When You’ve Lost Tom Friedman…

Mustached avenger Tom Friedman has a column today in which he unloads on Israel.  Friedman may have the most famously awful prose in all of punditry, but he’s still a useful barometer of liberal Jewish public opinion.  And man, is he fed up:

I’d never claim to speak for American Jews, but I’m certain there are many out there like me, who strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state, who understand that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood yet remains a democracy, but who are deeply worried about where Israel is going today. My guess is we’re the minority when it comes to secular American Jews. We still care. Many other Jews are just drifting away.

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.

First of all, I appreciate Friedman for saying he’d never claim to speak for American Jews, even though he surely could.  Jeffrey Goldberg claims to speak for American Jews all the time.  Second of all, did you catch that “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”?  A few years ago, John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt were eviscerated for inserting that phrase into respectable discourse.  Now, without anyone crediting them, their pithy phrase passes without notice from the most mainstream of commentators.  Philip Weiss has more on this.