The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been fantasizing since the early 1980s about a catastrophic rupture in the U.S.-Israel relationship. His breathless warnings notwithstanding, it didn’t happen over the war in Lebanon. It didn’t happen over non-gender-segregated prayer at the Western Wall. It hasn’t happened, at least so far, over Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform, though that is the latest issue upon which Friedman’s everlasting hopes for a crisis rest.

A strong U.S.-Israel relationship will, I predict, outlast Tom Friedman, to the point where eventually people will look back on the Friedman columns like historical curiosities, trying to understand how it was even possible for someone to be so wrong, so many times.

Friedman’s latest, headlined “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun,” features a couple of new twists beyond the usual hyperventilating.

He tries to make it look like Israel is super-expensive to American taxpayers.

“According to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report, Israel has received the most U.S. foreign assistance of any country in the world since World War II, at $146 billion, not adjusted for inflation. That’s quite an allowance,” Friedman writes.

What Friedman leaves out is that the U.S. has provided more than $39 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. Friedman leaves out America’s military costs to fight the war to defend South Vietnam, the war to defend South Korea, the war to defend Afghanistan, and the costs of defending Western Europe and Japan during the Cold War. Helping Israel to defend itself is a bargain at the price, especially because much of the money is spent on purchasing weapons from American defense contractors. It’s misleading to depict Israel as somehow an outlier in terms of being expensive to protect; what’s unusual is that Israel, unlike many other American allies, bears a large share of its defense burden through widespread military service and with a robust defense budget.

So what else is new this time around with Friedman’s unfulfilled fantasy of a U.S.-Israel rupture? For once, he has a policy recommendation that might actually make some sense.

Friedman writes, “If Netanyahu’s government is going to behave as if the West Bank is Israel, then the U.S. will have to insist on two things. First, that the visa waiver agreement Israel wants from the U.S. — which would allow Israeli citizens entry into the U.S. without a visa, including the more than 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank — should apply to all 2.9 million Palestinians of the West Bank as well. Why not?”

Good question. Friedman assumes that this would be opposed by Israel. But if the Palestinian Authority wants a visa waiver for West Bank residents, why would Israel stand in their way? The more Palestinian Arabs in Detroit and Dearborn, the fewer of them in Jenin, Jericho, and the Jordan Valley. Let them come to America, as Seth Lipsky once argued for the Wall Street Journal. So long as the Palestinians aren’t inaccurately mislabeled as Israelis, why not? So long as they don’t pose a security threat to Americans—and most of them wouldn’t—welcome them here in the United States. There is plenty of room, especially in Northern and Midwestern cities. Many American businesses are facing a shortage of labor. Even the perennial wrong Friedman occasionally stumbles onto a not-totally-bad idea.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.