Love of the Land: Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Eamonn McDonagh
Z-Word Blog
13 February '10

As readers of this blog know, Roger Cohen is not a wise man. His latest column in the New York Times gives further evidence of this.

Domestic U.S. politics constrain innovative thought - even open debate - on the process without end that is the peace search.

Open debate constrained, eh? Come on Roger, don’t be a tease. You mean the evil and oh so long tentacles of the Israel lobby are reaching into campuses, news rooms and the very halls of Congress to prevent people saying what they really think, and you know, you’re really sure, that what they’d say if the evil Zionist manipulators would only let them, bears a striking resemblance to what you think yourself.

Centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust created a moral imperative for a Jewish homeland, Israel, and demand of America that it safeguard that nation in the breach.

And if Jews had never been persecuted and never been victims of genocide I guess that would mean that they would have no right to self determination? Let’s try thinking about this another way. During the 19th century the idea began to gain traction among Jews in Europe that they were as entitled to their own nation state as anyone else. The same idea started to gain presence among many other peoples without states at the same time. Eventually the Jews got their state. Not all were so lucky.

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Love of the Land: Roger Cohen And Wishful Thinking, Part 974

Love of the Land: Where are the pressure points?

Where are the pressure points?

Ira Sharkansky
Shark Blog
12 February '10

What is amazing about the preoccupation with Israel and Palestine is the certainty with which respectable individuals preach about a problem whose complexity has been pondered for decades, and where fluidity is more prominent than stability.

Even more amazing is the focus of urging change on the one element that is stable, while failing to take account of the instability elsewhere that may run over in several directions with no end in sight.

A prominent recent example of misplaced certainty is an op-ed piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times. Cohen has a long record of blaming Israel for the problems of the Middle East. He has called for an end to Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and expressed shame for the operation in Gaza that he described as a disastrous case of Israel slaying Palestinian children.

Now he is lamenting that President Obama must do more to honor an election pledge for "new thinking, outreach to the Muslim world, and relentless focus on Israel-Palestine. . . . The conflict gnaws at U.S. security, eats away at whatever remote possibility of a two-state solution is left, clouds Israel's future, scatters Palestinians and devours every attempt to bridge the West and Islam."

Cohen realizes that problems among Palestinians contribute their share of the frustrations, but he asserts that President Obama must work harder "to ask such tough questions in public and demand of Israel that it work in practice to share the land rather than divide and rule it."

If the two-state solution does not work, Cohen is certain that "there will be one state between the river and the sea."

The one-state solution is a common threat, typically made by the Israeli left and overseas critics who claim that they are friends of Israel, and want to reign it in before it is lost. As Cohen writes of the one state he sees as possible, "very soon there will be more Palestinian Arabs in it than Jews. What then will become of the Zionist dream?

The one-state threat illustrates the weakness in many criticisms of Israel. It is more a fantasy than anything that can be extrapolated from realities. Who would make Israel absorb into itself land and people that do not succeed in achieving statehood. The process would not reflect any natural law of politics that I recognize.

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Love of the Land: Where are the pressure points?