Addendum: Because of a rather nasty antisemitic email I received because of my overt and outspoken support for Israel, I thought I should make a note here as to why I feel the way I do. First, you can knock off the antisemitic remarks as I am not Jewish, at least not by birth or religion. I am as WASPy as one can get. That said, my background and eduction is such that I never had a friend who wasn't Jewish until I went off to junior high school. The two most influential women in my life were the mothers of two of my Jewish friends. I often spent the night at their houses and participated in Friday night sabbath services and many times over the years, I was invited to join their families for Passover. In addition, I am of an age that the terrible ordeal of the Holocaust was nearly real time for me. One of my friends was born at Auschwitz just days before the camp liberation that saved her mother from the gas chamber. I was born on V.E. Day. The couple that I babysat for regularly had had an "Anne Frank" type experience in Belgium during the war and had ultimately ended up in our small Pennsylvania town, he as the Cantor at the local synagogue, she a teacher of Hebrew. I spent many hours listening to their stories and for two years, I accompanied my best friend to Hebrew school every Thursday afternoon as she prepared for her Bas Mitzvah. And maybe the most lasting influence came right out of my own very mainline Presbyterian Church, where all students progressed through the Sunday School years with classes in the world's great religions and for an entire year we studied Judaism and were constantly told to remember God's Covenant with Abraham. It wasn't until I was married and looking for a good church for my young children that I fully realized how different my views are from so many other WASPy types. So call me a princess, I take ownership of the thought as a Sara. Let's call it Princess with an attitude or as my friends call me, Princess 'tude. Now on to the real story:
Hunker Down With History
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, which was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.
It seems every blog I regularly visit is quoting this article tonight and every single time I see it, I get angry all over again. What the hell is this guy, Cohen, talking about? European Jews, Israel??? A mistake? He obviously knows nothing about either the religious/Biblical history of the area or the secular history either. So, I am going to repeat a post on the subject for a little historical perspective:
Originally posted 2 December 2004
I've been trying to organize my thoughts and decide whether to start this Middle East history study in the present and work back in time, or start in ancient times and work forward. Because I believe that all the history of strife and alienation of the Middle East traces back to the Covenant of Abraham, I've decided to start with the ancient and work toward the present (I should live so long). The first signs of civilization began approximately 4500 B.C. Two civilizations emerged at about the same time ... the Mesopotamians to the northeast of Palestine and Egyptian to the southwest of it. It was about 2500 years before these two civilizations discovered the existence of the other and the fight began. Palestine, as the buffer, had little chance of avoiding the fight.
The
oldest and most prominent Mesopotamian civilizations began with the
city-states of Susa, Kish, and Ur, now part of modern Iraq. In the
third millennium B.C., Sargon I, conquered the Sumerians and formed the
Sumerian-Akkadian kingdom with a high standard of living and a highly
developed culture. The development of cuneiform writing was their
greatest contribution and a vast improvement over Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
Around 2100 B.C., all city-states in this area were
united into the far-reaching Babylonian Empire.
Hammurabi was the Moses of the Babylonians, giving them their code of law as a present from heaven, much as Moses gave his code of law to the Israelites at Mount Sinai one thousand years later.
While the Babylonians were building their cities, drinking their wine, getting rich, and dreaming of world conquest, there were as yet no Jews. In about 2000 B.C., a new Semitic tribe, the Assyrians, began to challenge the soft and rich Babylonians. At about the same time, a man named Terah took his son Abram, Abram's wife Sarai, and his grandson Lot, the nephew of Abram, and emigrated from the cosmopolitan city of Ur in Babylonia. Not much is known about Terah except that the Bible traces his genealogy to Shem, one of the three sons of Noah. Whether he was a Babylonian or what language he spoke or what his occupation was, is never mentioned. We have to assume he was not a poor sheepherder since he lived in one of the most sophisticated cities of that age.
So why does any of this matter? The Bible, our main source of reference leaves more questions unanswered than answered. All we know is that by the act of crossing the River Euphrates, Terah and his family group become the first people in the Bible identified as Ivriim, or in English "Hebrews," ... the people "who crossed over," the people "from the other side of the river."
