I Am A Zionist, But This I Cannot Accept--Roger Cohen (NYT OP ED)

[KoKo]

Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza

JULY 29, 2014--by Roger Cohen--NYT OpEd

I am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews needed the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the words of Israel’s founding charter of 1948 declaring that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”

What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.

This, as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers represents.

The Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than sought to resolve.

This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in which I still believe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/roger-cohen-zionism-and-israels-war-with-hamas-in-gaza.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

[phantom power]

1. But Roger, that's what happens when you base a religion on a particular patch of land...

and then base a government on that religion. If that's a bitter pill for you to swallow, maybe you should reconsider Zionism.

[EEO]

2. I agree the Jews needed a homeland to call their own. I disagree with the location of that homeland.

Did it really have to be there? There was nowhere else in the world we could find that would not require us to displace people already living there?

[phantom power]

3. I question the whole premise. Why does any religion *need* a "homeland?"

It's all water long over the dam, but I've always thought a good solution would have been for us (the United States) to take in the Jewish refugees.

[YoungDemCA]

5. Jews comprise more than a religion.

And in any case, considering what had just happened to them in Europe...

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. You know...

the Holocaust was, possibly, the greatest crime in human history. But I don't really know that it's sufficient justification for the dispossession and displacement of the Arab population of what was Mandatory Palestine. Any more than the religious persecution of Puritans and Quakers and Catholics and Huguenots and so on is sufficient justification for the dispossession and displacement of Native Americans.

[EEO]

7. So we make another group of people victims...

[Pisces]

4. The oppressed become the oppressors. This is human nature. We should not be backing this

lopsided battle with more money and weapons. Bibi wants us to mind our own business. We should and leave him and Israel
to figure out who stands with this disgusting display of power.