Roger Cohen is walking our road. He has another fine piece in the Times today, on Jewish identity, the Holocaust/victimization, and the hateful occupation.
A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a
two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone
on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement
impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically
destined for Palestine.
As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister,
remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one
political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a
non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a
binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state …”
million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state
solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.
Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of
settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.
I gotta wonder how long he's going to invoke the "Zionist dream." Dear Roger, do you believe in that Zionist dream? Do you believe in the necessity of a Jewish state?
I am informed that Leonard Fein of the Forward has responded to Cohen in the comment I excerpt below. Read it to understand the full-on detachment from political reality of a Jewish progressive. In essence, Fein is saying that all Jews have PTSD from the Holocaust. That Menachem Begin's (legitimate) fear of the Holocaust (he escaped it) has been passed on to American Jews. And it's irrational, and exploited by politicians, and we need therapy to overcome it.
Yes, true, all true. And what do the Palestinians, who basically have no human rights, deserve while Jews are overcoming this neurosis? If politicians are exploiting Holocaust fears, do we have any power to stop them? Even more important, Walt and Mearsheimer tried to discuss the issue of Jewish power over politicians and Fein essentially called them antisemites, out of his own Holocaust fears, surely. Is that any way to discuss important foreign-policy issues of today?
Fein:
…given Cohen's long experience in Germany,
and his empathic understanding of the Germ,an people, one might have
expected that he would dig a bit deeper into the Israeli psyche, that
he would try to understand just why it is that Israelis live with the
fears they do. Yet he seems satisfied to imply that it's just plain old
irrationality, since Israel is so much more powerful than the forces
arrayed against it.
How about this: Israeli Jews suffer an acute
version of post-traumatic stress disorder. The origins of the disorder
are well-known to Cohen; They derive from the calamitous trauma of the
Sho'a, the Holocaust,
Under "normal" circumstances, whatever
that may mean, the wounds of that trauma might by now have healed,
leaving only receding scars. Alas, that great trauma has been followed
by an evidently endless series of mini-traumas, traumas typically
identified by the places they happened — Ma'alot, the Coastal Highway,
the Savoy Hotel, Munich, the Dolphinarium and on, and on and on. Yes,
and even Sderot.
And to all those traumas that have prevented
the original wound from healing over, one must add the exploitation of
the traumas by a succession of politicians who have thought to benefit
by keeping fear alive. Thus Menachem Begin could say, and did, that
"Beirut is Berlin" and that "Arafat is Hitler."
It seems to me
that American Jews, too, suffer from PTSD, though to a much less acute
degree than do the Israelis. Yom Hasho'a, Holocaust Remembrance Day,
fall this Tuesday, April 21. More than six decades have passed since
the end of the horror that led the poet, Nelly Sachs, to write that "We
are gardeners who have no flowers, we stand upon a shining start and
weep," and the events we will recall this week are no more
comprehensible now, despite the hundreds of learned analyses that they
have occasioned, than they were the day Anne Frank succumbed or the day
Buchenwald was liberated or the day Adolph Eichmann was hanged.
I
do not mention such things to suggest that the world — or Roger Cohen
— should cut Israel some slack. I mention them because they powerfully
suggest that it will take a therapeutic model to bring Israel to a
clear-eyes analysis of its interests. Rabin began that work, but was
fatally interrupted. Now? Now comes Cohen to chastise Israel, as if in
its naughtiness it deserves a spanking.
No, Israel need
something quite different. And Mr. Cohen needs to listen to what Eran
Lerman, his correspondent from Israel was trying to tell him. Lerman
put the words into the mouth of his 17 year-old daughter, but odds are
they reflect his own fears as well.
It
is altogether too easy for Western sophisticates to see and call
attention to the errors of Israel's way. The harder work is to see and
respond to the wounds of Israel's psyche.
— Leonard Fein, Boston, MA
