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.
