Today he writes, in his "Israel, Iran and Fear":
"The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state."
Does his suggested solution mean that no Jews can/should live in the future proposed Palestine, and equally, that no Arabs can/should live in Israel? For if not, and his demographic prognastication is correct, - which may not be possible, but for argument's sake let's say it is - what is to prevent Arabs overtaking Jews in the territorially-reduced Israel in another 50 years? What demographic problem has he solved with his two-state solution?
And he makes an unsupportable claim regarding Iran:
it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.
He quotes Jimmy Carter as to why Israel should not fear:
But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”
I doubt that is completely true anymore but the point is why let ourselves be attacked by nuclear Iran and then have to win and a tremendous risk and price? If deterrence and diplomacy doesn't work, do we wait for the first strike to prove we're strong in the end? Dumb.
And here are lines one of my persistent critics will identify with:
Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.
Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.
For Roger Cohen Jew, his angst problem is easily solved - he attacks Israel in the New York Times.
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Just after posting this, I read a recent book review which gives an alternative perspective than the one Roger Cohen has been propagating:-
The election of the little-known Mr. Ahmadinejad — a hardliner, who had campaigned not on a platform of strict Islamic values but on populist promises of economic opportunity — came as a surprise...a result, Ms. Moaveni argues, not only of possible vote tampering, but also of moderates’ failure to unify around one persuasive candidate, and apathy on the part of voters who’d grown disillusioned with years of stalled reform.
...his government has clamped down on the limited freedoms afforded journalists and women.
One day in spring 2007, Ms. Moaveni reports: “The authorities launched the most ferocious crackdown on ‘un-Islamic’ dress in over a decade. Overnight, they revised the tacit rules governing women’s dress. The closets of millions of women across the country contained nothing but short, tailored coats; ankle-length pants; and bright headscarves. Suddenly, these styles were grounds for arrest. In the days that followed, the police detained 150,000 women for failing to abide by the official dress code.”
...In these pages Ms. Moaveni does an affecting job of conveying how the Islamic government’s edicts permeated every aspect of people’s private lives. Couples wishing to hold a “mixed wedding,” where men and women commingle, are advised to hire expensive security details to guard against police raids. Baby names have to be chosen with care so as to avoid forbidden names, including European names, Kurdish names and the names of pre-Islamic Persian heroes.
Attention must be paid to neighbors, who are liable to report people who pursue an “alternative lifestyle” — sometimes “out of genuine pious indignation, sometimes as revenge for neighborly quarrels.” And parents must worry that bringing up their children with liberal values can have troubling consequences for them down the road...for Ms. Moaveni, it means acknowledging that “Iran wasn’t livable enough” for them, that all the talk there about “mending and changing and improving was a charade,” that “Iran is all heavy and rotten at the core.”
Why has the reform movement stalled in Iran? Why hasn’t there been more protest against the government’s repressive policies or a broader movement for political change? As Ms. Moaveni sees it, young Iranians care “far more about finding jobs and raising their living standards than about whether Islam would become compatible with Western-style democracy during their lifetime.”...the risks involved in rebellion swiftly outgrew the rewards. Busy investing in the logistics of emigration — the English proficiency tests, visa applications and language courses — many young people envisioned their futures abroad, and were unwilling to compromise those hopes for the sake of somehow changing Iran, a notion they considered chimerical, costly and best left to a future generation.”
The above comes from a book review published in...the New York Times.
If that is the sorry state of affairs for Iranians, what are we to make about Cohen's hogwash concerning the Jewish minority there? and the attitude towards the state of Israel?
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