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Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=249685
Friedman Is Wrong
(Jerusalem Post) Editorial - For the past several years, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has shown that he doesn't really understand Israel or the region. His underlying assumption that appears in his columns repeatedly is that were Israel to just leave the settlements, peace would flow like a river. Well, Israel uprooted all 21 settlements from Gaza in 2005, but instead of peace, received an unending barrage of missiles in return. The settlements are a consequence of the conflict, not its cause. The PLO, if anyone has forgotten, was established in 1964, three years before the Six-Day War and any thought of a West Bank settlement. As for Friedman's failure to understand the region, readers need look no further than his breathless "Postcard from Cairo" columns at the outset of the Arab Spring last February. To have read Friedman then was to believe this was 1989 all over again, and that Hosni Mubarak would be deposed and replaced by the Egyptian version of Vaclav Havel.