James North
Mondoweiss / August 3, 2023
The New York Times is uncritically promoting the Biden administration’s ill-fated efforts to promote Saudi-Israeli normalization while the rest of the U.S. media rightly ignore it.
President Biden continues to run away from his one-time conviction that there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia,” and that the regime that ordered the vicious murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi should be made a “pariah.” Instead, last week Biden floated a plan for an impossible peace deal among Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and Israel. The New York Times uncritically promoted the plan, in the process nearly erasing the criminal record of the Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Nearly forgotten in The Times’s excitement is one central fact: bin Salman did order the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, and his rule continues to be repressive, even as Western political leaders and businessmen (and some journalists) continue to try to rehabilitate his image.
Biden’s proposed comprehensive peace agreement was truly a jaw dropper. He, for some reason, released it in an interview with Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who — no doubt as Biden intended — started cheerleading for it immediately. Next, The Times assigned its top political reporter to do a news analysis about the plan, which took it seriously (but buried the Crown Prince’s guilt in the Khashoggi killing in the next to last paragraph). That was better than Friedman, who didn’t mention the murder at all, even though Khashoggi was, after all, his colleague as an American newspaper columnist.
What’s interesting is that the rest of the U.S. mainstream ignored the Biden/Friedman trial balloon. So far, not a word in the Washington Post, or on NPR, or CNN or MSNBC. (The Times must be embarrassed that no one else is taking their breathless scoop seriously.) The Israeli press was understandably more interested, but Haaretz got straight to the point in its first sentence: “. . . political realities make [such an agreement] impossible and unattainable under current conditions.”
Here, briefly, is the Biden/Friedman proposed deal. (This site’s excellent Mitchell Plitnick has just posted a longer dissection of the tentative proposal.) The Saudis would get a strong security alliance with the United States, more sophisticated American weapons, and a U.S.-monitored civilian nuclear program. Left unsaid in The Times accounts is that the whitewashing of bin Salman would continue. Israel would get mutual diplomatic recognition with Saudi Arabia, and — also left unsaid — Benjamin Netanyahu could dramatically distract attention from his usurpation of Israeli democracy. But in return, Israel would have to promise to stop additional “settlements” in the occupied West Bank and also end its threats to annex the territory.
By now, veteran Mideast observers are laughing out loud. Amir Tibon, in Haaretz, pointed out that “back in the realm of reality” the “far-right wing of the Netanyahu coalition” would sabotage any such agreement.
What’s even more surprising and amusing in this proposed peace plan is that 20 years ago, Thomas Friedman actually had direct involvement in its more plausible predecessor, the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. The then-Saudi Crown Prince (later King) Abdullah revealed the plan’s outline to Friedman during a dinner meeting in Riyadh. That plan “called for normalization of relations in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory (including the Golan Heights) and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israeli intransigence prevented King Abdullah’s plan from going anywhere, and Friedman inexplicably didn’t mention it in his latest column. Why Biden floated a proposal that he and his advisers must realize is almost certainly hopeless is a mystery that may await the memoirs and the diplomatic historians. For now, though, for The New York Times to pretend that a comprehensive peace could break out any time soon in Israel/Palestine is journalistic malpractice.
James North is a Mondoweiss Editor-at-Large
