Israel: Is It Good for the Jews?

From the celebrated syndicated columnist for "The Washington Post," comes a passionate testimony to the necessity of Israel's survival and a dispassionate analysis of why it may not. Cohen, a writer of uncommon power and feeling, has reported from Israel and the Middle East for decades. Although a l [...]
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From the celebrated syndicated columnist for "The Washington Post," comes a passionate testimony to the necessity of Israel's survival and a dispassionate analysis of why it may not. Cohen, a writer of uncommon power and feeling, has reported from Israel and the Middle East for decades. Although a long-time critic of some of Israel's policies--its seizure of the West Bank, for instance--he rejects the current revisionism, which ignores the reasons the State was founded, and recounts the reasons why it once had world-wide support. Cohen argues that the notion that Israel is just another--and the last--of Europe's many colonial enterprises, is a willful misreading of history. Israel's challenges are many--demographic, political, ideological and, bit by bit, a steady erosion of its raison d'etre. It is losing people, purpose, and the patience of much of the world. At the same time, it faces a perilous future in which its neighbors, saturated in European-style anti-Semitism for more than seventy years now (the Hamas charter cites the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"), will ultimately push aside their dictatorial regimes and establish Islamic-style democracies--more threatening to Israel than anything that now exists. In the end, it is not the existence of Israel that's on the line. It's the efficacy of western values.