New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once penned a piece wherein he wished that the United States had an effective autocratic government like China’s. “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” Friedman wrote. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today [2009], it can also have great advantages. The one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” That, of course, was when Barack Obama was in power. Friedman never would have written that when Donald Trump was president — but then Trump, unlike Obama and the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, is not included in Friedman’s “reasonably enlightened group of people.” Neither, apparently, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In an open letter to President Joe Biden, Friedman urges the president to let the Netanyahu government know that if it moves ahead with its proposed “judicial reform” and its effort to “dismantle the Oslo peace process,” it will cause a “break” in the U.S. relationship with Israel. Just what that “break” will consist of is never defined by Friedman. But he claims that U.S. “strategic interests” are at stake if the Israeli Supreme Court’s powers are limited and Israel annexes the West Bank of the Jordan River. 

Friedman notes that during the October 1973 Middle Eastern war, President Richard Nixon saved Israel “from being destroyed from the outside.” It is now up to Biden, Friedman claims, to save Israel “from being destroyed from the inside.” Just how Biden is expected to do that remains unclear in Friedman’s letter, though he suggests that Biden’s key cabinet officials (Defense, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, CIA, Joint Chiefs) let the Israelis know that Netanyahu’s proposed policies would “undermine the shared values between our two countries” and “do serious damage to our own strategic interests in the Middle East.”

Friedman explains the U.S. strategic interests at stake in this way: Netanyahu and other “Jewish supremacists” want to limit the ability of the Israeli Supreme Court to halt their plans to annex the West Bank. Such a move, he contends, could destabilize Jordan, which serves as a “buffer state” to help the U.S. deal with threats from Syria and western Iraq, and could upset plans to wean Saudi Arabia from its recent collaboration with China. Friedman uses italics to emphasize that “vital U.S. interests” are at stake here, and he concludes that Netanyahu must be made to understand that we are “required” to defend those vital interests.   

Hopefully, Friedman’s unsolicited advice will be ignored. The domestic political arrangements of the Israeli government should be none of our concern. If Israel is a strategic asset — and it is — it does not matter whether the current Israeli government lawfully limits the powers of its Supreme Court, which even Friedman acknowledges has engaged in “judicial overreach in the past.” This type of U.S. meddling in the domestic political affairs of friendly countries has a checkered past; President Jimmy Carter lost Iran to the mullahs and Nicaragua to the communists in the 1970s by his Friedman-esque meddling.

As this article goes to press, the Knesset has passed Netanyahu’s judicial reform legislation. Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister who was duly elected by Israeli voters. He used the democratic process to pass legislation in the Knesset instead of wielding autocratic powers for which Thomas Friedman had a soft spot when used by China’s Communist leaders.

Biden should stay out of Israeli politics. And Thomas Friedman should go back to writing about China.