Thomas Friedman says that the present Israeli Government is "Worse than the Klan"

 

by Rabbi Yair Hoffman

  Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times Op-Ed, has informed his readers that “self-destruction is on the ballot” in Israel and in America. It is a bold claim from a man whose track record includes the Iraq war he championed, the Chinese authoritarianism he admired, and the flat world that turned out to have quite a few hills. The column is as far from journalism as mankind is from the amoeba and completely collapses when checked against the record. Claim by claim, there is nothing left standing.

“The future of democracy” is on the ballot in Israel

Here is Friedman’s “democracy on the brink.” The outgoing 25th Knesset became the first Israeli legislature since 1988 to complete its full four-year term without early dissolution. The election is being held on schedule, on October 27. The motion to dissolve parliament passed 62-0, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voting in favor. That’s 62 to 0.  And the incumbent is trailing: Channel 12’s August 25 poll shows Yashar leader Gadi Eisenkot beating Netanyahu 44 percent to 34 on the question of who is fitter to be prime minister.

And now let’s look at what Friedman is asking readers to believe. A regime that is “strangling democracy” schedules an on-time election, watches the polls turn against it, and then votes unanimously to hold the election anyway. That is not how autocracies behave. It is how democracies behave. Friedman has mistaken the thing itself for its absolute opposite.

The coalition partners are “worse than the Ku Klux Klan”

Whatever one thinks of Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich, they hold office because Israeli citizens voted for them in a free election, and they will leave office the same way. The Klan lynched thousands of Americans outside any legal process. To place an elected parliamentary faction beneath a terrorist organization is not a moral judgment; it is a sever moral collapse. It insults the Klan’s actual victims, and it reveals far more about the speaker’s contempt for Israeli voters than about the men they chose. Friedman printed it anyway. He should be ashamed.

The coalition will “complete” the destruction of the Supreme Court

The record says precisely the reverse. In July 2023 the Knesset amended Basic Law: The Judiciary to bar courts from applying the “reasonableness” standard to government decisions. On January 1, 2024, the Supreme Court struck that amendment down, 8–7. The government complied.

A court that voids a Basic Law and is obeyed without a murmur is not a court under siege. It is the most powerful judicial body in the democratic world. Israel has no written constitution, its justices hold what amounts to a veto over their own successors, and the “reasonableness” doctrine the coalition sought to trim exists nowhere else in comparable form. Canada’s Charter contains a legislative override clause; no one at the New York Times has ever described Canada as a dying democracy. The difference is not the policy. The difference is who is proposing it.

Annexation and “ethnic cleansing” come next

This is a disgusting prediction wearing the costume of a fact. No Israeli government has adopted a policy of expelling Palestinians, and Friedman offers not a shred of evidence that one will. Stranger still is his chosen redeemer. Eisenkot, we are told, has “much in common with Yitzhak Rabin.” Yet Eisenkot supports continued settlement in the West Bank, rejects a Palestinian state outright, and favors retaining and protecting the major settlement blocs. If that is Rabin, then the gulf Friedman describes between the two camps is a matter of tone and temperament, not the distance between democracy and its grave. Friedman cannot have it both ways: either Eisenkot is a moderate and the stakes are ordinary, or the stakes are existential and his savior is no savior at all.

Israel is becoming apartheid South Africa, and its best and brightest are fleeing

The centerpiece of the column is a study of 1,370 departing doctors. But let’s take a look at the fine print Friedman skipped. The researchers themselves cautioned that a year abroad does not mean a physician has emigrated; many leave for fellowships, training, or research and return. After accounting for those who came back, Israel’s net loss was 509 doctors across 2023 and 2024, out of a physician workforce in the tens of thousands.

The lead author heads the Economists for Democracy forum, a group that has already published a series of reports documenting emigration since 2023. That is advocacy research, and Friedman cites it as though it were a census. Meanwhile, in the direction he neglected to look, 541 physicians immigrated to Israel in 2025 through the International Medical Aliyah program alone.

The larger “pariah state” thesis fares worse. In 2025 the United States sent 4,150 olim, up 12 percent from the year before, and France saw an estimated 45 percent jump to roughly 3,300 arrivals. Apartheid South Africa did not draw immigrants from Paris and Manhattan.

As for the economy: Israel recorded its two largest foreign investment deals ever last year, Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion purchase of CyberArk, and Moody’s held Israel’s sovereign rating at Baa1 with a stable outlook, citing high income levels and a robust technology sector.

