The Transformation of Roger Cohen
The emergence of The New York Times’ Roger Cohen as a vital progressive Jewish voice on issues related to Israel has been something that’s very much surprised me over the past year. This interesting article in New York Jewish Week helpsput it into some context:
“Something did break in me at the time of the Gaza attack” last winter, he said. “I couldn’t see the strategy behind” Israel’s military moves, “and I was appalled at the extent of the loss of life” among Gazans. [...] “The great operative word” among Palestinians now is “humiliation,” Cohen said. “Whether or not it’s desired, that’s the effect. And it’s not good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul.” [...] “No degree of suffering gives you an eternal passport to ride roughshod over another people,” he said.
For me, I think the equivalent moment came during the attack on Lebanon in 2006, but the impulse is similar.
38 Responses to “The Transformation of Roger Cohen”
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June 13th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Roger Cohen is a fucking piece of filth who is nothing but an apologist for the Ayatollahs in Iran. Fuck him.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Well, these partial shifts are welcome, but I really find it hard to see how Gaza 2009 or Lebanon 2006 were any break with the long-standing Zionist treatment of the native arabs of Palestine.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:35 am
For me it was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I don’t mean at all to be smart–it is just that these kind of events have a way of sharpening views.
BTW, I thought Blow’s piece in today’s Times was unconvincing. If we reacted to every instance of unhinged hate speech not much would get done.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:42 am
sorry Matt I’ve been reading you for a long time and your writing has never indicated a change in your view of Israel….you’ve always been critical and maybe you are more so now, but its on the same continuum.
And Cohen may be critical of Israel, but he is an apologist for the Iranian regime and its treatment of its minorities. One could be one without the other….but Cohen isn’t.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:44 am
But did the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (attack on Gaza in 2006 etc) make you understand what jewish colonialism had done to the Palestinian arabs since 1917? Or did it make you think that Israel had recently ‘lost its way’ (in 2009, in 2006, in 1982 etc)?
June 13th, 2009 at 10:48 am
It’s a demographic war. Israel has a kind of slo-mo Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.
.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:50 am
It’s not trivial that Lebanon ‘06 and Gaza ‘09 were failures. It’s one thing to embark upon a heartless policy that leads to greater security, quite another to waste lives and treasure on adventures that increase isolation and uncertainty. Roger Cohen’s despair is only partly a result of Israeli brutality in Gaza; it’s also caused by the shortsighted stupidity of the Israeli political class.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Gee Matty I would have thought that your and Cohen’s shared enthusiasms for the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan would have long ago married you and Cohen.
Having chosen to screw his readers did that lying piece of shit not share his heads up (which he made use of to protect himself and his family) about anthrax with you either?
What a roach!
June 13th, 2009 at 10:52 am
The events in Lebanon convinced me of the dangers of further Israeli withdrawals.
A withdrawal in the West Bank will lead to rockets on Tel Aviv
and Ben Gurion Airport, which will in turn create an escalation
that will make Lebanon and Gaza look like child’s play.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:54 am
But the whole business of colonising the land conquered in 1967 was about deliberately choosing isolation and uncertainty over greater security. As indeed was the policy of imposing settlers in the lands conquered in the Suez crisis, which Eisenhower had to force them out of. Short-sighted stupidity and bigotry has been a thread running the whole colonial project.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am
WHy hasn’t the pigf*cker Islamophile savage who calls himself Mr. Abb1 showed up yet?
June 13th, 2009 at 11:12 am
I guess 39 years of occupation didn’t do it for you until then?…
June 13th, 2009 at 11:17 am
When LoneWacko shows his filthy face again, bury him with this link.
Founder of the Minutemen. Scum.
June 13th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Attached is a link to a column on the Huffington Post describing the goat fucking piece of shit, Roger Cohen, as he appeared before Iranian Jews in a Los Angeles synagogue. Despite being informed that his is a fucking lying fucktard, he ignored the stories told by those refugees, preferring to believe what Jews in Iran told him. Of course, those Jews in Iran were under no pressure from the regime there to paint a false rosy picture. For anyone who believes that, I have a nice bridge which I am planning to visit this afternoon for sale. It’s brand new, less then 2 years old in pristine condition, connecting Alexandria, Va. with Prince Georges Co., Md.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-david-wolpe/clashing-over-iran-and-th_b_175326.html
June 13th, 2009 at 11:35 am
You people really love each other, don’t you? You actually get off on these little blog commentary bitch-fests. This is just weird.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
SLC, why would anyone care what you have to say? You’re not only a racist who hates arabs and persians, you’re a whackjob who compares their own pet cause to segregation, and you mean that as a good thing.
