ON A NEW TAKE ON OLD FEARS

STUCK IN A RUT

Roger Cohen has an interesting op-ed in the New York Times today titled "Israel, Iran and Fear", where he makes some thought-provoking points about Israel:

"Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber.
Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood..."
"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.

As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”

There are no easy solutions out of this well-known and understood rut.  Just pushing it along doesn't seem to point to a way forward any more.

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[david waller]

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