I link to StoptheACLU because I am a huge fan they did a good roundup of right-wing reaction to Richard Cohen’s editorial today. Oh! The controversy? Here is what Cohen said:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
It is my policy not to debate things like whether or not Israel is a mistake. Feel free to use this thread for such a debate, but that is not the reason I bring this up. The right-wing’s reaction needs to be understood. Now, some of it is painfuly stupid like the poor idiot from Iowa Voice that says:
Now, far be it from me to accuse the Post of being anti-Semite, but jeez. If it walks like a duck….
Yeah, ‘Cohen’ is such a gentile name.
What is far more important is a criticism that I will pull from a couple sources below.
People do not fight and die for what they believe to be a mistake. What Cohen wants Israel to internalize is the very message that Hassan Nasrallah wants them to internalize: Their nation is a mistake and they have no right to live in the land of Abraham. Their state should curl up and die.
That’s a good message for the MSM to internalize, perhaps, but not one that will motivate a tiny country currently fighting for its life. So if anyone’s listening, my advice to Israel: Ignore the press and do what you must do.
Cohen gives the benighted version of history preferred by Arabs and then advises Israel that they have little right to defend their existence. After all, Cohen argues, how can one allow someone to defend a mistake? Cohen doesn’t bother to mention the “mistake” of Islamist terrorism — well, he does, but casts it off in a patronizing defense of the “they can’t help themselves’ variety. Israel should not react to their attacks because it will never change the minds of Hezbollah and Hamas.
On that, Cohen and I agree. For that reason, Israel must continue their attacks on both Hezbollah and Hamas and completely wipe them out, unless they agree to lay down their arms and quit committing acts of war.
There is no debate here over the truth or falsity of Cohen’s argument. Not really. What there is is an argument of whether the argument is dangerous and might undermine Israel’s resolve to defend itself. And I think this mindset, that is displayed here quite openly, is the same mindset the right uses tacitly when debating domestic events.
Whether or not Iraq represented a grave and gathering danger to the United States in 2003 is not important. What’s important is that the American people think Iraq was such a threat. ‘After all, how can one allow someone to defend a mistake?’ This is the reason that Hoekstra and Santorum trotted out some bogus claim that we found WMD in Iraq. It’s why military intelligence keeps forging (or misattributing) Zarqawi-Zawahiri letters, it’s why we are supposed to focus on Bush with a bullhorn and not Bush with goat book. The truth is irrelevent. What is needed is resolve and willpower.
The best way to buck up resolve is through fear and hate. We must never empathize with the enemy or attempt to understand what motivates him. Instead, we must ‘completely wipe them out’.
Cohen’s main point was not that Israel was a mistake. His point was that Israel needs to come to terms with reality and realize that they are not going to get peace on anything like the terms they would like. There was a flaw in the assumptions that were made when Israel was created. And that flaw was that Israel would be allowed to live in peace. They have not lived in peace. It’s not likely that they could have done much that would have resulted with them living in peace.
The right-wing thinks the answer to this problem (as Cohen puts it: “The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface”) is to wipe out the Islamic world. And that really is the logical endgame for Bush’s and Israel’s policies. If you can’t make them love us, or quietly accept our hegemony, then you must kill them all.
To ready the American and Israeli people for their participation in this second holocaust, it is necessary to continually dehumanize the enemy, make them more fearsome than they are, and blame them for every problem, both real and imagined.
Israel exists. It is going to continue to exist. I don’t care whether it should have been created or not. But it will not be accepted. It will not be accepted even if we kill nine million Muslims. The best we can do is help broker a peace agreement that gives back the occupied land. The Muslims need to face reality too. The can keep banging their head against a wall, but all it does is radicalize dangerous elements in the United States and Israel and put them in grave danger from right-wing loons with messianic complexes, fantasies of armageddon, and nuclear weapons.
Sanity is desparately needed from our leaders.
It’s ‘go’ for Israel move
BY T.W. FARNAM
Newsday Staff Writer
July 18, 2006
The Goldsteins and their four children are moving – from Merrick to the West Bank.
The family started arrangements for the move almost a year ago and had been thinking about it for much longer than that. The latest escalation of violence is not enough to shake their determination.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-liisra094821054jul18,0,7187198.story?track=rss
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The Goldsteins will be explaining to journalists that it’s their land, their birth right to settle in the West Bank. Thereby, uprooting the olive groves of the Palestinian people in the next village, who have just lost their livelihood.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
That’s hilarious. You know full well we have no chance of getting sanity from our leaders, it isn’t part of their agenda. What’s our alternate plan?