Most of us already hate Roger ‘fool or frenchman’ Cohen.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
A lot of people belived that line about “A land without people for a people without land” too.
The zionist project has been built on lies, censorship and coercion from the start. American Jews have been in denial but some are starting to acknowledge the truth.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
It’s never acknowledged and probably never even enters the consciousness or modern conservatives and especially modern conservative Christians but the ancient mistrust and hatred of Jews as it evolved in the modern era is based in part upon the history of Jewish societies being passive in the face of assaults. This passivity is not totally true from late Middle Ages Spain to the Russian or Polish pogroms through the Nazi Holocaust but as a general thing it holds up. Being stateless of course renders the response to attacks doomed to failure but still, there is an embedded prejudice against passivity in the face of attacks.
The hated Jew history and myth we should recall worked behind the scenes. Deviously and in the shadows. Too cowardly to fight in the open. Too cowardly to fight at all really.
Now the Jews have their state and don’t think the centuries of passivity or victim hood are not playing a big role in growing embrace of violence and oppression, or that that embrace has not greatly added to their stature among observers here.
Eventually Israel is going to repay the Holocaust 10 or 1000 times over on someone. Those someones will happen to be Muslim.
June 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
rapier, so isreal is just showing off to Europeans because they have a genocidal insecurity complex?
June 13th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
“No degree of suffering gives you an eternal passport to ride roughshod over another people.”
Cohen misunderstands the underlying rationale of the occupation, of the Lebanon war, and of the Gaza invasion. That rationale is security. It’s certainly possible to disagree with the proposition that these actions actually do (or might have) improved Israel’s security position, or, even if they did, or do, that they’re worth the cost in human life and suffering. But Cohen only sees things in emotional terms as he once again demonstrates here.
He’s absolutely in the grips of what the Israelis call the “Galut” mentality, and I say that as a member of the Galus myself.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Bullshit. Both Yglesias and Cohen are Zionists, both want an ethnic group to rule a state, and therefore both are tribalistic savages and racist swine, like every other Zionist.
And I’ll say this: I really do much prefer a sincere overt Zionist like my buddy SLC here to a “conflicted”, self-pitying Zionist like Cohen. Oh, Cohen, he is such a nice guy; murdering and plundering in his name is so upsetting to him; let us all comfort him, poor Jewish soul. Ah, oh, ah, oh. Murdering, plundering and crying. Truly disgusting.
June 13th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Re abb1
Excuse me, I made 2 comments here, neither of which had anything to do with Mr. Cohens’ views on Israel. Both were apropos his views on Jews now living or formerly living in Iran.
June 13th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Many who were ambivalent about the I/P problem before 2006 had their eyes opened to the barbarity and murderous cynicism of the Israelis then and have had their disgust and despair increased by the massacre in Gaza.
Notwithstanding the murder and injuries suffered by so many innocent civilians, there is a positive side to these Israeli atrocities – the US and world MSM have lost their previous passivity and are now paying much closer attention to Israel’s actions and policies. The tried-and-true Israeli propaganda using Holocaust Guilt and endlessly repeating the “Iarael as victim” theme are no longer accepted at face value.
In the next months and years this MSM shift will cause Israel nothing but problems.
June 13th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I’d never paid attention to the “old” Roger Cohen. What was he before now? All I gather is that no one seemed to think very much of him.
June 13th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
For me it was about 1999 when the Israelis kept telling the Palestinians to crack down on suicide bombers while blowing up their police stations and killing their policemen at the same time. It struck me that if it was their sole aim was to stop suicide bombers then those measures would be a bit counter-productive. That only goal of killing Palestinian policemen I could think of was to weaken the PLO’s ability to govern and turn the occupied territories into a dependent, rump state.