Terah and his family wander six hundred miles northwest from Ur to the land of Haran, in the southern part of what is now Turkey. Terah dies and the story of Abram/Abraham begins ... a beginning that has not ended to the present day. It is in Haran after his father's death that Abram has his first meeting with the Lord God "Jehovah." God proposes his Covenant to the elderly Abram. Abram is to be called Abraham and Sarai, his wife, to be called Sarah or Princess. To seal the Covenant, all males were to be circumcised. In return, God will make the descendants of Abraham "His Chosen People and place them under His protection. (Note: God does not promise to make them better, only that they will exist as a separate and distinct entity and be His people.) From an historical point of view, it doesn't matter if this experience was real or imaginary on Abraham's part. In four thousand years, the idea of a Covenant is still alive and well in daily prayers and synagogues around the world. The idea of a "Covenant with God" is the driving force in Judaism and without it there can be no Judaism and no Jews. For four hundred years, Abraham and his descendants wandered about as nomads in the land of Canaan, without a country of their own or a stable form of government. The were often regarded by the pagan population as strange and a little crazy, worshiping a God that was invisible. But, we get ahead of ourselves.
When God told Abraham "I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you," and when He said about Sarah, "I'll bless her and give her a son. And she'll become a mother of many nations; kings of nations will come from her," Abraham wondered how he at 100 years and his wife at ninety years could have a child. Abraham called out, "Oh, that Ishmael might find favor in your sight" And God answered, "As for Ishmael, I've heard your request. I have blessed him and I will make him fruitful and will give him many descendants. He will father twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you this time next year, will I establish my covenant."
As far as I am concerned, we have reached the crux of the matter. Isaac and Ishmael. Half brothers. The elder forced to take second place to the younger. The makings of a dysfunctional family right from the git go.
So I'll pick up this story later as we begin to trace the history of Isaac and Ishmael.
End of old post *********** End of old post
Related:
Sadly, Cohen's grasp of history is shown to be almost as weak as that of Iran's Holocaust-denying President Ahmadinejad.
Cohen rails against "the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims," in a land where Jews predated the very existence of Islam by more than three millennia. It was only during the first two centuries AD that the Jews were forced from their ancestral homes in Israel and into slavery around the world, and it wasn't until after then that Muslims usurped Israeli lands.
Cohen makes another asinine statement unsupported by the history he claims to be on the side of, when he states, "Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose..."
Poppycock.
The following two links are both from Atlas Shrugged and are excellent rebuttals to Cohen. I encourage you to follow the links and read the entire posts as they both say it far better than I can.
Nidra Poller's Love Letter to Richard Cohen
Nidra sent me a copy of the letter she wrote to Richard Cohen. Nidra, you're too good for him.
There is no limit to journalistic chuzpa! You have a cushy spot on the Washington Post and the words just pour out of your computer and onto the page. No need for fact checking. It's modestly called "opinion" but when your reputation is secure, and the country you are bashing is getting attacked by thousands of rockets, with a promise of nuclear annihilation just being the thin veil that separates Nasrallah from Ahmadinejad, opinion turns into historical expertise.
I suppose you think jihad is conspiracy theory. I assume you do not know that your comfortable desk chair wherever it is is no less marked for conquest than the skinny little land of Israel. And you, Roger Cohen, are no less a candidate for death or dhimmitude than any Israeli on any streetcorner anywhere in the world. The force of opposition to Israeli presence in the Middle East, to Jewish existence in the world, does not ask for opinions, it acts on its own terms to take what rightfully belongs to it. If you can still think that means Gaza, the "West Bank" and half of Jerusalem plus right of return, then just stop listening to yourelf and listen to them.
Tell me, please explain to me how you can be so ignorant and so proud of yourself? Not only do you not know where the Jews of Israel came from, you do not know where the Arabs who recently decided to call themselves Palestinians came from.... Continued Here
All people are deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's the foundation of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Any cultural group, deprived of rights, made into second class citizens, abused by a government and given no right or avenue for redress, is deserving of an independent, free nation.
This applies to Middle Eastern Jews. The very fact that the nations in which they lived called themselves "islamic" deprived Jewish residents of the most fundamental right of a free person- the right to be considered an equal under the law. Since, not being Muslim, no Jew could ever participate in the making of law in an Islamic nation- as an equal- he is by definition a second class citizen. Claims of fair treatment of Jews by Muslims are irrelevant- a well kept house slave is still a slave, and as long as a Jew cannot be a political equal by virtue of his religion, he is not a true citizen- IN HIS NATIVE LAND! Claims of fair treatment of Jews by Muslims are also false, as made evident by documented, repeated cases of mass violence perpetrated against them, for which the governments offered no protection, and no justice. Since there is no avenue for democratic redress, the Jews of the Middle East were entitled, as Human Beings, indigenous to the region, to independence- NO LESS than the people represented by the HUNDRED OTHER INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS the world has by and large supported over the past century. ... Continued Here
And in his typical "give 'em hell" style, Mac tells Cohen what he can do:
Cohen's a symptom, Evil pandering Liberalism is the problem
No Mein-Cohen, the fact that Ismael has wanted Issac's rear end for over two mllinea is the reason, but especially since 1948 when he Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini yelled "Murder the Jews, murder them all".
