Richard Cohen remains one of the most incoherent columnists in America. Even as he tries to reassure his religious brethren that the president has an entirely sensible policy towards Israel, he can’t help but bash Obama for his lack of empathy. If Obama would just follow Anwar Sadat’s example and visit Jerusalem, he would eliminate all Israel’s anxiety about his commitment to their country. That’s baloney.
Cohen follows the practice of trying to sell us a one-sided version of reality.
…the Israeli middle, is scared. It would give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank for peace — only it is skeptical that even those concessions would work. None of this is theoretical. It is about life and death. It is about rockets coming in from Gaza yet again. It is about Hezbollah’s Scud missiles and the reasonable apprehension that Hamas would oust the moderate (and hapless) Palestinian Authority from the West Bank and turn the area into the functional equivalent of Gaza, an Islamic republic whose charter is a stew of crackpot anti-Semitism laced with death threats.
I don’t dismiss those fears. But it is not at all clear to me that Israel’s ‘middle’ is willing to give up East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Every indicator I can think of points the other way. In fact, I would argue that the Israeli middle’s refusal to stop expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is the root of the problem that the Obama administration faces in trying to reboot a peace process.
But let’s assume that some theoretically plausible future Israeli government could muster the will and popular support to trade away almost all of East Jerusalem and the West Bank for assurances of peace. If they made that deal the political and public relations landscape would shift dramatically. No political deal can make everyone accept the existence of Israel, but a deal that involved the official recognition of Israel by all the Arab nations would cast all future harassment from Palestinian or Lebanese (or Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian) territory in an entirely different light. In fact, you will notice that Israel doesn’t face harassment from Egyptian or Jordanian soil, and that is because Israel has made peace agreements with those two countries.
No one can assure Israel that they will never again have to dodge rocket fire if they just make peace. But we can assure them that continued harassment will be viewed almost universally as illegitimate, and any Israeli responses to continued harassment will not be second-guessed the way they are now.
The paradigm in Israel seems to be that they withdrew from Lebanon and received rocket fire and the withdrew from Gaza and received rocket fire. Therefore, why would a withdrawal from the West Bank be any different? This has a surface plausibility, but the reason they still struggle with resistance is that they still occupy Palestinian territory and are still expanding their permanent settlements on that territory. At least half the world (actually, considerably more than half) thinks some form of Palestinian resistance is legitimate under current circumstances. That would no longer be the case if Israel obtained official recognition from all its neighbors.
It’s not hateful to point these things out to Israel. It’s what a good friend does. Obama is telling Israel what it needs to hear, and there is no lack of empathy in the message.
When I first read your opening sentence I had to re-read it like 3x because I first saw it was: “Richard Cohen remains one of the most coherent columnists in America.”
So before re-reading, I went to google him just to make sure we were talking about the same Richard Cohen. Lol.
I don’t have any comments about this, I’ve already made my position clear.
Here’s a nice article I read the other day, and it was surprising because it came from a rag like the JPost:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=173485
that is a nice story. Big changes start with small steps.
As a postscript to this report, 60 Percent Of Israelis Say Settlements Should Be Removed, Ray HaCohen/Antiwar.Com made an interesting observation given that the Israeli right wing would not like to hear that 60% of the Israeli public says, give up most of the settlements, which by implication also means stop the colonization of the Palestinian territories.
But that 60% may only be a minority of Israelis. Israelis are just as likely to think along the lines of government propaganda as anyone else not wise to the workings of the right wing. When the government can control public opinion, it makes peace making that much more difficult.
And that appears to be just what this government has done: created a minority out of a majority, which does not agree with its actions vis a vis the Palestinians.
“the practice of trying to sell us a one-sided version of reality.”
Cohen is obviously one of a long line of proZionist propagandists, who now argue that Israel must confiscate all of the Palestinian teritories if it is ever to achieve security. But of course as you mention, Israel’s insecurity is a direct result of its own bellicosity toward its neighbors, and toward the Palestinians, who remain the object of further intended colonization, for which military occupation is required. That military occupation is sold by Israel as a defensive posture.
