Roger Cohen: Time to Go

ROGER COHEN: TIME TO GO

Roger Cohen, whom the New York Times labels a globalist, penned the following description of Israel in his April 7th op-ed piece circulated on line and in print, as well, in the international edition of the International Herald Tribune:

…the siege mentality of a nation controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians but unsure what to do with them or with the world’s growing disavowal of this corrosive dominion that humiliates its victims and eats into the soul of its masters.

He is, of course, saying this in a piece speaking about Judge Goldstone’s earlier op-ed piece in the Washington Post wherein the learned Judge disavowed some of the negative findings in what has generally become known as the Goldstone Report, although there were three other authors who signed their names to this as well, and they have issued no such retraction.

Not happy with what Judge Goldstone wrote in his own op-ed piece, Cohen could not help but conclude with the following statement, his own “Cohen Report” on the exercise we here in Israel called Operation Cast Lead:

Meanwhile, the facts remain: the 1,400 plus Palestinians dead, the 13 Israelis killed, the devastation, the Hamas rockets – and the need for credible investigation of what all evidence suggests were large-scale, indiscriminate, unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza, as well as Hamas’ crimes against civilians.

Frankly, I am tired of Roger Cohen, the Jewish immigrant from England sitting comfortably in his New York apartment and finding ways to swipe at Israel in every op-ed piece he writes, even if the topic has nothing to do with Israel. But to Roger Cohen, everything in the world has to do with Israel and sometimes he appears obsessed with Israel, but not enough to live here, of course.

For example, during the period October 1-December 10 of last year five of his op-ed pieces alone dealt with Israel, as if there was nothing else going on in the world worthy of his attention. In the last of these columns, on December 10th, he says that

The view that American Jews supportive of Israel but critical of its policies are not “real Jews” is….widespread.

His evidence of course is his intimate knowledge of the core approach of major US Jewish organizations such as AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Well, I know an awful lot of “real Jews’ who are, indeed, critical of our policies here and while I wish there were fewer of them, I would certainly not question their Jewishness, but Cohen does.

He is also sloppy in his analysis of facts. In one of his earlier pieces he said that US President Obama “had virtually no domestic constituency for his attempt to denounce the continued growth of settlements.” Well, some of us here may wish that was true but we all know that a significant segment of American Jewry very definitely agrees with the President.

And, of course, this past week’s description of Israel as a “corrosive dominion that humiliates its victims and eats into the soul of its masters” is certainly not an accurate description of the country in which I have elected to live these last 27 years. To be sure, we have our problems here and the future is anything but secure, that is as clear today as it has been since the second Lebanese war. At that time it became clear that we no longer possessed the dominant deterrent capability that had protected us since 1967. And yes, we do have a challenge before us, how best to live in a land that needs to be fairly shared by two peoples, each of whom claims a historic connection to that land. But solving that problem is the job of those of us who live here, all of us, and not Roger Cohen and his ilk that choose to deal with their discomfort in being Jewish by spewing forth their venom to constantly criticize those of us who have placed our collective futures on the line in this land of our forefathers.

Perhaps the New York Times, as an earlier pundit suggested, should follow the tradition they started when they booted Irving Kristol and do the same with Roger Cohen. We would all be better off as a result.