Don’t Try This at Home/Beyond the Banks

These New York Times op-eds are a post in response to KC’s dual view of United States’ aid for Palestine in light of the recent conflict in Gaza. While I am much more of a Krugman follower than a Friedman one, Mr. Krugman is far too busy trying to clean up our own country’s economic woes to have time to focus on international conflicts.

The Don’t Try This at Home article lends another perspective to the Palestinian-Israeli solution; KC’s articles included the international “let’s sit down and figure out a two-state system” and the splintered “six swing states” viewpoint, but Friedman’s adds a much more American view. The article includes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s initiatives in the Middle East, which is similar to the KC’s articles, though Friedman does not see our intervention as a simple “saving the day” mission. He is much more pessimistic about the entire situation and outlines, in his layman manner, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

What I found so interesting was not the way he outlined the historical and actual conflict, but of his overgeneralization of Israel/Palestine as one giant question mark. He portrays the conflict in a way that we, as Americans, cannot understand. By using phrases like “Are you still with me?” and comparing the conflict to “how an amoeba reproduces by constantly splitting itself in half” he is almost allowing ignorance to overtake thoughtful study. I felt, in a way, he was allowing the Western world to write this conflict off, that its intricacies and struggles cannot be comprehended.

It is his final paragraph where he describes his own feelings towards the situation is the most disappointing: “Who in the world would want to try to repair this? I’d rather herd cats, or become John Thain’s image adviser, or have a colonoscopy, or become chairman of the “bad bank” that President Obama might create to hold all the toxic mortgages.” He ends with a suggestion of starting over, and maybe that is the new Western perspective, but I was wholly unimpressed by his tone regarding the conflict.

The solution article, Beyond the Banks, printed 3 days later, was also interesting in connection to KC’s articles since it offered the same answer--the US must fix this conflict. Friedman’s article ends with the sentiment that US involvement is not just key, it is the whole solution: “So it is important to have George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, steadily pushing the diplomacy from above, but nothing will happen without vastly increasing U.S. efforts from below to help West Bankers build a credible governing capacity. Do that, and everything is possible. Don’t do it, and nothing is possible.”