Inventing Roger Cohen

How lucky for us to have a Roger Cohen, the man who wrote in the NY Times of Jan 1, 2014, that "(i)f Israel looks like a Jewish state and acts like a Jewish state, that is good enough for me -- as long as it gets out of the corrosive business of occupation.   Zionism, the one I identify with, forged a Jewish homeland in the name of restored Jewish pride in a democratic state of laws, not in the name of finicky insistence on a certain form of recognition, nor in the name of messianic religious Greater Israel nationalism."

Here we have our evil son, the one who asks what does this have to do with me?  But he is worse than the evil son.  Roger Cohen is self delusional.  Clearly, he is not simple, at least not by the lights of the NY Times.  And, he is hardly a child.

He claims that Israel is in the business of occupation.  Really?  We have no Palestinian state, in the legal sense, despite the General Assembly's vote; votes largely bought with Arab oil money.  We know they have established "embassies."  But, they have never been open to the Israelis.  They fire rockets from Gaze despite the borders with Gaze having been clearly established.  They object to joint ventures with Israeli companies because they do not want "normalization" to take place.  And, they celebrate Muslim murderers of Israeli citizens when Israel releases them.   They also have their own secret service and their own police officers.

The delusional Roger Cohen fails to appreciate that the PA is a corrupt organization and that their corruption stifles the ambitions of their people.  The PA is, therefore,  reliant on the funding from those nations who most hate Jews.  I might add that Christians and other non-Islamic people don't fair too well either under the rule of Islamic nations.  So much for "occupation."

A state that looks like a Jewish and acts like a Jewish state is good enough for Roger Cohen.  Really?  So what does a Jewish state look like?  How does a Jewish state act?  Like America?  Like Great Britain?  Like Russia?  Have you ever heard of an American ashamed to say, "I'm an American" or "this is an American country?"  Have you ever heard of a Brit or a Russian speaking that way?    But for an Israeli to say that Israel is a Jewish country; that's too much for Roger Cohen.  Israel today is Israel only because it was made Israel by Jews, for Jews.  Sure, it gives equal privileges to Druze, Muslims, Christians, gays, blacks, and whoever else, provided, of course, that they are citizens of Israel.
Can that be said of any of Israel's neighbors?  Jews have accomplished a great deal.  They have every right to be proud and to demand that the nations of the world recognize Israel as a Jewish state; indeed, the only Jewish state on this planet.  For Roger Cohen this insistence that Israel be recognized for what it is strikes him as being  "finicky."  It might offend the anti-Semite.  I, for one consider, it a basic Jewish right.

And, finally, he cones out with  someone's "messianic religious Greater Israel nationalism." Ah, yes, when all else fails, bring out that good ol' messianic religious Greater Israel nationalism.  Hallelujah.
We all know that one of Britain's early sins, as far as Israel is concerned, was to create the county of Jordan out of thin air.  What is now Jordan had always been part of Palestine and was to have been the Arab part.  But Churchill had to do some Arab sheik a favor, so he gave him half of Palestine, but called it Jordan.  That left only the other half of Palestine to be cut up between the Arabs and the Jews.

We get it.  It's old news.  Sure, you'll find someone who believes anything including that the world is flat, but get real.  No one in Israel expects the Palestinians in the West Bank to be pushed over into Jordan.  Yes, we understand that there is a land mass that once constituted Greater Israel.  We also know that there won't be a Greater Israel anymore than that the alAqsa  mosque will be removed from where Saladin placed it on top of the ruins of the great Jewish Temple.