Emanuele Ottolenghi and Noah Pollak have already responded to Roger Cohen’s Try Tough Love Hillary. Cohen argues that peace – that is necessary for Israel – can only be achieved if Israel cedes all the land demanded by the Arab world for a “just” peace. And for Israel to make those necessary concessions, it needs to be pressured by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
There’s one point that Cohen made that is hard to swallow.
I am fiercely attached to Israel’s security. Everything depends, however, on how that security is viewed. Israel can continue humiliating the Palestinians, flaunting its power with a bully’s braggadocio. It will survive that way — and be desperately corroded from within. Neither domination nor demography favors Israel over time.
“[F]iercely attached?” What does that mean? Anyway anyone who’s been paying attention to the past fifteen years would note that after Israel pulled out of six cities in late 1995, it was struck by a wave of terror in early 1996; after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah was strengthened, setting the stage for the 2006 war and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza strengthened Hamas, which proceeded to upgrade its armaments leading to regular missile strikes against the Israeli city of Sderot.
Frankly, Israel, following Oslo has not been a bully at all, it has been in a state of slow retreat. However its retreats have been met with its enemies strengthened doing the bullying from a better strategic position.
To argue that more retreats are necessary for Israel’s security after the past fifteen years, Cohen is either oblivious to the record or deluding himself.
But perhaps the most effective refutation to Cohen’s many distortions, cliches and untruths is Elder of Ziyon’s excellent Islamist strategy vs. Western tactics
Part of the reason that the West is so keen on pressuring Israel is the unstated but very relevant viewpoint that, somehow, Israeli concessions will take the wind out of the sails of jihadists, that Israeli sacrifices – or the sacrifice of Israel – will appease the terrorists who will no longer have broad-based support in the Islamic world. There is not a shred of evidence to support this wishful thinking; and there is plenty of evidence that shows it to be false.
The West is attuned to short-term thinking. Perhaps this is because of the need to elect new leaders every few years, but it sacrifices long-term strategy for vaporous short-term gains. It would be laughable to even consider that the West has a plan to defeat the Islamist world that spans more than a decade.
The Arab and Muslim psyche, on the other hand, is very much attuned to long-term trends. A hundred years is but a blip in Islamic history and, from their perspective, Israel has not yet lasted as long as the Crusades. The battle takes decades and centuries; it is not something that has to be mopped up by the next election cycle.
But perhaps more importantly, the Israeli-Arab conflict isn’t merely about “Palestine,” it is part of a wider conflict.
Islamic extremism does not look at “Palestine” as the be-all and end-all of their expansionist goals. Al Qaeda’s founder put it succinctly when he said “jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands which formerly were Muslim come back to us and Islam reigns within them once again. Before us lie Palestine, Bukhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, Andalusia.” And this is hardly an exhaustive list of land that Islamists covet.
Each of these seeming “land disputes” is prosecuted locally, as if they each have individual merit, and the fair-minded West will look at each dispute dispassionately and tactically. Well-meaning Westerners will be “even-handed” (and subconciously pro-Islam) in many of these claims, all the while ignoring the worldwide pattern that they represent of inexorable Islamist encroachment and expansionist thinking.
Cohen’s misguided prescription misses this point. If Israel heeds his advice, it won’t just be strengthening Palestinian rejectionists. It will be strengthening the jihadists throughout the world. Cohen’s liberalism feeds extemism. It’s a point that he’s too blind to see.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.