The Israel-America clash
"The sparring between the United States and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing," writes Roger Cohen in his online column for Sunday's New York Times. He continues:
Israel’s interests are not served by an uncritical American administration. The Jewish state emerged less secure and less loved from Washington’s post-9/11 Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.
Perhaps. But is Cohen concerned with Israel's interests, or with America's?
A sentence later, Cohen writes of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.
One can debate whether or not the policies Cohen advocates are good for Israel (they include having Israel move ahead with the Palestinians on peace talks, stopping Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank, having the United States talk with Hamas and Hezbollah, avoiding slapping Iran with additional sanctions no matter what the Islamic Republic does), and it's fine for Cohen to put America's interests ahead of Israel's, but he should not fool himself into thinking those interests always collide.
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First of all, there hasn’t been a meeting between Netanyahu and Obama yet, and we don’t know what separates Israel and the U.S. We do know what Israel has agreed to and what the Palestinian Authority has agreed to, and even a “unity government” which isn’t going to happen tomorrow, will have to accept these agreements. It will mean that Hamas, as a part of the PA, will have to fight, not sponsor or encourage or condone terrorism. It means that its current dependence upon Iran will have to end. Otherwise, it will not happen, because it is against Israeli policy and U.S.law. And the Fateh knows on which side its bread is buttered.
Milton if you are going to represent yourself as a Semite and a Jew may I ask you to, at least, be accurate? Semites are a particular breed of the human phylum that includes Arabs as well as Jews. I have discovered that there are Jews that aren’t Hebrew and Hebrews that aren’t Jews. While I try to rationalize all this I do realize that Semitic people are identifiable as a distinct people through DNA analysis. I try not to say anti-semitic because what I really mean is anti Jew. In this case I disagree with several points Mr. Cohen backs, but I wouldn’t call him anti-Semitic. Perhaps you mean “not a republican” but that would apply to every non-millionaire with a brain and a sense of independence.
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Milton J. Wolk
04/27/09 08:32 PM
Ho hum. Just another diatribe by this so-called authority “Cohen”. Nothing worse than an anti-semitic Jew. We have enough non-Jewish anti-semites in the world, this is all we need, unless Cohen may not be a Jewish name!!!