I urge folks in the New York area to go to the debate about American policy in Israel and Palestine on Thursday night at the New School, featuring Brooklyn congressman Anthony Weiner, former Washington state congressman Brian Baird, and New York Times columnist Roger Cohen. It is sure to be an important moment in the bubbling tension between progressive views and pro-Israel views inside the Democratic Party. You can sign up here.
Weiner is hugely articulate, and a firebreathing supporter of “Eretz Israel.” Brian Baird is simply inspiring– plainspoken, thoughtful, the guy who fought for his late constituent Rachel Corrie and who urged a Berlin airlift to Gaza by the free nations of the world, to no avail.
And the moderator, Roger Cohen, is the most independent and impressive columnist at the New York Times. Yesterday at J Street, taking the prerogative of a columnist, Cohen argued against the theme of his own newspaper’s frontpage story on Iran. He said that in fact Iran was disempowered by the Arab revolutions, the Iranian is an old rickety revolution that has been no model to the Arab revolutions and that the Iranian regime either doesn’t want nukes or is too incompetent to produce them. Pakistan went from zero to bomb in ten years, Iran has been messing around forever and not making one.
The significance of the event lies in something MJ Rosenberg said a couple of years ago. When are the congresspeople who reflexively support Israel going to be asked about this support openly? When are the American people going to have a frank conversation about these issues? The last time I saw Roger Cohen on a New York stage, it was with two neoconservatives. Now he is in a much broader spectrum of establishment opinion. About time.
