https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opinion/international-world/friedman-israel-gaza-hamas.html
Thomas L. Friedman’s column strings together a series of indictments—pariahdom, wanton homicide, political cynicism, deliberate immiseration, communal rupture—and treats them as self-evident. They aren’t. Each claim, examined against the public record and the actual logic of the war, fails to bear the weight he puts on it.
Start with the “pariah state.” “Pariah” is not disapproval; it is ostracism—ruptured relations, severed ties, isolation. Yet the core architecture of Israel’s regional relations has held. The UAE openly kept diplomatic ties while business cooled, arguing normalization was a strategic choice, not a whim. Jordan has repeatedly described peace as a “strategic choice,” i.e., a policy baseline even under public fury. And Saudi Arabia, far from “lost,” has made normalization explicitly conditional—not foreclosed—on credible movement toward Palestinian statehood. That is leverage, not excommunication. None of this is rosy; all of it contradicts a verdict of pariahdom.
Friedman cites ugly incidents—Israeli tourists blocked from disembarking in Greece, a French leisure park refusing Israeli children, a public spat with Australia—as proof of global banishment. These episodes show intensified *public* hostility and bilateral friction, not the collapse of state-to-state relations. Greece’s protests produced a diversion, not a rupture; France detained the park manager for religious discrimination; and Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, whatever one thinks of it, is a policy divergence by a democracy, not the definition of “pariah.” The distinction between reputational cost and structural isolation matters.
On civilian harm, Friedman’s assertion that Israel kills “with seemingly no regard for innocent human life” ignores how Hamas engineered the battlespace. Declassified U.S. intelligence confirmed that Hamas used the al-Shifa hospital complex for command-and-control and held hostages there, an emblem of the group’s broader practice of embedding military assets under protected sites. That fact does not license anything; it does explain why the law-of-war tests of discrimination and proportionality are excruciating in Gaza. To treat the resulting tragedies as proof of murderous *intent* is moral shorthand, not moral reasoning.
Friedman points to the August strikes near Nasser Hospital as the smoking gun. The strike was devastating; journalists were among the dead; the IDF acknowledged striking the area and announced an inquiry; the prime minister called it a “tragic mishap.” All of that is in the record—and none of it proves a policy of indifference. The right inference is the hardest one: catastrophic error can occur in a war against an enemy that uses a civilian matrix as cover. That outcome demands investigation and accountability; it does not warrant the presumption of design.
He claims Israel has already “devastated Hamas as a military force” and killed “virtually all” top planners of October 7, so continuing operations must be about hunting “deputies to deputies.” That is not the picture credible reporting paints. Some senior operatives were confirmed killed—Marwan Issa, for example; others, like Mohammed Deif, remain contested even after Israeli claims of confirmation. Meanwhile, Hamas has shifted into a dispersed insurgency with guerrilla cells and tunnel logistics that keep fighting despite leadership losses. A campaign that migrates from decapitation to attrition of the connective tissue is not proof of pretext; it is how anti-insurgent wars typically progress after the first phase.
He treats evacuations and demolitions as a covert demographic project—“bulldoze the homes … make life so miserable they leave.” That leap erases the plainly stated (and contested) operational logic. Israel seized the Philadelphi Corridor to expose and interdict cross-border tunnels to Sinai; it created, then later vacated, the Netzarim corridor to bisect the Strip and split battlespaces. One can argue that these moves imposed intolerable civilian costs—and many do—without claiming they were *primarily* instruments of forced removal. That claim requires evidence of intent that Friedman does not supply.
On humanitarian aid, the facts are brutal and politicized. An international famine review committee confirmed famine in and around Gaza City—the first such designation in the Middle East—while projecting spread southward. Israel disputes those findings, publishing rebuttals and pointing to expanded entry points, daily truck counts, and coordination channels. A serious critic can and should press Israel to remove bottlenecks and widen access; a serious analyst also acknowledges that the famine designation is contested and that throughput has, at times, increased even if distribution has failed catastrophically. Intention is a separate question from effect; Friedman collapses them.
His monocausal politics—that the war continues because Netanyahu needs it to continue—ignores institutional continuity and repeated statements of war aims that long predate today’s coalition arithmetic: destroy Hamas’s military/governing capacity and bring the hostages home. Nearly two years later, about fifty hostages remain, with only about twenty believed alive. That grim arithmetic sustains the national obligation regardless of one prime minister’s fate. Reducing a structural security problem and the hostage file to one politician’s legal troubles is polemic, not analysis.
Nor does the column’s “fratricide” trope convince. Diaspora arguments are searing, and Israelis are protesting in the streets even as their children fight. But democratic societies at war often contain simultaneous protest and mobilization; Israel always has. The existence of dissent is not proof of terminal communal breakdown; it is evidence that a democracy insists on arguing while it fights. History, from Labor/Revisionist brawls to contemporary coalition resets, is replete with such duality.
Finally, on diplomacy: he insists Israel is “losing friends,” “including Saudi Arabia.” But Riyadh’s line is not “we are out”; it is “we are conditional.” Saudi officials have restated that normalization hinges on credible movement toward statehood. That is a bargaining posture publicly designed to shape “the day after,” not a severed relationship. Likewise, Washington’s position—under a president plainly sympathetic to Israel—is to work a cease-fire and hostage framework, not to rubber-stamp endless war. One can disagree with the U.S. or Saudi conditions while still acknowledging that they are leveraging ties, not abandoning them.
Friedman’s final flourish is to read strategy through psychology: Trump has been “duped” by Netanyahu into rejecting a cease-fire. The record shows something less cinematic: a rolling, contested negotiation in which Hamas signals acceptance of temporary truces, Israel insists any deal must bring home all remaining hostages, and Washington continues to work the channels. If U.S. policy were merely the product of one leader’s gullibility, we would not see this pattern of iterative proposals, public pressure, and conditional support.
A sober reading yields a different conclusion from Friedman’s. Israel is paying severe reputational and moral costs in a war shaped by an adversary that built a military under a civilian canopy; its partners are pressuring, not abandoning; its operational choices have military rationales that do not absolve humanitarian failure but also do not prove a program of expulsion; and its politics are messy without being monocausal. This is not to acquit Israel of error or to deny catastrophe. It is to reject the ease of grand metaphors—suicide, homicide, fratricide—in favor of the harder, more honest account: a grinding war of necessity against a still-functioning insurgent network, prosecuted under unprecedented scrutiny, with contested humanitarian outcomes and unresolved diplomacy. On that terrain, the right demands are exacting rules, credible investigations, and a political end-state. The wrong demand is for drama that substitutes for analysis.