Writing Lesson, Comment on Tom Friedman

Don't piss people off if you don't have to

One of my writing maxims is, don’t piss people off if you don’t have to. It’s so tempting to put little comments on this or that in the introduction of a paper. But if a reader disagrees with your little nuggets, then you’ve lost him or her for the rest of the paper. Only put in assertions that are necessary to the point in the paper.

I am reminded of this lesson by an otherwise interesting essay in the New York Times by Tom Friedman. The essay asserts that history is often shaped by human decisions, and explains bad decisions made by Hamas, and bad decisions made by Israel. More on the content later.

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But in a meandering build up to the analysis, Friedman allows himself this comment: (my emphasis)

For the last few years….much of my work was decrying bad choices made by big players: Vladimir Putin’s tightening dictatorship and aggression, culminating in his brutal invasion of Ukraine; Xi Jinping’s reversal of China’s opening; Israel’s election of the most right-wing government in its history; the cascading effects of climate change; the loss of control over America’s southern border; and, maybe most ominously, an authoritarian drift, not only in European countries like Turkey, Poland and Hungary but in America’s own Republican Party as well.

Remember, we are building up to an analysis of Hamas and Israeli decisions in the last 10 years. Already, labeling the current government “most right-wing” in history doesn’t invite its supporters, perhaps ill-informed, to listen to the argument.

Friedman loses Bjorn Lomborg readers with “cascading effects of climate change.” Leave aside whether they are right or not. They think they are, this article is not going to contravene the wealth of facts they bring to the table, nor has the article anything to do with climate change. Friedman simply asserts as fact something that a good fraction of people think is not a fact, and unnecessarily. Well, they think, if he’s closed minded, tribal, uninformed, and wrong about this, he must be the same about Israel.

About half the country does not see an “authoritarian drift” in America’s Republican Party. They will point out that though it’s not obvious Trump knows much about the Constitution, there is no articulated political theory praising authoritarianism in anything he says. No Mein Kampf, no “doctrine of fascism.” Sure, he flatters dictators on occasion in the same way he flatters New York Zoning Board officials. Denying the election loss is a narcissistic tragedy, but not an “authoritarian drift.” Using the legal system to ban opponents from the ballot on the other hand… Well, let’s not go too far channeling Trump Republicans, here, you get my point. You do not have to accept that Republicans are “authoritarian” to accept Friedman’s later arguments. So why throw in the swipe, and undermine the credibility of later arguments? If he’s wrong about Republicans, Republicans will say, surely he’s wrong about Israel too.

Well, I’ll amend my motto to, don’t write things that piss people off needlessly unless you’re absolutely sure none of them are reading, or you don’t care if they tune you out. Perhaps Friedman and the Times care nothing about trying to persuade Republican readers, or perhaps the times doubts there are any left.

The shame is, at least half of it is a good essay. Friedman starts with Dubai:

…two generations of monarchs in the United Arab Emirates … had a powerful vision of how the U.A.E. in general and the emirate of Dubai in particular could choose to be Arab, modern, pluralistic, globalized and embracing of a moderate interpretation of Islam. Their formula incorporates a radical openness to the world, an emphasis on free markets and education, a ban on extremist political Islam, relatively little corruption, a strong rule of law promulgated from the top down and a relentless commitment to economic diversification, talent recruitment and development.

There are a million things one could criticize about Dubai, … But the fact that Arabs and others keep wanting to live, work, play and start businesses here indicates that the leadership has converted its intensely hot promontory on the Persian Gulf into one of the world’s most prosperous crossroads for trade, tourism, transport, innovation, shipping and golf — with a skyline of skyscrapers, one over 2,700 feet high, that would be the envy of Hong Kong or Manhattan.

Friedman’s first (finally) point, which I liked because I agree yet find it well expressed, is that Hamas and Gaza could have chosen to be Dubai. And they tragically did not do so

Compare that with Gaza, …

Among the most ignorant and vile things that have been said about this Gaza war is that Hamas had no choice — that its wars with Israel, culminating on Oct. 7 with a murderous rampage, the kidnappings of Israelis as young as 10 months and as old as 86 and the rape of Israeli women, could somehow be excused as a justifiable jailbreak by pent-up males.

No.

Let’s go to the videotape: In September 2005, Ariel Sharon completed a unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza,… In short order, Hamas began attacking the crossing points between Gaza and Israel to show that even if Israel was gone, the resistance movement wasn’t over; these crossing points were a lifeline for commerce and jobs…

In January 2006, the Palestinians held elections hoping to give the Palestinian Authority legitimacy to run Gaza and the West Bank.

News to me,

the Bush team insisted that Hamas be permitted to run without embracing Oslo, hoping that it would lose and this would be its ultimate refutation.

Well, that worked out well. To the choice:

Hamas then faced a critical choice: Now that it controlled the Palestinian parliament, it could work within the Oslo Accords and the Paris protocol that governed economic ties between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — or not.