Let Cohen explain what Israel will call it when it becomes a formal Apartheid state through annexation. I suspect we will have the next strategy: calling Israel an Apartheid state is anti-Semitic.
Cohen isn’t arguing that Israel should stay in or expand the settlements. He’s arguing the opposite. My objection is that he is also arguing that Obama can just visit Jerusalem and get the Israeli public to change their attitude sufficiently that Israeli politicians will feel compelled to make a deal.
Knowing that the WashPost like the NYT has a proIsrael bias, somehow I don’t agree with that. Like many exceptionalists, the theme here is: I’m for two states, but….and then all the reasons why there should not be two states including terrorism, Israel’s security. In Cohen’s last articles, he pumped up the terrorist nature of the Palestinians, without addressing what motivated terrorist acts during the second Intifada to begin with. We don’t even learn that the second Intifada ended seven years ago. But “terror” is a theme Israeli propaganda still uses, and Cohen has no trouble accommodating it. No mention of state terrorism, of course
Palestinians’ Destructive Veneration of Terrorists
By Richard Cohen
It Takes a Village
By Richard Cohen
And where does Cohen once mention “occupation” or “colonialism”? It is verboten. And then this paragraph,
Yes, I’m for Obama and two states, BUT…and you can read the rest for yourself. Ergo, the right wing is right. No two states. It is suicidal. Cohen writes what he means between the lines.
And did Cohen ever mention, something he should have known, that only 20% of Palestinians support Hamas, 25% in Gaza and 18% in the West Bank.
Cohen is no paragon of the two state solution. He’s a Likudnik phoney. Sorry.
Overall, I agree that Cohen is a dishonest and biased reporter on Israel and pretty much everything else, too. But in this particular column, he was actually defending the substance of Obama’s policy and attacking his style.
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Clear politics, where does their loyalty lie … with the Jewish heritage and biblical times, 3,000 years and the Promised Land of Moses. Getting back to reality and the UN resolution establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinians demand their 22,5%. The only word that comes to mind is Hasbara.
These have been busy days for Jewish bloggers when it comes to Israel. One of them, the formidable Ed Koch, has virtually incinerated President Obama for his Israeli policy. The Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has taken out full-page ads in major newspapers to tell Obama, in effect, to lay off Jerusalem, and Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, wrote the president to say how concerned he was about the administration’s Israel policy. In short, it stinks.
U.S. President Barack Obama presents the 2009 National Humanities Medal to Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.
Undoing the miracle of the Six-Day War; Benjamin Netanyahu to complete this Hillul HaShem?
“Iran and the resistance bloc [i.e. Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and some Iraqi groups] compete with the United States and its allies to impose regional order as the strong horse.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
“I don’t dismiss those fears.“
I do. Israeli officials know very what what they need to do. All the evidence suggests that there is little if any justification for these fears if Israel would only comply with the applicable international law.
The Palestinians, including Hamas, have made it absolutely clear for decades what they want. No less a figure than Khalid Mesh`al has stated more than once that he is prepared to accept Israel within the Green Line. For eight years the Arab League has repeatedly unanimously extended a peace proposal that gives Israel everything it insists it wants – peace, recognition, and full normal diplomatic and economic relations – in exchange for full withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, a just resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue to be mutually agreed upon by the parties, and the acceptance of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel has refused even to consider this proposal as a starting point for negotiations.
“a deal that involved the official recognition of Israel by all the Arab nations would cast all future harassment from Palestinian or Lebanese (or Egyptian, Jordanian, or Syrian) territory in an entirely different light.“
Once again:
The Arab League unanimously approved and offered such a deal in 2002, and has had exactly that deal on the table continuously for eight years. For eight years Israel has thumbed its nose at exactly the deal you suggest. The Arab nations are not the impediment here.
Since Oslo, Israel governments, except for a short haitus during the Rabin administration, have successively avoided the very principle upon which Oslo was based: land for peace. As it turned out, as you know, Oslo became the ticket for just the opposite, the land grab that occurred just afterward, which, with the help of Clinton, transformed into Israel’s strongest colonial period. Israel was just never interested in giving up land for peace.