The leading commentators in American media continue to focus on Israel and criticize the push for judicial reform, just moments before the planned Knesset votes on the final readings of legislation to cancel the reasonableness clause. One of the prominent figures among them, Thomas Friedman from The New York Times, addressed his Sunday column to US President Joe Biden, and wrote that he is "the only one who can save Israel."
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Following his previous columns that discussed the "reassessment" of U.S.-Israel relations and the explicit message from Biden to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the legislation, Friedman stood behind his firm stance on Sunday as well.
In his column titled "Only Biden Can Save Israel Now," Friedman compared the current situation in Israel to the days of the Yom Kippur War. "In October 1973, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise pincer attack on Israel. As the Israeli army fell low on ammunition, your predecessor Richard Nixon ordered a massive airlift of weaponry that helped to save the only Jewish democracy from being destroyed from the outside.
"Fifty years later, Mr. President, this Jewish democracy urgently needs another airlift to save it from being destroyed from the inside. It needs an urgent resupply of hard truths – something only you can provide," he wrote.
Friedman is well aware of the Israeli media's focus on his recent columns, and he wrote that they have dominated the news for several days because they were received as an "electric shock to the Israeli political system."
"It was such a shock because a vast majority of Israelis believe – rightly – that you are a true friend and that your advice came from the heart. But I’m afraid this Israeli government needs another dose of your tough love – not just from your heart but from the heart of U.S. strategic interests as well," according to Friedman.
The columnist suggests to Biden that "what is needed is that your secretary of state, your secretary of defense, your treasury secretary, your commerce secretary, your secretary of agriculture, your U.S. trade representative, your attorney general, your C.I.A. director and your Joint Chiefs call their Israeli counterparts today and let them know that if Netanyahu moves ahead – without a consensus, fracturing Israeli society and its military – it will not only undermine the shared values between our two countries but also do serious damage to our own strategic interests in the Middle East."
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Thomas Friedman is well aware of the Israeli media's focus on his recent columns
(Photo: Michael Kramer)
Friedman is not alone in his views. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and a Jewish Pulitzer Prize winner, published an article over the weekend titled "Is This the End of Bibi?" In this article, he quotes Israeli journalists who say that Netanyahu's days in power are over and call for him to be replaced by Benny Gantz.
"Such a shift, the replacement of the leading zealots in the coalition government with a retired general and a relative centrist, will hardly represent a revolution in Israel, but even that measure of sanity and reconciliation may be beyond the impoverished political imagination of Benjamin Netanyahu," Remnick wrote.
Remnick's criticism of Netanyahu is nothing new. Nearly a decade ago, he dedicated one of his columns to the prime minister with a message that he repeated this weekend in writing that "the prime minister is endangering the stability of his own country and his future relations with the United States."
In his previous column on Netanyahu, Remnick accused the prime minister of taking unreasonable risks and interfering in the internal workings of the American electoral system to the detriment of then-US President Barack Obama.
Also on Saturday, an op-ed titled "With Israel, Its Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable" also was published in The New York Times, calling on the American government to reconsider military aid to Israel. The op-ed, written by one of the newspaper's senior and respected columnists, Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, suggested reevaluating the massive aid package that the United States provides to Israel – not to stop the judicial overhaul, but because, according to him, this aid package is no longer necessary.