Hamas chose not to …

These were fateful choices. Once Sharon pulled Israel out of Gaza, Palestinians were left, for the first time ever, with total control over a piece of land. Yes, it was an impoverished slice of sand and coastal seawater, with some agricultural areas. And it was not the ancestral home of most of its residents. But it was theirs to build anything they wanted.

Had Hamas embraced Oslo and chosen to build its own Dubai, not only would the world have lined up to aid and invest in it; it would have been the most powerful springboard conceivable for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, in the heart of the Palestinian ancestral homeland. Palestinians would have proved to themselves, to Israelis and to the world what they could do when they had their own territory.

But Hamas decided instead to make Gaza a springboard for destroying Israel. …

Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that. Hamas is engaged in a raw power struggle with Fatah over who will control Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s engaged in a power struggle in the region — alongside other pro-Muslim Brotherhood parties and regimes (like Turkey and Qatar) — against pro-Western monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E. and military-led regimes like Egypt’s.

In that struggle, Hamas wanted Gaza isolated and in conflict with Israel because that allowed Hamas to maintain its iron-fisted political and Islamist grip over the strip, foregoing elections and controlling all the smuggling routes in and out, which funded its tunnels and war machine and the lifestyle of its leaders and loyalists…

But it’s easy to accept well written argument that aligns with your priors. I found his analysis of Israel harder going:

Benjamin Netanyahu, …also made choices. And even before this war, he made terrible ones — for Israel and for Jews all over the world.

The list is long: Before this war, Netanyahu actively worked to keep the Palestinians divided and weak by strengthening Hamas in Gaza with billions of dollars from Qatar, while simultaneously working to discredit and delegitimize the more moderate Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, committed to Oslo and nonviolence in the West Bank. That way Netanyahu could tell every U.S. president, in effect: I’d love to make peace with the Palestinians, but they are divided, and moreover, the best of them can’t control the West Bank and the worst of them control Gaza. So what do you want from me?

Netanyahu’s goal has always been to destroy the Oslo option once and for all.

There is a difference between writing about facts and actions, and writing to assert motivations. The fact is Netanyahu allowed direct subsidies to Hamas, from Qatar, from the EU, from the US, from the UN, and was pretty asleep at the wheel about security threats. Was he just waiting it out, hoping to keep down the violence and someday they would come to their senses? Was he in fact negligently left-wing, slowly encouraging a two state solution to emerge as Gazan life got slowly better, first directly then under the Abraham Accords? The PA is “committed to Oslo and nonviolence?” That’s a stretch. What’s the evidence for these assertions about his motivations?

Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement has been to persuade Israelis and the world that it’s never the right time to talk about the morally corrosive occupation and how to help build a credible Palestinian partner to take it off Israel’s hands.

Really, the Israelis can “build up” a “Palestinian partner?” Too bad Friedman didn’t let the US on to that magic sauce in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also note Friedman is back to Israel alone must somehow work this miracle. The more likely path is that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the U.A.E., Egypt, Abraham Accord countries who are sick of Hamas and Iran will step in and gradually make life better for Palestinians.

Well, you see my priors are different here. I was reading Friedman to put my priors to the test, to hear a different view, to be persuaded. If he had not needlessly framed the essay with what I regard as silly and ignorant (in the technical sense) virtue signaling on climate change and Republicans, and an announcement of bias against Netanyahu, I might well have changed my mind more.

Don’t piss people off if you don’t have to. It’s not easy, and I find myself doing it too often.

Update:

A critic writes,

You appeal to everyone you can! Aka you have no real opinions! Thanks for nothing as always!

No, state your opinions forcefully on the topic at hand, and don’t distract the reader with irrelevant opinions. Save those for another day.

Albert, in the comments, writes

Friedman is writing to his own tribe, he's not trying to convince those outside of it. The paragraph at the beginning that you quote says in essence: "I'm one of you. I believe all the things you believe in. Now listen to what I have to say about Hamas, even if some of it you don't like."

This is an insightful comment, and at least gives a coherent reason for pissing off everyone outside the tribe (who probably stopped reading the Times years ago.) Perhaps that’s a “unless you have to” exception. But in general, it’s better to do that in context of the main argument rather than virtue signal “I’m with you on the climate calamity so listen when I tell you Hamas could have made Gaza into Dubai.”

Friedman surely pisses off a lot of people in the meat of the argument. For example,

Hamas is not simply engaged in some pure-as-the-driven-snow anticolonial struggle against Israel. Only Hamas’s useful idiots on U.S. college campuses would believe that.

But there you can and often must. Though always try reason and fact, and to buttress any piss-off statements with reason and fact. The point, don’t piss off people with extraneous comments in the beginning.

My motto came in the context of academic writing. I see a lot of introductions and literature reviews that go out of the way to trash what everyone else has done, including most of the potential editors and referees. Just get to the point. (A second, and superior, motto.)