When the going gets tough, Roger Cohen gets going

Roger Cohen has a column in the Times today that is remarkable for its toughness. Titled, “Israel’s Sustainable Success,” it says that the occupation may be permanent but Israel can manage it. Let’s quit with the “unsustainable” idea; Obama should stop saying that the occupation can’t go on; it may not be desirable, but it can go on forever, because Tel Aviv is a sparkling success for all the world and Israel is “certain of more or less unswerving American support.” Cohen’s idea of “manageable conflict,” to which he says the Palestinians are as much a party as the Israelis, is reminiscent of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall idea, but retrofitted for a 47-year military occupation. Excerpts:

Tel Aviv, one of the world’s most attractive cities, has a boom-time purr about it. For all the talk of its isolation — and all the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement — Israel has an economy as creative as it is successful. Yes, it is sustainable.

Behind its barriers and wall, backed by military might, certain of more or less unswerving American support, technologically innovative and democratically stable, Israel has the power to prolong indefinitely its occupation of the West Bank and its dominion over several million Palestinians…

It is time to retire the unsustainability nostrum. Facile and inaccurate, it distracts from the inconvenient truth of Israel’s sustainable success…

Permanent occupation is what several ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government advocate. Backed by the evidence, they are certain it can be managed. They are right.

I found this piece so spiritually exhausted and exhausting that I turned to a book I had out, Emerson’s Anti-Slavery Writings, and his lecture on slavery from 1855. Emerson said he did not have the talent for politics, but legislatures passing laws for the recovery of fugitive slaves forced all citizens to come forward and consider how slavery could coexist alongside “the advantages and superiorities we fondly ascribe to ourselves.”

Just read this.

A high state of general health cannot coexist with a mortal disease in any part…

We have to consider that, however strongly the tides of public sentiment have set or are setting towards freedom, the code of slavery in this country is at this hour more malignant than ever before. The recent action of Congress has brought it home to New England, and made it impossible to avoid complicity.

The crying facts are these, that, in a republic professing to base its laws on liberty, and on the doctrines of Christianity, slavery is suffered to subsist; and, when the poor people who are the victims of this crime, disliking the stripping and peeling process, run away into states where this practice is not permitted,–a law has been passed requiring us who sit here to seize these poor people, tell them they have not been plundered enough, and must go back to be stripped and peeled again, and as long as they live…

We found well-born, well-bred, well-grown men among ourselves, not outcasts, not foreigners, not beggars, not convicts, but baptised, vaccinated, schooled, high-placed men, who abetted this law. ‘O by all means, catch the slave, and drag him back.’ And when we went to the courts, the interpreters of God’s right between man and man said, ‘catch the slave and force him back.’

Now this was disheartening. Slavery is an evil, as cholera or typhus is, that will be purged out by the health of the system. Being unnatural and violent, I know that it will yield at last, and go with cannibalism, tattooing, inquisition, duelling…

But to find it here in our sunlight, here in the heart of Puritan traditions in an intellectual country, in the land of schools, of sabbaths and sermons, under the shadow of the White Hills, of Katahdin, and Hoosac; under the eye of the most ingenious, industrious and self-helping men in the world,–staggers our faith in progress.

Emerson called for political leaders to make a deal to free the country of slavery, with compensation for the slaveholders. Creative men could figure that out, he said. But they didn’t do a thing, the crying facts continued, and the political parties continued to cater to the slave power. And four years later a radical who hated slavery led a murderous raid on the south, and helped precipitate the country on the path toward war, and Emerson celebrated John Brown. Slavery was not sustainable.