I’ve seen in blogtopia:
Nerdified Link.
that is good. And I wrote about that interesting last fact earlier.
That’s what I get for being out of town, and largely away from blogging!
It is not about Arabs and Jews or Jews and Muslims, it is a western colonialist conflict, and it was frequently called “the last stand of western colonialism” until a few years ago when US tossed in a couple more last stands…
It is possible to find elderly indigenous Jews, in fact a few years ago, I remember reading an interview with a lady, sorry, don’t remember the link, but the essence of her story, she left Israel when the large influx of Europeans came, they did not come, she said, to join them, to live in a Middle Eastern country, which Israel has been, for quite some time. 🙂
Jews of Israel before the Naqba and arrival of the westerners, prayed in Hebrew, but bought eggs and scolded their children and gossiped about the scandalous behavior of the current young generation and whispered words of love to their spouses in Arabic. As did their Christian and Muslim brothers, except for the praying in Hebrew part. 🙂
In their food, their lifestyle, their fashions and customs and folkways and art and everything, they were a Middle Eastern people living in the Middle East.
The westerners arrived, and did not speak Arabic, they spoke Yiddish. They eat different foods, have different lifestyle and fashions and folkways, etc, and from the point of view of many indigenous Jews, not only did they not assimilate, assimilation is overrated anyway, but they acted like theirs was the only “way to be,” the “well now we are here, we can civilize the place.”
Now this is certainly not the attitude of all westerners who moved to Israel, and certainly not all indigenous Jews felt culturally displaced, but enough of them did to make the issue quite the topic of conversation in certain now-shrinking circles of elders who departed from Israel in the late 40s and early 50s for parts diverse and global.
And their experience, even those who found it a very unpleasant, life-uprooting event, cannot be compared to what happened to the Naqba victims, I wonder how many Americans ever consider that there are people living in refugee camps in Lebanon who were born there, as were their fathers, born in the camp to which the grandfather was ethnic cleansed in the Naqba!
So while I do not mean to minimize the trauma of feeling so uncomfortable and culturally strange in one’s own land that one leaves it for wherever, neither do I mean to suggest that it is the same as being forcibly cleansed into a camp, but the common thread of both experiences, and the essential nature of the conflict which persists to this day, is that of western colonialism, both in its crafting and perpetuation in the conference rooms far from the Levant, but in the nature of its impact upon the victims.
t is possible to find elderly indigenous Jews, in fact a few years ago, I remember reading an interview with a lady, sorry, don’t remember the link, but the essence of her story, she left Israel when the large influx of Europeans came, they did not come, she said, to join them, to live in a Middle Eastern country, which Israel has been, for quite some time. 🙂
Considering that European immigrant Jews far outnumbered the ‘indigenous’ ones by the mid twenties or so, anybody with personal memories of a time before that is very, very old.
And their experience, even those who found it a very unpleasant, life-uprooting event, cannot be compared to what happened to the Naqba victims, I wonder how many Americans ever consider that there are people living in refugee camps in Lebanon who were born there, as were their fathers, born in the camp to which the grandfather was ethnic cleansed in the Naqba!
Plenty of Americans and even more Europeans can imagine being children or grandchildren of people who were ethnically cleansed from their homeland. As it happens I study two groups affected by European ethnic cleansing – the Germans expelled from what is now western Poland in 1945-1947 and the Poles who settled in their homes; many of these Poles had themselves been ethnically cleansed from their homeland in what is now western Ukraine, western Belarus, and southern Lithuania. Few Poles or Germans are ready to admit that what happened to them was anything but a terrible crime. But at the same time they also understand that it did happen and that there is no way to turn the clock back, and that indeed to try to do so would also be criminal. What people seeking reconciliation on both sides try to do is look at what they can agree on and work from there. Poles acknowledging and honoring the German cultural heritage of the land in which they live, as well as the suffering of the German Vertriebene. The Germans for their part recognize that it is no longer their home, that ‘Ostdeutschland’ was killed off in the aftermath of the war and it is no more possible to resurrect it than one can bring back to life the individual lives that were lost. Killing the community that the descendants of the ethnic cleansers have created is not justice, it is retribution by the children of the victims against the children of the perpetrators.
can, I believe, have some value even today, for the young folks who have an interest in listening, however I will be the first to acknowledge that I cannot claim a lack of bias on this particular subject. 😉
And I think you bring up a very interesting aspect of colonialism in the Levant.