Cohen ought to resign and go join Hizbillah, after all they could use a sympathetic war correspondent right now, you know to "tell their side". But Cohen is only a symptom, one of a crowd of America hating left-wing scribes such as Juan Cole who see good as evil and evil as good.
Hmmm. Is Jonah Goldberg chastizing Cohen? Well sort of, but kind of half-assed, like a back-handed compliment except in this case it is a back-handed slap:
Indeed, Cohen seems to be grounding the entire case for Israel's existence on the fact that the Jews of Europe had to go somewhere, and they were "mistaken" to pick an Arab neighborhood as a destination. If only those European Jews had all gone to Shaker Heights! This is a really ill-chosen line of reasoning in a column that keeps referring to the authority of historians. It's hardly as if Jews haven't been living there for a long time. And it's hardly as if they have a weak historical claim to the land. Cohen surely knows this. But, it seems for the sake of being provocative, he chooses to lend weight to the argument that Israel is nothing more than a foreign intrusion. After all, he closes by saying that the only way for non-Jewish Middle-Easterners to accept Israel's existence is for them to accept the moral implications of the Holocaust. But that's absurd. Plenty of Arab "moderates" accept the fact that the Holocaust happened and that it was terrible. Their response is to say, "So give them land in Germany." Cohen's position doesn't seem to be much different.
This is a must read article. It is jam packed with facts, historical and current. Written by a resident of Jerusalem, a former Boston lawyer who made aliya to Israel in 1991. It is long, but well worth every word.
At Little Green Footballs this morning, Charles Johnson points to an article in today's Washington Post with the comment, "At the Washington Post, Richard Cohen agrees with Hamas and Hizballah that 'Israel is a mistake.' And he’s open to the argument that Israel is a 'crime.'”
If that sounds like an overly blunt characterization of what Cohen wrote in this morning's Washington Post, it's not. Cohen's article reflects a total ignorance of Jewish history, and of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel dating back to biblical times, which is inexcusable even for an assimilated Jew (which I assume Cohen to be). In fact, even Christians should be offended by Cohen's writing them out of the history of the Holy Land. Cohen adopts the Arab narrative of the last century of history lock, stock and barrel, without even considering that it might be false. Note, I said Arab and not 'Palestinian,' because the 'Palestinians' by their own admission are a fiction created by that Arab narrative.
The term "Palestina" was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian. The Romans wanted to rename Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) after the Philistines, the longtime enemy of the Jews. Hadrian believed that by renaming the Jewish homeland after the Jews' archenemy, he would be able to forever break the bond between the Land of Israel and the Jewish people.
The Romans pillage Jerusalem - A Roman bas-relief, still extant on an ancient building in Rome, shows Roman soldiers robbing the menorah and other sacred objects of the Beit HaMikdash HaSheni (the Second Holy Temple) But even the name of the Philistines, from which the term "Palestine" was adopted, is completely alien to the Land of Israel.
The name Philistines in Hebrew is plishtim, which comes from the Hebrew verb polshim (foreign invaders).
Arabs only came to the Land of Israel in large numbers after the Jews returned in the 20th century and started to rebuild the nation, thereby creating economic and employment opportunities for Arab immigrants.
Prior to 1870, when Jews started to return to the Holy Land in large numbers, there were fewer than 100,000 Arabs living in what is today the State of Israel - including Yesha (the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District).
This small number of nomadic, tribal Arabs who lived in the Holy Land before the modern Jewish return never considered themselves to be a separate people or nation.
The Arabs who lived in the Land of Israel were not "Palestinians" but Arabs - part of a huge Arab people with 22 very large independent nations that control one-ninth of the land mass on the planet Earth.
In an interview given by Zuhair Mohsen to the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977, Mr. Mohsen explains the origin of the 'Palestinians':
- The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.
- For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.
In this morning's Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
Israel is anything but a mistake, and history shows the justice of Israel's cause. With the exception of the period between the two Jewish Temples between roughly 586 and 516 BCE, Jews ruled this land continuously from approximately 1300 BCE until 68 CE. Since that time, no other government has been based in Israel, no other country has called Jerusalem its capitol, and no other people has called this land its home. It is not history that is Israel's enemy but the false narrative of history presented to the World by the Arab Muslims. It is not history that is Israel's enemy, but Arab attempts to wipe out the vestiges of that history, as if destroying all of the Temple artifacts on the Temple Mount will confirm that it was 'always' Haram al-Sharif, that two Jewish Temples never stood there and that Jesus never argued with money changers there.
