“Netanyahu Plays Trump and American Jews for Fools—Again” is the headline over Thomas Friedman’s latest column in the New York Times. I read the “again” part as an admission by Friedman that he’s been writing the same column for decades. It’s been consistently wrong, so the real “fools” are any remaining readers who take what he says seriously.
A decade or so ago, when Friedman was less washed-up than he is now, someone built a computer program that would auto-generate a Tom Friedman column. This latest one reads like Friedman had his news assistant train an artificial intelligence model on a bunch of old Tom Friedman columns, then fed in the latest Times front-page headlines and Harvard-PLO-Al Jazeera-Rockefeller Brothers press releases to generate a new column so that Friedman could spend his time golfing or giving honorarium-generating speeches.
Friedman begins the column by saying, “I cannot put it any more succinctly than Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, did.” That could have been a good signal to Friedman’s editors to spike the Friedman column and ask for a piece from Olmert instead. Or to tell Friedman, “Hey, you already quoted Olmert in a Nov. 13, 2024, column, in a May 27, 2025, column, and mentioned him, describing him as one of ‘two friends of mine,’ in a Sept. 24, 2025, column. Maybe give Olmert a rest?” The May 27, 2025, Friedman column includes a correction: “A correction was made on June 12, 2025: An earlier version of this article misquoted an opinion essay by Ehud Olmert in Haaretz. It reads, ‘What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,’ not ‘What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of extermination.'”
In not a single one of the columns reliant on Olmert does Friedman mention that his source spent 16 months in prison after being convicted in a bribery and corruption scandal in which he pocketed cash to promote a Jerusalem construction project. Olmert’s cash-strapped brother got in on the bonanza too. Tom Friedman is serving as a one-man prisoner-reentry rehabilitation program for Ehud Olmert, and the Times is all-in, or at least reluctant to exercise any editorial control over Friedman that would involve asking him to disclose to readers that Friedman’s “friend” is a discredited figure in Israel.
The column proceeds to another hoary Friedman move, the comparison of Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. He warns that Israel’s government will “make today’s Israel permanently indistinguishable from apartheid South Africa,” writing of “an apartheidlike Israel” and asserting, “Israel is becoming an apartheid state.”
This is an echo of the old Soviet “Zionism is racism” lie. Though the Soviet Union was defeated, the storyline remains readily available from Friedman’s Times opinion stablemate and competitor for “New York Times most favorite Jew” title, Peter Beinart, whose parents were from South Africa. Friedman’s apartheid obsession is less easily psychologically explicable, but as has been noted elsewhere, it’s no less repetitive, dating back to at least 2002: “If you think it is hard to defend Israel on campus today, imagine doing it in 2010, when the colonial settlers have so locked Israel into the territories it can rule them only by apartheid-like policies.” Friedman also mentioned apartheid in Israel-related columns in 2011, 2012 (“Israel could be doomed to become a kind of apartheid South Africa”), and 2014 (“Israel by default could become some kind of apartheid-like state in permanent control over the 2.5 million Palestinians”).
No amount of repetition by Friedman will make the apartheid smear any closer to being true. For readers who want that validated by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times columnist who used to live in Israel, take it from Bret Stephens, who called the apartheid term “a cheap slur from people whose grasp of the sinister mechanics of apartheid is as thin as their understanding of the complexities of Israeli politics.” Stephens has also written that “the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter.”
If trying to shoehorn Israel by analogy into South Africa won’t work, there’s always Friedman’s fallback, which is a metaphor from Indian and Sri Lankan culture: the pariah. Sure enough, the columnist trots that tired old trope out again in this column, too: “Jewish parents around the globe will soon be in a position they never dreamed of: watching their children and grandchildren learn what it’s like to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.”
Friedman uses the “pariah state” phrase almost as frequently as he warns of apartheid. “Jews worldwide better prepare themselves, their children and their grandchildren for a reality they’ve never known: to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state—a source of shame, not of pride,” Friedman wrote in a June 10, 2025, Times column. A May 9, 2025, Friedman column said, “Your Jewish grandchildren will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.” “Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Making It a Pariah State” was the headline over an Aug. 25, 2025, Friedman column. Since the Gaza campaign is over (at least for now) and Friedman is still perfervidly perseverating with the “pariah state” pablum, it might be an indication that the whole thing is about Friedman rather than about Israel or its policies.
The reality is that though Israel has suffered some modest public relations damage—more from China- and Russia-backed social media smear campaigns than from Friedman’s fantasizing—the country is not a pariah state. The capital markets and high-tech firms understand this, if Friedman does not. In December 2025, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced: “Israel is home to some of the world’s most brilliant technologists and has become NVIDIA’s second home.” Apple just bought an Israeli AI startup, Q.ai, reportedly for nearly $2 billion. An Israeli drone startup is going public at a $1.5 billion valuation. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, “Our stock market is at an all time high. The shekel versus the dollar is almost at a 30 year high.” (The Iranian rial, meanwhile…)
Netanyahu just returned from his seventh in-person meeting with President Trump, more than Trump has had with any other foreign leader. The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, is scheduled to visit Israel from February 25 to 26. The president of the Serb Republic visited Jerusalem on January 28. The prime minister of Albania visited January 26. The president-elect of Honduras visited on January 18. The German interior minister visited January 11 and signed a cybersecurity pact with Israel. Israel welcomed 1.3 million foreign tourists in 2025, even though its skies were closed during much of the 12-day war with Iran in June.
On what evidence does Friedman rest his dire warnings? He writes, “A poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, conducted by YouGov in November, found that 51 percent of Republican voters under age 45 said they preferred to support a candidate in the 2028 presidential primary who favored reducing taxpayer-funded weapon transfers to Israel. Only 27 percent favored a candidate who would increase or maintain weapon supplies.” This is a crummy poll, because it asked only about Israel, not about Ukraine or Taiwan, and thus doesn’t indicate anything about Israel in particular. In fact, when Americans oppose arms for Ukraine, the Friedman types blame the Americans for being isolationist rather than blaming Ukraine or its leaders. It’s an anti-Israel double standard.
The other thing Friedman keeps carefully concealed from his readers—as hidden a secret as Olmert’s criminal record—is that the “Middle East Understanding Policy Project” is part of the noxious anti-Israel philanthropic-industrial complex. It’s an affiliate of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has gotten half a million dollars from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and $405,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, on whose board sits J Street president (and organizational Soros fund recipient) Jeremy Ben-Ami. The Institute for Middle East Understanding’s most recent tax filing lists as the group’s $138,140 a year “communications director” Diana Buttu, a Harvard division of continuing education faculty member and former PLO legal adviser who recently was scheduled to appear with a Hamas official at an event sponsored by Qatar’s Al Jazeera.
At this point the Friedman columns are a contrary indicator—each time the Times publishes one, another foreign leader or CEO visits Israel to invest or make a deal, and the Israeli stock market and the shekel soar more. It’s enough to make one conclude that the product the Times readers are purchasing with the apartheid-pariah-state narrative isn’t a reliable prediction of the future or an accurate picture of the current reality. It’s something else—a psychological outlet, validation for their own Bibi Derangement Syndrome (“BDS”) or more deeply rooted hatred of Israel or its people (of the sort that shows up in the Times reader comments on Friedman’s column, many of which observe that Netanyahu and his government were elected by Israeli voters). Demonizing Israel and its people requires neither originality nor accuracy. It’s a function that can be performed even by a fool.
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