Another Jew has passed the Gaza test. And the more status you have, the more Karmic bonus points you get. Menschy internationalist Roger Cohen, in the New York Times even allows himself to hint that Zionism is over. He'll come to that in a couple years… Cohen:
The heroic Israeli narrative has run its course….
Yes, there has to be a response to Hamas, but this is the wrong one.
It’s been wrong since James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, saw his attempts to get economic activity going in Gaza in 2005 thwarted by border closure and “everything getting wasted.” It’s been wrong since Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006 led to ostracism.
Israel has
the right to hit back at Hamas when attacked — but not to blow Gaza to
pieces. What it does not have the right to do is delude its people into
thinking that peace is achievable without coming to terms with the
deeply entrenched Middle Eastern realities that are Hamas and Hezbollah.
Related posts:
- Roger Cohen, shamed by Gaza, is the realist heir to tribalist Tom Friedman’s chair
- Roger Cohen, in the streets
- Ilene Cohen: ‘Why am I so boringly repetitious about pro-Israel ‘talking points’”?
- Reading the Roger Cohen-Marty Peretz exchange
- Game-changer: NYT’s Roger Cohen visits Iran and views Israeli and US militarism from the other side
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Wonderful. Thank you, Roger Cohen:
The high-tech security fence built to wall off the West Bank and the near-hermetic sealing of Gaza since withdrawal in 2005 are in the end attempts to shut out reality. Palestinians have become a vague abstraction to the vast bulk of Israelis not within the range of Hamas rockets: out of sight, out of mind. Israel, shamefully, has even prevented international journalists getting into Gaza to tell the story as they see it.
In this context, the hallucinogenic appeals of the government of caretaker Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, asking them to realize Hamas is their common enemy, become more understandable.
or this:
As for Ehud Barak, the third of the sound-bite-mouthing Israeli troika and leader of the Labor Party, his talk as defense minister of deepening and broadening the Gaza campaign has not been unrelated to an attempt to deepen and broaden his appeal among Israelis who see him as a peacenik. The subtext of political maneuver ahead of Feb. 10 elections has been one of the more repellent aspects of the Gazan carnage.
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