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.