In fact, many have remarked on the phenomenon of some who were victims themselves of certain behaviors, visiting those same behaviors on other human beings.
It is not unlike the familiar lament of some ologists, that the abused child is so likely to grow up to become an abuser, thus the cycle is perpetuated.
For over 50 years people have been saying that Israel does not want a just peace, that when they enter into negotiations” they do so in bad faith, planning only to stall and stall and stall until someone can make the argument that you just made . . . that it’s been so long now that it’s unreasonable to expect Israel to seek, or even accept, a just settlement . . .
Fisk writes that many of those refugee families in southern Lebanon would show him the key to their front door, the deed to their home in what was known as Gallilee, in the vain belief that there might still be a “home” to which they might return.
Ammiel Alcalay‘s book Keys to the Garden that I brought up elsewhere brings to print the voices of those marginalized, “indigenous” Jews — contemporary voices whose writings explore the tension of a minority within an Israeli society, shaped by Zionism, that would locate itself within the larger history & cultures of the Middle East.
The world will be lucky if something resembling the terms UNR 242 can ever be realized. I still have the perhaps naive belief that if that were to happen, popular support for Hamas would markedly decrease.
Who knows what possibilities will be left when this current adventure plays itself out. All we know for now is that more slaughter is on the way.
My response to Cohen is that I agree that the creation of Israel by U.S.- and British-sponsored agencies in the aftermath of WWII was a misguided initiative. However, now that 58 years have passed, there are generations of people born and raised in Israel who can legitimately call themselves Israelis and they have the right to life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness like all other people in the world.
As I say this, I don’t want to toss out an AIPAC talking point without qualifying it. While pundits across the board have mouthed the words, “Israel has the right to defend HERSELF,” it must also be noted that people in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and all other parts of the world – equally – have the right to defend themselves.
One step toward solving this problem is to accurately assess the true conditions of this conflict. While attacks against Israel are presented to U.S. readers/viewers as “vicious terrorists (a term made synonymous with Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims) murdering the good people of a peaceful nation” attacks by Israel are presented as “defensive maneuvers.” Instead, U.S. news agencies should present a far more truthful account.
Israel was, in fact, created without concern for hundreds of thousands of people already living in the area. Israel was, in fact, created in part by the terrorist acts of it founders. Israel has, in fact, maintained constant military and economic pressure on the Arabs and Muslims of the area all these years and decades since.
I have several hopes for the future of this region (an area not much different in size from my homestate of Massachusetts). One is that a more balanced view of the conflict is made available to the American public. Another is that I hope the people who make up my government will refuse campaign support from groups that support oppressive Israeli regimes, such as those run by the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu. A third is that the reasonable, rational majority of Israeli citizens takes control of their government and makes wise decisions for the future of their own country and for the future of living everywhere in the region.
As for Cohen’s comment that the creation of Israel was a mistake? Yes, it was. So was the creation of the United States without regard for the Algonquin, Mahican, Cherokee, or Apache. So was the creation of England without regard to the Celts. But now that Israel does exist, it would be a crime against humanity to even consider removing it from existence.
However, this conflict globally has been a gaping wound for more than half a century. Here in the U.S., in countries throughout the world, and in countries of the region surrounding Jerusalem, the effort needs to be made to remove beligerent, self-serving regimes with governments that are far more representative of their people
Practically no American wants to see harm come to people living in Israel or Palestine or Lebanon. Practically no European wants to see harm come to people living in Israel or Palestine or Lebanon. In fact, most Israelis want their government to respect the civil and human rights of the Arabs and Muslims in their region.
If most people want this conflict to end reasonably and peacefully, the question has to be asked, why does it continue? The answer has nothing to do with Israel’s creation or its existence and everything to do with a general disregard for human dignity. To solve this problem, people in countries all around the world need to stop choosing sides between people on one side of the border against the other. Instead, we all need to recognize that all people – without any regard to religion or ethnicity – deserve a chance at living a good and decent life. A Palestinian life is equal to an Israeli life; a Muslim life is equal to a Jewish life.
