listing over 63,000 deaths, plus more than double that number wounded, while declaring 887 IDF personnel killed as well as 815 Israeli civilians. The respected UK medical journal, The Lancet, has published various expert analyses suggesting that the Palestinians are at least 41% underreported by these official figures, especially in relation to indirect deaths due to traumatic causes and malnourishment, including one Lancet estimate in July 2024 that at least 186,000 Palestinians have perished due to the Israeli attack. At present, the entire surviving Palestinian population is at risk due to the recent Gaza City escalation, acutely imperiling one million sheltering Palestinian civilians, and abetted by ordering dangerous evacuations amid Famine 5 acute food shortages.

The third level of Israeli-oriented brainwashing is perhaps the most disturbing of all, allowing Israel and the US to decide upon ‘day after arrangements’ with the perverse consequences of rewarding the perpetrators and accomplices of genocide, while further punishing the victim population and affirming a reductionist demonization of Hamas as ‘a terrorist entity.’ It is as if it were left to surviving Nazi leaders to preside over post-World War II arrangements, including those affecting surviving death camp inhabitants and the fate of Israel. Friedman completely adheres to the Israeli narrative when it comes to the October 7 attack as unprovoked and barbaric, also subscribing to ‘a blaming the victim’ rationale of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal.

Friedman insists that if only Hamas had returned the remaining Israeli hostages, it would have spared Palestinians the slaughter of recent months. In his words, “Hamas’s leadership could have ended all of this suffering by agreeing to quit Gaza and release all its hostages. By perpetuating this war, Hamas has also engaged in its own heinous crimes — the murder of Israeli hostages and the human sacrifice of thousands of Gazans to Hamas’s mad dreams. It’s all true — and relevant.” (For a more nuanced and accurate portrayal of Hamas, see Helena Cobban & Rami G. Khouri, Understanding Hamas and Why It Matters, OR Books, 2024). Is it really true or relevant?

There is again silence on the part of Western media when it comes to the most verified influential reports of post-October 7 detention of hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians and confinement accompanied by routine torture. Such Palestinians are hardly noticed and certainly never receive the special attention reserved by the term ‘hostages,’ a term reserved for the unfortunate Israelis detained in the course of the October 7 attack. The Israeli managed the public discourse on this issue in such a distorted manner that only Israelis are media identified as ‘hostages,’ with the unconscious effect of the dehumanization of the Palestinian ‘other’ whose captivity is not even worthy of notice.

Friedman’s explanation for why Israel is feeling the heat of global criticism, while Hamas generally escapes censure except by complicit Western governments. Friedman poses the rhetorical question, “So why is the world ganging up on Israel now?” His disguised Zionist response is revealingly tone deaf, as well as stunningly blind to the unfolding account of the cruel daily occurrences that bring tears to the eyes of persons of conscience the world over: “Because it holds Israel to a higher standard than Hamas, because Israel has always held itself to a higher standard.”

Only a self-censoring media platform would allow such slanted language to find its way into print. To forget the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland with no right of return in 1948 was winked at by the world, as were decades of defiant lawlessness in administering the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Rather than being held to a higher standard, Israel was given a no-holds-barred exemption from its legal duties to apply international humanitarian law in its treatment of Palestinians and their rights, including Israel’s lapsed commitment to implement the UNGA 1947 Partition Resolution 181(II), which underpins Israel’s own claims of sovereign rights.

There are reasons to take a serious look at Friedman’s warnings to Israel’s supporters that its current leadership “is committing suicide, homicide and fratricide.” Such an evaluation from a longtime influential journalist is in reaction to his overall conviction that Israel’s future is indeed bleak if it fails to challenge effectively Israel’s growing classification and treatment as a pariah state. If this status becomes frozen, as now seems almost certain, it will jeopardize Israel’s prospects for a normal, prosperous, viable future.

Friedman’s solution is indeed a great departure from his uncritical prior unabashed pro-Israeli writings when it comes to questioning Zionist approaches to the conflict. It is for Israel to agree immediately to a permanent ceasefire and military withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the release of the hostages.

This preliminary recommended move is to be followed by Palestinian governance of Gaza configured to please Israel as well as the complicit West by excluding Hamas and relying upon a reconstituted Palestinian Authority that is sufficiently collaborative to satisfy the Tel Aviv leadership. In my view, this is a non-solution, but a formula for a more subtle way of achieving Zionist goals and consigning the Palestinian people to new miseries. Friedman’s solution is what Palestinians who insist on their right of self-determination dismiss as ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ in the form of a demilitarized statelet, aptly alternatively described as ‘a Bantustan.’

The true path to a justice-driven peace depends on implementing the ICJ July 2024 Advisory Opinion terminating Israel’s role as Occupying Power in Gaza and the West Bank. This change of formal status should be coordinated with internationally monitored free elections in Gaza, with Hamas having the option to compete for votes with other political entities. If this process were able to go forward smoothly it might become possible to have real peace and justice negotiations between Israel and Palestine but only after Israel renounces Zionism, dismantles apartheid, agrees to respect the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and engages with leading Arab governments, the EU, Canada, and the US in reparation arrangement allowing for reconstruction of devastated Gaza, and the ravaged West Bank.

It would also be desirable to redress past Palestinian grievances to establish a Peace and Reconciliation Commission that would provide an objective account of the historical record, which has helped clear the air in other post-conflict situations of transition. A final vital step would be a nuclear-free internationally verified zone applicable throughout the Middle East, together with a cap on annual military spending.

A long and difficult agenda, but anything less will not reach the deep roots of this century-long conflict that began during the British Mandate that commenced after Palestine’s relatively peaceful existence beneath the mantle of the Ottoman Empire. After World War I and the Ottoman collapse, Britain fulfilled the colonialist Balfour Declaration that pledged support to the Zionist Movement for a Jewish homeland (but not a state) in Palestine.

Support consisted of greenlighting Jewish immigration and property purchases without bothering to obtain the consent of the Arab majority population in Palestine. This paved the way after World War II for the Zionist settler colonial project that reached its current genocidal climax during the past two years and is now poised to either further reinforce this criminal past or transcend it. If the latter happens, it will be a historic victory not only for the Palestinians but for all of humanity, and a tribute to the activism of civil society. If not, worse is sure to come.

Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

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