New York Times columnist Tom Friedman is a lefty, of course, and has written some truly stupid stuff in a long career. The one place which he does seems to get right most of the time is the Middle East.
Here he writes about Israel’s impending “get even” strike into Gaza, somehow outside the NYT paywall. Ignore his obligatory put down of Netanyahu’s struggle to rein in Israel’s lefty self-perpetuating “Supreme Court,” the rest is solid. I particularly like this bit of historical background:
In 2006, Israel essentially responded to Hezbollah: “You think you can just do crazy stuff like kidnap our people and we will treat this as a little border dispute. We may look Western, but the modern Jewish state has survived as ‘a villa in the jungle’” — which is how the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak described it — “because if push comes to shove, we are willing to play by the local rules. Have no illusions about that. You will not outcrazy us out of this neighborhood.”
