Tuesday, February 16, 2010
[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word]
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.
The second part of the quote above is just risible. The United States was so concerned to safeguard the new state that it placed it under an arms embargo and jailed those of its own citizens who broke it and it didn't start selling weapons in serious quantities to Israel until after the Six Day War.
And then there's this peach of an observation:
... the "existential threat" to Israel is overplayed. It is no feeble David facing an Arab (or Arab-Persian) Goliath. Armed with a formidable nuclear deterrent, Israel is by far the strongest state in the region.
The existence or otherwise of an existential threat to a nation can't be assessed solely on the basis of whether or not it is better armed than its neighbors. If that were the case we'd have to accept that there existed an existential threat to Canada from the United States and to Ireland from the United Kingdom. The threat to Israel arises from the refusal of many of its neighbors to recognize it and the participation by some of them in attempts to destroy it, and all this from the first day of Israel's existence.
So it's a very good thing that Israel is well armed, if it weren't its neighbors would have destroyed it long ago. And it's also a good thing that it has nuclear weapons but they're only of use in deterring other states that conduct themselves in something approaching a rational manner. Their existence ought to be giving the ayatollahs pause for thought about the likely consequences of an open brawl with Israel but they aren't keeping its border with Lebanon quiet, for that conventional deterrence, otherwise known as the Dahiya Doctrine, suffices for now.
Cohen's unwisdom reaches its apogee here:
The Hamas charter is vile. But the breakthrough Oslo accords were negotiated in 1993, three years before the Palestine Liberation Organization revoked the annihilationist clauses in its charter. When Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, that destroy-Israel charter was intact.
The PLO entered negotiations with Israel after decades of beating its head against the iron wall of Israel's refusal to be terrorized into disappearing and after being attacked by Israel from one end of the Middle East to the other. It entered negotiations when it became really obvious to it that the kind of force it had been using up to then was only going to lead to its leaders dying in exile, of old age in the best case. It started negotiating after the Soviet bloc collapsed and it thus lost a crucial foreign ally. I trust the difference between the PLO at the start of the 1990s and Hamas today don't have to be pointed out to readers of this blog.
And this is pretty good stuff too:
Things change through negotiation, not otherwise. If there are Taliban elements worth engaging, are there really no such elements in the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah?
I don't think that anyone who coolly considers Hamas's behavior in the year since Cast Lead with its behavior in the year before would agree that only negotiations change things. The same goes for the civil war that ended last year in Sri Lanka too. Of course negotiations may bring about changes but they are usually entered into when one of the parties to a conflict realizes that it can't get what it wants by force or that it risks annihilation if it doesn't. And that holds for the Middle East and for every other zone of conflict you care to mention.
And can Cohen be so poorly informed as not to know that engaging with the Taliban means cajoling its more biddable elements into abandoning the fight against the government of Afghanistan and, where possible, getting them to fight against their old comrades? You don't have to rack your brains too much to figure out how this is usually done. If he knows of any elements of either Hamas or Hezbollah that would be willing to give up the fight against Israel or, better still, fight on its behalf in return for a generous monthly stipend in dollars then I think he ought to let us know.
Is there anything worth rescuing from Cohen's text? There are some good points but I'm not going to rehearse them here and for two reasons: firstly, because I've set out my views on Palestinian rights at length here before and secondly, because I don't feel that writers should have to prove that they are on the side of the angels every single time that they have something to say about the Middle East.
[For those who may have missed it, here is Cohen taking Rashid Khalidi's part in a debate, "The US Should Step Back From Its Special Relationship With Israel." (h/t: Allan Grant) -MS]
