Soccer Dad

When self-defense is a holocaust or the continued rantings of roger cohen

Roger Cohen is at it again. He writes in Israel, Iran and Fear:

In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.

So Israel's birth is every bit a crime as the Holocaust?

Let's go over some of the details of Israel's founding.

On May 15, 1948, the day the British Mandate over Palestine ended, the armies of five neighboring Arab states invaded the new State of Israel, which had declared its independence the previous day. The invasion, heralded by an Egyptian air attack on Tel Aviv, was vigorously resisted. From the north, east and south came the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt.

The invading forces were fully equipped with the standard weapons of a regular army of the time - artillery, tanks, armored cars and personnel carriers, in addition to machine guns, mortars and the usual small arms in great quantities, and full supplies of ammunition, oil, and gasoline. Further, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria had air forces. As sovereign states, they had no difficulty (as had the pre-state Jewish defense force) in securing whatever armaments they needed through normal channels from Britain and other friendly powers.

In contrast, the Jews had no matching artillery, no tanks, and no warplanes in the first days of the war. Some supplies of these weapons arrived in the days that followed, however, and turned the tide. Little more than small arms - in paucity- had been available to the Haganah which on May 28, 1948, was to merge with other Jewish defense groups to form the Israel Defense Forces. Two Jewish defense forces, the Irgun Zeva'i Le'ummi and the Lohamei Herut Israel agreed to cease their independent activities, (except in Jerusalem) and to absorb their members into the newly founded IDF.

So Israel's "crime" in being founded was defending itself against those who sought to destroy it. Forgetting about the refugees (from what would become Israel and the Arab states - whether they invaded or not), Cohen is equating Jewish self-defense with Jewish annihilation?

Obviously, I would argue otherwise. The Germans had to come to terms with the actions of their fathers. I'll take Cohen's word that they've done so successfully. But they only needed peaceful coexistence with themselves. However Israel hasn't found peaceful coexistence because the same nations who sought to destroy them 61 years ago, still seek to do so today. And if they can't do so militarily they will use institutions to weaken Israel until it is vulnerable. With cover provided by foreign policy sophists like Cohen, Israel's enemies seek to delegitimize it and render it defenseless. It isn't Israel that needs to change.

Here's the nub of Cohen's argument:

Yes, Israel is small -- all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland -- and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in "We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land," Israel has a "military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries."

Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.

His fallacy is that just because Israel does not face existential threats, it faces no threats whatsoever. Even assuming that his premise is correct - if Iran develops a nuclear bomb his premise is clearly wrong - his conclusion is wrong. Yes by any military measure Hezbollah and Hamas lost their recent wars with Israel. But both puppets of Iran threatened hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Hamas still launches rockets that can reach large sections of southern Israel's. Hezbollah isn't actively attacking Israel now, but under the watchful (but ineffective) eye of the UN has rebuilt its capabilities of attacking Israel's north.

And after Israel withdrew from the major Arab cities in Judea and Samaria in the mid 90's and from Gaza in 2005, first Fatah and then Hamas strengthened themselves. They used their newfound freedom to build a terror infrastructure not a civil society.

After dismissing all of the real threats faced by Israel, Cohen identifies the one that really bothers him.

Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: "The biggest risk to Israel is Israel."

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.

The irony here is incredible. After equating Israel's self-defense with the Holocaust, Cohen now dismisses Nazi analogies made to today's Iran, whose leader uses genocidal language to threaten the Jewish state.

But that's besides the point. According to Efraim Karsh, over 99% of the Palestinians no longer live under Israeli control. The idea that Israeli settlements somehow "atomize" Palestinian land is untrue.

What is true is that Cohen declares any Israel concessions that fail to satisfy the Palestinians as being insufficient. Furthermore he concludes that if Israel doesn't satisfy Palestinian demands Israel will be illegitimate. (And he does this in the course of endorsing a state that will be ethnically cleansed of all Jews!) So he gives veto power to the hardest liners among the Palestinians and effectively justifies terror against Israel.

Please also see Israel Matzav and Elder of Ziyon.

Crossposted on Yourish.