Israel and the Saudis, and a few other Arab states, have finally come together on an issue — they are against the deal with the Iranian mullahs that is being sought by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. They see it as appeasement. So what is the reaction from The New York Times?

It rolls out Thomas Friedman to blame American Jews. That is the gist of his latest cable, sent from the United Arab Emirates and headlined “Let’s Make A Deal.” While the Arabs have been warning the Obama administration about a Geneva pact, Friedman complains, “[d]iplomats and ministers from Israel and the Israel lobby have been working Congress.”

“Never have I seen Israel and America’s core Arab allies working more in concert to stymie a major foreign policy initiative of a sitting U.S. president,” Friedman writes, “and never have I seen more lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — more willing to take Israel’s side against their own president’s.”

And what does the three-time Pulitzer prize winner take from this? “I’m certain,” Friedman writes (that’s his word, “certain”), “this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”

Well, I’m certain there are some choice adjectives for Friedman’s tendency to blame America’s Jewish community for the failure of the Congress to do what Tom Friedman thinks best. “Loathsome” is the word that my erstwhile colleague at the New York Sun, Ira Stoll, uses in Wednesday’s edition of Smartertimes.com, his daily critique of the Gray Lady.

Friedman, as Stoll puts it, “ignores the possibility that it might also be in America’s interest to avoid some sham deal with Iran that would leave the Iranian dictators in power with the ability to continue supporting terrorism, abusing the human rights of the Iranian people, and opposing the Arab-Israeli peace process, and secretly continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.”

The last Washington, DC, pooh-bah to ignore that possibility was Sen. Charles Hagel. He blamed the Israel lobby for just about all the ills of American policy in the Middle East. President Obama promptly picked him for defense secretary, and when, at his confirmation hearing, he was grilled about this, he backed away from his libel.

Friedman reacted to Hagel’s then-pending nomination by writing that he was “certain” — that’s the word he used again — that “the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes.” He characterized that belief as including the view that “this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account.”

It’s fun to imagine how would Friedman would fare in the kind of hot seat Hagel was put in by the Senate. It was Friedman who said when the joint meeting of Congress exploded in applause for Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu: “That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

How is that kind of talk any different than Patrick Buchanan writing, as he did in 2008: “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran”? Or the kind of talk David Duke has been publishing in reaction to the Geneva talks?

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Friedman shares David Duke’s view of the Jews or of Israel. All the more bizarre is Friedman’s suggestion that Congress has been bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.

The fact is that there are a lot of highly educated people, in and out of Congress, who have studied their history. They know the lessons it teaches — that it’s not just the deal that is the danger. It is the talking itself. The very process of negotiation makes each side the partner to the other. The lesson is that the hunger for peace can itself be a ­danger.

At the time of the appeasement at Munich, the Times was as certain of one thing as Tom Friedman is of the culpability of the Israel lobby. It was that Neville Chamberlain, who cut the deal with Hitler to avoid war, would emerge as “a heroic figure, with the respect and admiration of men of good-will the world over.”