THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN'S New York Times column of last February 17 reads like a bad B-movie script. Finding himself in Saudi Arabia on a press trip, Friedman explains he "took the opportunity" of a dinner with Crown Prince Abdullah to try out on the crown prince an idea he had floated in an earlier column. What if the 22-member Arab League proposed a Middle East peace plan offering Israel diplomatic relations, normalized trade, and security guarantees in exchange for a total Israeli military withdrawal from the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War? Friedman characterized this as "full withdrawal, in accord with U.N. Resolution 242, for full peace between Israel and the entire Arab world." An astonished Abdullah responded, "Have you broken into my desk?...This is exactly the idea I had in mind....I have drafted a speech along those lines. My thinking was to deliver it before the Arab summit, and try to mobilize the entire Arab world behind it. . . . I tell you if I were to pick up the phone now and ask someone to read you the speech, you will find it virtually identical to what you are talking about. I wanted to find a way to make clear to the Israeli people that the Arabs don't reject or despise them." This piece of theater was scripted to disguise the fact that the crown prince had intended all along to have Friedman make his proposal public. Abdullah wanted a PR coup in light of September 11, which had tarnished Saudi Arabia's image. He got his wish. After Friedman wrote his column, the "peace plan" took on a life of its own. It was praised by statesmen and journalists; and it got the crown prince a summit meeting with President Bush. Thomas Friedman has a knack for influencing both public debate and the words and actions of statesmen. Back in 1990, it was he who suggested to James Baker, then secretary of state, that Baker insult Israel by publicly declaring, "Everybody over there should know what the [White House] telephone is: 1-202-456-1414. When you're serious about peace, call us." Now, all these years later, his idea for inserting a NATO force between Israelis and Palestinians has picked up support inside the Beltway. Friedman is a media star. "Tom's Journal" is now an occasional feature on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." Friedman is a favorite foreign policy wonk of talk-show hosts from Charlie Rose to Don Imus. He recently won his third Pulitzer Prize, and he has received the National Book Award. His books "From Beirut to Jerusalem" and "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" are required reading on Friedman's favorite subjects, the Arab-Israeli conflict and globalization. Why is Friedman so influential? Certainly people listen to anyone who writes for the world's most prestigious newspaper. But there is more to Friedman's stardom. Reacting to the Saudi peace plan column, New York magazine's media critic Michael Wolff described Friedman as "a Hollywood character--Mr. Smith goes to Riyadh. . . . He's naturally anti-intellectual. In a sense, he's anti-Times. He's evangelical." Especially in his books, Friedman shows brilliant storytelling and reporting ability. He is a master of the quip and the cute turn of phrase. He can make arms control entertaining. His earthy language seems engaging on radio and television. But Friedman is also popular on the talk-show circuit precisely because he rarely breaks from the views of the Times or expresses an opinion outside the journalistic mainstream. Of course, being "anti-intellectual" has its hazards. It can make a columnist superficial--and wrong. So it is that events keep failing to bear out Friedman's dire predictions--about, for example, NATO expansion, U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty, and progress toward a National Missile Defense, all of which he said would ruin U.S. relations with Russia. Instead, last week's establishment of a new partnership between NATO and Russia shows U.S.-Russian relations to be in fine shape. So it is, too, that Friedman, undeterred by experience in places like China, goes on preaching globalization as a means to force authoritarian regimes to create democratic institutions. Similarly glib is Friedman's proposal to insert NATO troops into the West Bank and Gaza. He never says how many troops will be needed to stop terrorist infiltration of Israel or what exactly the troops are supposed to do. When Israelis are attacked, will the NATO soldiers emulate the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank, going house to house to arrest terror suspects? Or will they prevent Israel from retaliating? Friedman doesn't say. Nor does he consider Israel's sad history with international forces. Before 1967, a United Nations force was supposed to prevent war between Israel and Egypt. But when, on the eve of the Six Day War, Egyptian president Nasser decided to attack Israel, he simply ordered the U.N. force to leave. It obeyed, and Egypt's attack proceeded unobstructed. Israelis are understandably reluctant to entrust their security to a foreign force. Friedman is often critical of Arab leaders and Arab societies, but Israel is his main villain in the Middle East. For the most part, he draws little distinction between the region's only democracy and its authoritarian or totalitarian adversaries--except when arguing that Israel cannot stay Jewish and democratic while holding on to the West Bank and Gaza. And Friedman is clear: The chief obstacles to peace are Israel's refusal to withdraw from the territories and its unwillingness to