That Thomas Loren Friedman There is no doubt that he is an expert on the Middle East and there are three Pulitzer Prizes that he won in 1983 and 1988, respectively for his reports on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the first Palestinian intifada and then in 2002 as a commentator. In Italy, just to complete the trophy cabinet, he was awarded the Urbino Press Award 2009. He writes about foreign policy for the The New York Timesfor which he was also the Middle East correspondent for years, and is one of the best-known American commentators.
Always committed to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and one of the most assiduous supporters of the modernization of the Arab world, in an article published in Gray Lady (the nickname by which the New York newspaper is known) made an analysis according to which the president’s administration Biden is encouraging a new doctrine to immediately advance the creation of a Palestinian state demilitarized.
According to this new idea, which is being implemented a few months before the US presidential elections and which therefore requires an unlikely victory for the President himself in office, the United States would give some form of recognition to a Palestinian state demilitarized in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A state that would see its establishment only after the Palestinians had developed a set of defined and credible security institutions and capabilities to ensure peaceful coexistence with Israel. This new “Biden Doctrine” also sees a strengthening of Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabiauntil arriving at a normalization between Riyadh and Jerusalem on the model of the “Abraham Pacts” and the maintenance of that sort of anti-Iran alliance that was never signed but already exists in fact.
A robust Palestinian police was envisaged which would keep control of public order and which would collaborate closely with the Israeli authorities, but not an army, not a navy and not an air force. I’m not saying this, the agreements signed by the Palestinians also say it, just read them in the official translations. At this point: if there was already talk of a demilitarized Palestinian state in 1993, and there were agreements to this effect, what is the novelty of the “New Biden Doctrine”? Why is the exhumation of an idea in a very advanced state of decay passed off as a sensational novelty that no one had ever thought of before? And above all, why does anyone still persist in believing that turning the clock back to 1993 can change the future after 2024? If there are answers, I’m honest, I can’t see them.
The idea of a demilitarized Palestinian state it didn’t work with Arafat at the moment in which the old terrorist had pretended to transform himself into a statesman and held the adoring people under a steel heel with a velvet sock, and was finally wrecked with the second intifada. How could it work now that Hamas and its followers, both in the Strip and, above all, abroad, repeat like a discordant record that Palestine must be from the river to the sea with the Israelis, they say Jews because they are not hypocrites and have not fear of appearing anti-Semitic, thrown into the sea?
Now, without taking anything away from Thomas Loren Friedman, how can we pass this cemetery, or rather this archaeological site of wrong and unworkable ideas, as if they were the last frontier? We all know that the New York Times it is a rib, indeed, the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we also understand that in view of the electoral-presidential disaster, Trump’s breath on my neck is felt more and more strongly, is approaching with great strides. But if an electoral hustler was necessary, one can never deny a fiddle to the President, why do it with the Middle Eastern backdrop knowing full well that it is a labyrinth with no exit?
But most of all: instead of going shopping in the cemetery, wasn’t the supermarket with news coming from other corners of the world better? For example, a new doctrine on how to solve the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico to the USA would have been a good starting point.