The latest American official to admit he was wrong in the comment he made about a recent flare-up of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorism and the IDF’s response to it is Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides, who has just returned to Washington from his Jerusalem posting, no doubt to return to civilian life as a well-paid member of some think tank, or as a university professor, where he will resume his scolding of Jerusalem. More on Nides can be found here: “Ex-State Department Officials Admit They Were Wrong,” by Stephen M. Flatow, JNS.org, August 1, 2023:
On his way out the door, the retiring U.S. ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, has belatedly acknowledged that he “screwed up” in one of his last major actions.
He’s just the latest in a growing line of U.S. diplomats who have admitted—when it was too late—that they made significant errors in their treatment of Israel. So why does anybody still listen to them when they offer advice on the Arab-Israeli conflict?
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Nides was asked about his outrageous tweet commenting on the June 20 massacre of four Israelis by Palestinian-Arab terrorists. The four victims were defenseless civilians in a restaurant; their “crime” was eating lunch while Jewish.
Here is Nides’ tweet: “Deeply concerned about the civilian deaths and injuries that have occurred in the West Bank these past 48 hours, including that of minors,” Nides tweeted several hours after the deadly attack in which two Palestinian terrorists murdered four Israelis.
“Praying for the families as they mourn the loss of loved ones, or tend to those injured.”
The tweet was outrageous on multiple levels. Nides equated the Arab slaughter of innocent civilians with Israel’s anti-terrorist operation in Jenin that week; he failed to acknowledge that the victims of the massacre were Jews or that the killers were Arabs; and he lumped Israeli victims and dead Jenin terrorists together, saying that both deserved prayers and mourning.
Since all four of the Israeli victims of the terror attack at the restaurant were known to be adults, Nides must have been referring, when he mentioned “minors,” to those the IDF had unavoidably wounded in the Jenin attack. He did not differentiate between an attack on four innocent Israeli civilians and the IDF attacks in Jenin on terrorists that resulted in 12 killed, all of them members of the terrorist groups PIJ and Hamas. And why did he say he was “praying for the families” of both sides instead of insisting, in morally correct fashion, that he was “praying for the families of those killed in the latest terrorist attack by PIJ”?
Nine days later, when it was too late to make a difference, Nides acknowledged to Israel Hayom: “I screwed up … it was a stupid thing to do.” Unfortunately, he then trotted out assorted excuses: “I had just returned from Los Angeles when I got word of the attack. I was shown a draft of a tweet, and I signed off on it.” Translation: “I was tired, somebody else wrote it, so it wasn’t totally my fault.” Not a very impressive apology.
His quasi-apology, in which he attempted to suggest that his tweet had been written by someone else, and having just come back from a long flight, too tired to focus, he had signed off on it, will not do. And it was only after nine days of protests by Israelis about his tweet that he was ready to admit that he had “screwed up” — a choice of words that minimizes the gravity of his error. Nides, who for much of his adult life has been an investment banker, with stints at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, may know all about what the Fed is doing about interest rates, and why the Hang Seng Index is feeling poorly, and no doubt he’s a dab hand at discussing volatility and risk in the bond market, but his job as American Ambassador to Israel required not any of that, but a very different kind of knowledge. Nides needed to know the history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel over the last 3500 years, and how the Jews in their land fared under many different conquerors, and how, in exile, they continued to long for “Zion and Jerusalem.” He needed to understand the Treaty of San Remo, the Mandate for Palestine (with special attention to Article 6), Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and UN Security Council Resolution 242, as glossed by its chief author, British ambassador to the U.N. Lord Caradon. He knew none of these things, but he knew well how to speak when he should have refrained. Perhaps in his Hamptons or Jackson Hole or Chilmark retirement, he will learn – it’s never too late — the fine art of shutting up.
DavidW says
He’s lying. Any rational, thinking person would have known what the truth is/was.
Bexarkat says
…or a well-paid (or paid for) consultant to C.A.I.R.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Somehow, we have ambassadors who’re adept at screwing up our relationships even w/ friendly countries – Nides w/ Israel, Garcetti w/ India and Emmanuel w/ Japan. These are the people who used to accuse Trump (& even Bush) of getting us isolated in the world