All the Advice That’s Unfit to Give

The NY Times and the Sulzbergers need Israel to be accepted by them

In a fascinating but utterly dense NY Times headline last week, in an article by Thomas “Israel needs me to like them” Friedman, they proclaimed “Israel is Losing its Greatest Asset:  Acceptance”. 

It could be that Thomas Friedman can’t help himself in his desire to mold Israel to his own views whether they like it or not, or that the Sulzbergers themselves decided to reflect their own frustrations on the Jewish country -  but in what world is “acceptance” a country’s greatest asset? What do the psychologists call it?  Projection?

One needs to feel sorry for the Sulzberger family who have owned and run the NY Times for about 150 years.  During all this time they have tried their best to be accepted by their betters and to prove that they are not really Jews, but their Jewishness is inescapable.  During the 1930’s they denied Stalin’s self made famine in Ukraine and in the 1940’s all but ignored the Holocaust.  They have opposed Israel, its existence, its leaders and its policies from the start and yet they still have that big azure Star of David on their foreheads.   They so much want to be the “cool kids” and yet after one and a half centuries of power and money they still can’t manage to find acceptance – in spite of their membership in all the exclusive clubs in the world.  No matter how hard they try, Jews can never be the “cool kids”  and it seems to drive them crazy.

There has been no Jewish family in the United States that has tried so hard to escape their Jewishness.  And there has been no Jewish family in the United States that has been as unsuccessful.   They crave “acceptance” as the greatest asset a person or a country can have and yet – after all these years and after the millions upon millions of words condemning Jews and their behavior they are still known as … Jews. 

No matter how much they try, the anti-Semites on the right still consider the NY Times a Jewish newspaper and no matter how much they “expose” the horrors of Israel and Judaism, the anti-Semites on the left can’t forgive the Sulzberger’s Jewishness even when they bend over backwards in trying to show how much they condemn the Jewish country and its religion.  Just look at the interview with the Israeli hostage,   Amit Soussana, who was raped while being held by Hamas and how they made sure to ask for a comment from Hamas – as if they were asking Boeing’s PR department to comment on an article on their engineering or manufacturing scandals.

And with all that the Sulzbergers are still considered “Jews” by their betters -even if their betters work FOR them.

How can one not sympathize with one and a half centuries of failure by the same family?

But let’s discuss the heart of the headline and not the psychoanalytic interpretation of it.

Is “acceptance” really Israel’s greatest asset?  Or is it just a “nice to have”?

Every country wants to be “accepted” by others if just for economic reasons.  But to be accepted into some amorphous “community of nations” especially when most of those nations are run by cruel dictators and the official community is the likes of the United Nations – that “acceptance” is not high on the list.   I can’t think of another Western democratic country that craves acceptance by others.   Even those despised by the “community of nations” – meaning the global progressive left – they do not seem to care. 

Israel’s, and I would argue every country’s greatest asset is not its acceptance by those that hate it, but its people.  Not only have Israel’s people responded to the challenges of modernity by creating new technologies and medicines along with a vibrant cultural life, but its young people travel the world – not in five star hotels or to tourist havens but those places hardest to reach and most rugged to survive in.   After three or more years of army service, they go to India and Tibet, to the jungles of South America and even to the steppes of Mongolia.  They meet people who live in poverty, share meals with them and befriend them.  You don’t find them calling mommy and daddy every other day to make sure their credit cards have not expired or to beg points in order to travel in business class  - but you will find them on 12 hour bus rides to the hinterlands of India and China. 

These are the same youth that go on to create companies that produce advanced technologies and medicines, that are not afraid to fail in their pursuit of excellence  - and on the drop of a dime, put on their old army uniforms and drive like crazy to their bases to protect their country and their homes – no matter who they voted for and no matter what their beliefs are.   They are the wives (and sometimes husbands) of those who run off to fight who manage their homes on their own – they are  the grandmothers (and sometimes grandfathers) who help in difficult times.

With the Western country with the highest birthrate, Israel has confidence in itself and in its future even in the darkest times and even if the NY Times and Thomas Friedman and the BBC continue to reject it.  This confidence is there even though its political and military leaders, past and present, betray them time after time.  This betrayal seems to be a habit amongst western democracies, the assumption being that the people will be able to save their leaders when they fail utterly as the British and American people did in WWII, nearly a moment too late and as the Ukrainian people did two years ago.  So too, Israel’s greatest asset has pulled the chestnuts out of the fire put there by its leading political and military lights over the past 3 decades as they pretended that the common sense of the people is not worth the computer assisted analysis of the experts.

This self-confidence and success without acceptance by the Times and the BBC makes the Sulzbergers anger grow and grow.

For the Sulzbergers, “acceptance” may be the biggest asset a person or a country could have because they don’t understand the nature of self-sacrifice or of belonging to a people or a nation greater than themselves.   They see themselves as the guardian of all that is good in the US and in the world yet they have not gotten any big question right in the last 90 years or more.   Of course, for Thomas Friedman, no asset could be greater for a country than his approval.  He has lied about Israel and its actions since he covered the first Lebanon War in the summer of 1982, and he continues it to this day – pretending that he knows best and that he and the NY Times approval is Israel’s greatest asset.

Israel’s people have ignored and will continue to ignore the advice and “wisdom” of the NY Times and its writers – you saw that in past elections and you will see it in the next election.   That fact drives them crazy.