Jews did live throughout the Middle East, typically treated no worse than the various Muslim factions treated each other. Jews, Christians and Muslims co-existed in Palestine under Ottoman rule. And “modernization” and rising standards of living were encouraging a steady transition of the Muslim world into the kind of “secularized” states that developed countries tend to become. Until the displacement/expulsion of the Palestinians to create Israel. That unresolved injustice (not only unresolved but magnified by subsequent events) reinforced any negative stereotypes that did exist, and gave new and painfully visible reason to hate Israel, and by extension “the Jews”.
Of course Cohen is correct, even if “mistake” is a somewhat loaded term. And true “refugees” from Europe would have been tolerated, even if not welcomed with open arms, if their arrival had been a benefit to the people already living in Palestine instead of being entirely at their expense.
“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs, We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?” David Ben-Gurion, quoted in “The Jewish Paradox” by Nathan Goldman, former president of the World Jewish Congress.
Why should they, indeed. There has to be some way to resolve this injustice, and the attitude expressed below is not that way . . .
“The Arabs will be our problem for a long time,” Weizmann said, “It’s not going to be simple.One day they may have to leave and let us have the country. They’re ten to one, but don’t we Jews have ten times their intelligence?” Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1919 at the Paris peace conference, quoted in Ella Winter, “And Not To Yield.”
Zionists hated in the Arab world ? ? ? I wonder why . . .
“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel.
Why should they, indeed. There has to be some way to resolve this injustice,
So, in your view endless war and death is the way to solve the injustice?
I read comments like that and all I see is the mirror image of the neocons and Likudniks – peace is bad – it is defeat, we are right and they are wrong, there is no grey and anybody who thinks there is is evil.
You read what you want to read (is that because it’s what you think?) . . .
I wrote that there has to be some way to resolve the injustice . . .
Endless war and death is the Israeli “solution”, and that’s the problem . . . a refusal to even acknowledge the issues that Cohen raises, let alone participate in a just solution to an injustice that Israel created.
You read what you want to read (is that because it’s what you think?) . . .
I wrote that there has to be some way to resolve the injustice . . .
Endless war and death is the Israeli “solution”, and that’s the problem . . . a refusal to even acknowledge the issues that Cohen raises, let alone participate in a just solution to an injustice that Israel created.
What I think? – My personal view is that a just solution would be an Israel in its 1967 boundaries with no right of return for the Palestinians and the Old City of Jerusalem coming under direct UN rule. In practice any solution that both sides would accept would probably require small deviations from that ideal i.e. the kind of boundaries that the Palestinians were proposing at Taba (splitting E. Jeruslalem and letting the Israelis keep about two or three percent of the West Bank in return for land swaps) and some sort of token right of return – say a quota of 100,000 Palestinians. But sometimes I’m pessimistic enough to believe that there is no possible solution that would be acceptable to a majority on both sides.
My personal view is that a just solution would be an Israel in its 1967 boundaries with no right of return for the Palestinians and the Old City of Jerusalem coming under direct UN rule
Why hasn’t this been possible?
Is it because the Arabs reject it or because the Israelis never offered it?
Is it because the Arabs reject it or because the Israelis never offered it?
Israel’s never offered it, nor have the Palestinians. Israel has always insisted on retaining part or all of E. Jerusalem and some to all of the major settlements (depending on which Israeli government and when). The Palestinians have always insisted on a total or partial right of return (depending on which Palestinian government and when).
exactly
“….all it does is radicalize dangerous elements in the United States and Israel and put them in grave danger from right-wing loons with messianic complexes, fantasies of armageddon, and nuclear weapons.”
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What’s needed is for various Middle Eastern regimes to also have nuclear weapons. I’d like to see Bush cautioning against causing unnecessary civilian casualties when the people dying live in nations capable of lobbing a nuke at whoever is bombing them. Bet there’d be a lot more diplomacy and negotiations and a lot less gunplay and mortars. The world looks a little different when it’s your ribs that have the pistol pressed against them.
“If most people want this conflict to end reasonably and peacefully, the question has to be asked, why does it continue?”
I disagree with your answer to your own question. The reason for the continued violence is internal politics. The radical elements on either side can always count on their opposite number for support. When popularity wanes, provoke a senseless violent reaction and denounce it. Popularity rises.
This behaviour is only possible in entities with a capacity to act violently that is not negatively impacted by said violence. Hamas and Hezbollah do not have economies that get disruprted by warfare. They get their weapons like manna from heaven. Israel has a similar situation to a much lesser degree, with the USA acting as Sugar-Daddy-Warbucks. The warmakers on each side simply can not lose, so they have no incentive to avoid fighting. Their people can lose, but the decision to fight is not left to their people.