Pariahs do not attract $57 billion in American capital in a single year. Countries the world has written off do not have Silicon Valley lining up to buy their companies.

Ya’alon’s warning has reached “a remarkable new level”

The “Mein Kampf in reverse” line is presented as breaking news. It is a rerun. Ya’alon was using it as early as April 2023, and he has been a political opponent of Netanyahu since leaving the government in 2016. A three-year-old stale soundbite from a longtime rival is not a warning that has “reached a new level.” It is a campaign talking point that has reached Friedman’s inbox. And a columnist who is, to his credit, vigilant against Holocaust trivialization here amplifies without a flicker of hesitation a comparison between Jewish villagers in Judea and the architects of Auschwitz. That comparison should have been beneath him. It was not. He should once again be ashamed.

Chareidi schools teach “no lessons for modern life or work skills”

Here Friedman does not merely misjudge; he gets the numbers wrong. He puts Chareidi fertility at “about seven.” The Israel Democracy Institute’s own 2025 yearbook puts it at 6.5, largely unchanged over a decade. He describes a community deliberately stripped of the capacity to work, yet employment among Chareidi women stands at 81 percent, the number of Chareidi students in state-recognized engineering and technology programs reached 9,600 in 2024, triple the 2014 figure, and 75 percent of Chareidim own their own apartment, a higher rate than among non-Chareidi Jews. Despite being far poorer, Chareidi Israelis are markedly more likely to give to charity and to volunteer than their fellow Jewish citizens.

The assertion that a population which reads Aramaic legal texts by age twelve receives “no basic education” is not a demographic finding. It is a diabolical antisemitic self-hating sneer, and it is the kind of sneer that would end a career at the Times if aimed at any other minority. And the charge that Netanyahu traded away Israel’s security to the Chareidim ignores an inconvenient fact: this same coalition, in its final week, passed a law extending mandatory military service from 30 to 32 months.

Trump “coddles” Putin

This is the most inverted claim in the column, and Friedman’s own paragraph demolishes it. He concedes that Putin is openly supplying Iran in its war with the United States. Indeed he is: Putin has publicly acknowledged for the first time that Moscow is providing Tehran with equipment and assistance, and Russia has backed Iran with intelligence, including on American assets in the Persian Gulf, and with drone components.

Follow the logic. The United States under Trump is at war with Russia’s principal Middle East ally, the regime that armed Hamas and Hezbollah and swore to erase the Jewish state.

The president who destroyed Iran’s enrichment facilities at Fordow in June 2025 and is now fighting Tehran in the Gulf is, on Friedman’s telling, Putin’s friend. Even Kyiv sees it differently: 200 Ukrainian specialists were deployed to help coordinate air defenses in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, reportedly working alongside American personnel to protect US bases. Ukraine is fighting shoulder to shoulder with Trump against Putin’s ally. Friedman is not. He is writing fanciful columns.

The crypto earnings prove Trump does not value democracy

The figure is real. Here is where it came from: a financial disclosure filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, running to 927 pages. President Obama’s final disclosure ran eight. Friedman’s proof that transparency is dead is a 927-page public disclosure filed under the very ethics regime he says has been dismantled. One may object to a president’s business dealings, and many do. One cannot cite a legally mandated disclosure, dutifully filed and publicly available, as evidence that the law no longer functions. That is not an argument. It is a contradiction with a byline.

The institutions are “not intact”

The evidence is a private remark from an unnamed former president and a list of agencies Friedman dislikes. Courts continue to rule against the administration, and the administration continues to obey. Congress sits. The midterms are being held on schedule. The claim that the president is “declining mentally and physically” is a diagnosis delivered by a columnist with no medical training about a man he has never examined, and it would be laughed out of any newsroom, including his own, if aimed at a president Friedman preferred.

Self-destruction on the ballot

What is actually on the ballot in both countries is the ordinary business of self-government: voters choosing among candidates. Friedman’s closing move is to announce that if his side loses, democracy itself has lost. That is the one authentically anti-democratic idea in the entire column. It is the argument of a man who has stopped trusting the voters and started grading them.

Democracies survive elections their pundits lose. They do not survive the belief that only one outcome counts. Thomas Friedman has spent decades fancifully  explaining the world to the world. It may be time for the world to explain something real back to him.