June 13th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
It was always the same, since the earliest days of the colonization. Zionists have always been antagonistic to the native population, and, of course, it couldn’t be any different, given what Zionism is all about.
Even back in early 1900s when supposed Marxists of Zionist persuasion began moving there organizing kibbutzes, they would never accept a single Arab as a member, only as hired help, for hard labor. That’s how National-Communism operates.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
There’s no objective way to read the history chapters of the Old Testament as something other than as justifying genocide as the will of God. After Joshua fit the battle of Jericho he slit the throats of every man, woman, and child in the place. I’ve got no belief that Islam is less bloodthirsty (though there have been Jewish enclaves in the Muslim world for 1000 years), but military superiority is no measure of Justice.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
September 11 was the wake-up call.
America is hated by many because of our support for Israel, F-16’s and Caterpillar tractors kill Palestinians and they are Made In America. And Israel is not worth one American life or one American dollar.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Re patrick
Mr. patrick can go fuck himself.
June 14th, 2009 at 1:46 am
Israel is ultimately doomed to either be a bi-national single state or be destroyed. There’s no way, in historical terms, that this sort of thing can continue indefinitely.
The UN and the international community, including the US, need to pro-actively take control of the territory out of the hands of the existing Fata/Hamas and Israeli governments in order to avoid the coming disaster, and then design a bi-national secular state with accommodations for both secular and Islamist legal systems. Hold elections in which no one in either Palestinian or Israeli politics is allowed to stand for office, to sideline the fanatics. Set up a country where racial demographics are not recognized.
This is the only long term solution that is even remotely workable.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Nobody can take control of the territory out of the hands of the Israeli government, the government has nuclear weapons. Zionists can only be kicked out internally, and for that to happen the existing order has to collapse. Hopefully in the form of an economic collapse. And for that to happen, the US has to stop subsidizing them. And for that to happen – I don’t know what needs to happen; some sort of a pushback, massive protests or something. But pro-Zionist propaganda (of which this blog is a part) is so strong in the US that I don’t see how it could happen.
June 14th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Mr. Abb1,
One serious question for you- I’ll drop the ‘pigf*cker’ term of abuse for a moment, and hopefully you’ll do the same. Is your objection to a Jewish state _in Palestine_, or to the concept of a Jewish state _anywhere in the world_? If for example, the Jewish State were relocated to Afghanistan or Birobijan, would you still object to its existence?
June 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Btw, the same question applies to the smack-addict Mr. Hack, the deranged Muslim Mr. Fareed, and any other ones of the anti-Israel posters here.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Yes, Hector, I object to any ethnocentric state anywhere on earth: Jewish, Aryan, Teutonic, Slavic, White, Black, you name it.
And I’m not aware currently of any state (other than Israel) taken over by an ethnocentric movement and dedicated to an ethnic group.
Many countries do have smallish political movements of that kind (like the BNP in England), they’re are all considered to be a disgrace; and I don’t see why Zionism (which is much worse, because in addition to being ethnocentric it is also a colonialist movement) should be treated differently.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Mr. Abb1,
I see Jews primarily as a religious group, not an ethnic one. Since one can convert to Judaism, and in fact whole cultures have done so in the past, like the Khazars.
There are plenty of countries in the world with a established state religion- some are Christian, some Muslim, some Buddhist. Do you object to them all?
June 14th, 2009 at 10:49 am
You may see Jews as a religious group, that’s fine. You can have any state religion you want, I don’t care. Zionism, however, is a secular ethnocentric movement.
Yes, there is a conversion loophole and I know an Israeli woman – her father was Jewish and mother was a Russian, and that combination makes one a second-class citizen in Israel – who did convert, for the sake of her daughter. But they don’t make it easy, I tell you. It’s nothing like converting to Christianity; it may take years.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Abb1: “Nobody can take control of the territory out of the hands of the Israeli government, the government has nuclear weapons.”
Except the US which has thousands more than they do. Let the Israelis use one of the nukes. By all means, do it now! See the results!
The pigfucker Zionists would lay down and take it because those scum don’t want to die, either – they just want everybody else to die for them.
June 15th, 2009 at 11:35 am
They have enough nukes to be untouchable, one only needs a few.
They don’t need to actually use them, only to threaten to use them, and act a bit crazy. This is how the game is played.