After defending the Mullahcracy of Iran, Roger Cohen has followed his premise to its logical conclusion in Middle East Reality Check.
Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah has long been treated by the United States as a proscribed terrorist group. This narrow view has ignored the fact that both organizations are now entrenched political and social movements without whose involvement regional peace is impossible.
Britain aligned itself with the U.S. position on Hezbollah, but has now seen its error. Bill Marston, a Foreign Office spokesman, told Al Jazeera: “Hezbollah is a political phenomenon and part and parcel of the national fabric in Lebanon. We have to admit this.â€
Hallelujah.
Precisely the same thing could be said of Hamas in Gaza. It is a political phenomenon, part of the national fabric there.
One wonders if he would feel the same way about bank robbers who held hostages in the bank they robbed for a week. Would the robbers then become part of the “commercial fabric,” worthy of being treated the same as their hostages?
As I wrote last week, in response to a plea for recognizing Hamas, recognizing Fatah didn’t bring the peaceful utopia many like Cohen claimed would occur if Israel recognized Fatah and accepted Arafat as a peace partner.
Perhaps a few contrary memories will serve to jog his memory.
Hamas and Hezbollah are both terrorist organizations dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Once Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah did not lay down arms like hopeful but ultimately clueless pundits predicted it would. It continued building its offensive capability in order attack Israel’s northern border. Until they disarm, they’ve shown every reason that their actions will follow their words.
Cohen again:
With respect to Hamas, the West has bound itself to three conditions for any contact: Hamas must recognize Israel, forswear terrorism and accept previous Palestinian commitments. This was reiterated by Clinton on her first Mideast swing.
The 1988 Hamas Charter is vile, but I think it’s wrong to get hung up on the prior recognition of Israel issue. Perhaps Hamas is sincere in its calls for Israel’s disappearance — although it has offered a decades-long truce — but then it’s also possible that Israel in reality has no desire to see a Palestinian state.
Decades long truce? So that’s what Israel’s supposed to pin its security on? An organization that can’t even bring itself to describe a goal of unqualified peace with Israel? As I pointed out above, Israel’s bitter experience with Fatah, show that terrorists.don’t easily change their stripes.
If a Palestinian state will be governed by the likes of an unreformed Fatah or Hamas, Israel would be suicidal to agree to a Palestinian state ruled by either or both.
It’s also worth pointing that in the fifteen years since Israel signed the Oslo Accords Israel has taken substantive actions to create a Palestinian state despite the risks and costs involved. Israel has ceded land to its enemies – though they haven’t reformed – given them money and even arms and seen all of that turned against its own people. At some point, people like Cohen have to stop asking themselves if Israel is doing enough for peace and coexistence and ask instead if the Palestinians (and Arabs generally) are doing anything to promote peace. They would if they looked at the facts on the ground and at recent history. But they are too blinded by their hatred of Israel or by their foolish hope in the reasonableness of terrorists to see what’s been obvious.
Further Cohen writes:
Speaking of violence, it’s worth recalling what Israel did in Gaza in response to sporadic Hamas rockets. It killed upward of 1,300 people, many of them women and children; caused damage estimated at $1.9 billion; and destroyed thousands of Gaza homes. It continues a radicalizing blockade on 1.5 million people squeezed into a narrow strip of land.
And since Israel’s declared its unilateral ceasefire, has Hamas in Gaza gone back to building a peaceful society?
Why not check out Elder of Ziyon’s monthly Qassam calendars for January, February and March (so far)? Please note that this a society that scavenged its sewage pipes to fire on Israeli civilians. Cohen is willing to look past the hatred that motivates groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and act as if they are motivated simply by grievance.
Judea Pearl, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, had a simple but effective response to such naivete.
There is good and there is evil. The men who killed my son had a grievance, everybody has a grievance. Once you focus on the grievance, rather than the terrorist act itself, the terrorist has won.