dismantle Jewish settlements there. His wrath has thus been directed at successive Likud leaders, Menachem Begin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon. In his April 24 column, Friedman wrote, "Mr. Sharon is so paralyzed by his obsession of eliminating Mr. Arafat, by his commitment to colonial settlements and by his fear that any Israeli concession now would be interpreted as victory for the other side, that he can't produce what most Israelis want: a practical non-ideological solution that says, 'Let's pull back to this line, abandon these settlements, and engage the Palestinians with this proposal, because that is what will preserve Jewish democracy, and forget the other stuff.'" Of course, Friedman is not alone in making the "occupation" the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he is no less wrong for having company. Arab terrorism began long before Israel occupied the territories, and even long before Israel became a state. And it continued after Israel turned over the West Bank and Gaza to Yasser Arafat in compliance with the Oslo Accords. When Palestinians rioted in Jerusalem in 1997, Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Weekly Standard, "Those Palestinians throwing stones and hurling firebombs are not living under occupation. The single most misunderstood fact about the Middle East today is that, of the 2,300,000 Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, 2,250,000 live under the rule of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Of the Palestinians who were formerly under Israeli rule, 98 percent now live under Palestinian rule." For all practical purposes, the Palestinian Authority until recently had most of the attributes of statehood. A Palestinian police force maintained order. The Palestinians ran, and still run, their own schools, media outlets, and social institutions. The worldwide outcry against the recent incursion is proof that the international community admits Palestinian de facto sovereignty. Israel's promise to withdraw shows that it too effectively recognizes this. By pretending that the Israeli occupation continued under Oslo, journalists like Friedman helped create the misunderstanding Krauthammer decried. The pundits have told us for decades that Palestinian sovereignty is the key to resolving the conflict. However, Palestinian violence targeting Israeli civilians increased markedly after Oslo. Suicide bombings, for instance, are a new phenomenon. How many Israelis would have joined Friedman in supporting Oslo in 1993 if he had told them that it would increase Palestinian violence? How could anyone who knows how wrong Friedman was about Oslo ever trust his prognostications again? It is true that, in some of his columns, Friedman comes close to conceding that the Palestinians and the larger Arab world are mostly responsible for the ongoing troubles. In early March, for instance, he admitted being puzzled by the intensity of Muslim rage against Israel. When large numbers of Muslims die at the hands of Saddam Hussein or in sectarian violence in India, the reaction in the Muslim media is muted. "Yet when Israel kills a dozen Muslims, in a war in which Muslims are also killing Jews," Friedman noted, "it inflames the entire Muslim world." He saw the paradox as rooted in the "contrast between Islam's self-perception as the most ideal expression of the world's three great monotheistic religions . . . and the conditions of poverty, repression, and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live today." An American diplomat told Friedman that Israel--not Iraq or India--reminds Muslims of their own powerlessness. "How could a tiny Jewish state amass such military and economic power, if the Islamic way of life--not Christianity or Judaism--is God's most ideal religious path?" Lately, Friedman seems to have become more sympathetic to Israel's security concerns. Since the suicide bombings began, he has been tougher on Arafat than many other pundits. He holds Arafat responsible for much of the violence of the last 18 months. He chastises Arafat for failing to prepare the Palestinians for a "historic compromise with Israel" and having no plans for running a Palestinian state. In recent weeks, Friedman was supportive of Israel's military actions in the West Bank, and he was silent on the most controversial aspects of the operation such as Jenin and the standoff at the Church of the Nativity. But Friedman still refrains from asking whether the 1967 borders the Saudi peace plan demands are in fact defensible. Friedman similarly ignores the potential strategic significance of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. He never acknowledges that, wherever its permanent borders are set, Israel might need to maintain a defensive line along the Jordan River to prevent another Arab army from joining with the Palestinians to attack Israel. True to form, after a telethon in Crown Prince Abdullah's kingdom openly raised money for suicide bombers, Friedman neglected to ask whether a country that shows such enmity toward Jews and Israel is really interested in peace with the Jewish state. Friedman told Charlie Rose that his purpose in serving as Abdullah's mouthpiece was "maybe bringing a glimmer of hope to this Arab-Israeli thing." Bringing hope is what ministers and preachers do. For analysts, it often encourages wishful thinking and ignoring of inconvenient facts. And that's what is found all too often in Tom Friedman's prize spot on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Martin Krossel is a freelance writer living in New York.