This country was deserted swampland for much of the period between 68 CE and the beginning of the return of larger numbers of Jews started in 1870. Israel's interior areas were mainly a desert-like wasteland while her coast was a malaria-ridden swamp. But Jews always prayed three times a day that God should gather them in from their diaspora and bring them back to this country. Many Jews attempted to come here on their own. Jews were a majority of the population of Jerusalem in the 19th century, and settled many of the cities of the Galilee as well. In 1844 - when the Land of Israel was controlled by the Turkish Muslims - the Turkish census counted 7,120 Jews and 5,000 Muslims living in Jerusalem. Thus, Jerusalem was already a Jewish city 160 years ago. Until an Arab massacre wiped them out in 1929, there was even a large Jewish community in Hebron, which included a major Talmudical academy, which was transplanted from the village of Slobodka in Lithuania. ... Continued Here
UPDATE:
(Hat tip: Wizbang) James Lewis at The American Thinker explains why Richard Cohen should be fired today:
What gives Cohen the right to encourage the genocidal enemies of Israel in a time of hot war, when innocents are getting killed every hour, and when he knows that his words will be read and repeated times around the world?
Forget Cohen's last name. It wouldn't make any difference if it was Smith or Schicklgruber. But it might be a lot more understandable.
During the Hitler Holocaust the expression "self-hating Jew" became part of the vocabulary of history. It is a terrifying expression, as horrific as "house slave" in the antebellum South.
Today, the German expression "Juedisches Selbst-Hass" has come to haunt civilization again.
Thank you, Mr. Cohen. And thank you, Washington Post.
There are people, unfortunately, who do evil. And then there are those who encourage them by word and deed. In common law and in common decency the enablers are as bad as the evil doers.
Thank you, Mr. Cohen. And thank you, Washington Post.
And a big thank you to Jonah Goldberg of NRO's "The Corner" (what a difference a day makes) for pointing me to this article at Kesher Talk. Please read it all:
Holocaust revisionism at the WaPo
[ UPDATE: Ben has a unique take on Cohen's argument. ]
Great, now we have Richard Cohen in the WaPo questioning Israel's legitimacy, using the threadbare revisionist history of 30 years of Islamist-funded university Middle East Studies Departments. How many errors can you count in the first paragraph?
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
First big whopper which torpedoes Cohen's credibility, because it is an easy fact to check: Half of Israel's Jewish population is Arab Jews, not European Jews. How come there are Arab Jews? Because they were in Israel/Judea before Arabs became Muslim. In fact, they were the Jews before various historical events scattered and exiled some of them, one destination being Europe. (And yes, European Jews and Arab Jews are all Jews. The tracing of Ashkenazi Jewry from their origins in Judea are clear, their holy language, religious rituals, liturgy, and even genetic markers are the same, all dating back to where Israel is now, and they all regard each other as Jews and always have. So let's not even start with that particular nonsense.)
The earliest verifiably Jewish artifacts in Israel date to 1500 years before it was conquered by Islam. Contemporary documents and archeological finds verify some Biblical history, and show evidence of Jews in Persia 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, in Babylonia (later Iraq) 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, and in Egypt (especially Alexandria) during the Roman Empire, before Egypt was conquered by Islam. Even the Koran acknowledges that Jews were living in Arabia before Mohammed decided to create a new religion, and there is evidence for Jewish residence in what are now Arab countries dating back to Solomonic times.
To assert that "a nation of European Jews" was created in "an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians)" is to turn history on its head. In fact, the first area of Muslim control outside Arabia was created in what had been the Jewish homeland, renamed "Palestine" by the Romans. Then Islam went on to conquer North Africa, half of Europe, Byzantium, and points East.
"And some Christians," says Cohen. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that Jesus was a Jew and grew up in a Jewish nation which happened to be where Cohen places "an area of Arab Muslims." Right before the Muslims invaded Palestine, who did it belong to? Byzantium. What was Byzantium? The remnants of the Roman Empire, whose capital was Constantinople, seat of the first Christian nation and what became the Eastern Orthodox rite. Palestine was therefore officially Christian, but some Jews still lived there, mostly in the Gallilee.
So that's how there happened to be "some Christians" in "an area of Arab Muslims." ... Continued
The biggest mistake of all is to allow ignorance, whether by Muslims, Christians or Jews, to set the agenda and dictate the response. I don't know too much about Richard Cohen except that I sure wouldn't trust him and I wouldn't want to count on him in a time of crisis. Richard Cohen, your article is the biggest mistake I've seen so far. Go back to the rock you crawled out from under.
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