But it’s not just that views like Cohen’s grant a victory to the terrorists, it’s worse than that. Here’s Guy Bechor writing about Europe (h/t Yaacov Lozowick):
The trend is growing across the world and it has nothing to do with Israel: Israel is the tool used in order to secure achievements. Israel is what the Jews used to be in the past.
When we see, in Turkey or Italy, Jewish-owned stores being marked so the locals refrain from buying there, what kind of future do the children of the 750,000 Jews in Western Europe have? You worked for a country that will always view you as foreigners. Following World War II, you made some countries rich, but now we see a quiet Jewish rally in the Swedish capital being banned because of fears of Muslims violence there. What kind of future do you have in this continent, which is becoming increasingly Muslim?
Britain’s decision to start talking to Hezbollah is not something to be emulated, as Cohen claims. It is something that makes the killing of Jews even more acceptable. It is something that makes the hatred of Jews even more acceptable.
Cohen foolishly believes that Iranian Jews are free. He believes the grievances of Hamas and Hezbollah are legitimate. At some point though, his comfort level with the killing and oppression of Jews makes you wonder if he is simply a fool or a knave.
UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon finds some irony:
When Cohen calls for negotiations, he is asking for a process to begin where people’s words have meaning; where the representatives of each side are assumed to be telling the truth and are putting their positions forth in good faith. Negotiations without the ability to trust the words of one of the sides is worthless. Cohen, however, calls Hamas leaders liars for saying they want to destroy Israel and calls Israeli leaders liars for saying they want to live in peace with Palestinian Arabs.
And he wants both sets of liars to negotiate!
UPDATE II: Israel Matzav has weighed in too and gives Cohen a much-needed history lesson:
Cohen either ignores or has no knowledge of history whatsoever. He claims that Israel has no desire to see a ‘Palestinian’ state. Israel bent over backwards to create a ‘Palestinian’ state. In 1967, Israel offered back all of the territory it had liberated in a defensive war (Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan simultaneously). Of course, it didn’t offer that territory to ‘Palestinians’ because ‘Palestinians’ barely existed then. It offered that territory back to the countries from which it liberated that territory and who – by the way – showed absolutely no interest in creating a ‘Palestinian’ state during the years (1948-67) that they controlled the West Bank Judea and Samaria and Gaza. In response, Israel got the ‘three noes of Khartoum: no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel. It’s fashionable to claim today that was only a ‘starting position.’ But if it was, no one bothered to tell Israel that.
In 1973, Israel fought another existential war. Hamas didn’t exist back then. The Arab countries still did their own dirty work. That war had nothing to do with the creation of a ‘Palestinian’ state.
In 1979, Israel signed the Camp David accords with Egypt and returned every last grain of sand in the Sinai to Egypt. At the time, it was decided that the ‘Palestinians’ would get autonomy in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but there was no ‘Palestinian’ willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Beginning in 1993, Israel entered into the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat, believing – foolishly – that he would lead his people to live with us in peace. Hamas continued to be rejectionist.
From 1993 to 2000 Israel spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours of its time trying to create a ‘Palestinian’ state. The ‘Palestinians’ weren’t interested. They only wanted to destroy the Jewish state. They responded with terror.
Yaacov Lozowick questions Cohen’s assumption:
Cohen believes the answer is that Arabs aren’t any different from Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese far that matter). Since they’re just like us, yet some of them behave so nastily, it must be because we’re doing things to them that make them nasty; since we’re responsible, we need to be better.
I, on the other hand, am stuck with the question. Why is it, indeed, that Arabs (or at any rate, many of them, and many of their regimes), are less pragmatic than Jews (or Americans, or Brits, or even Chinese, for that matter)?
And Daled Amos “reality checks” Cohen’s “Reality check.” Point by point. When he’s all done, Cohen’s “analysis” is reduced to a series of unsupported suppositions. It’s an excellent example of fisking.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
