In the Times Roger Cohen writes an erudite and literate op-ed, "Obama in Netanyahu’s Web." He concludes it with these seriously wrong statements.
Netanyahu talks a lot about the “existential threat” from Iran. The United States faces a prosaic daily threat: Many more young American men and women will die in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several years if no Iranian breakthrough is achieved.The connection between American deaths in two wars and Iran is entirely fictive nonsense. Obama can end both of Bush's wars regardless of what goes on in Persia.
Obama must remind Israel of that. He should also tell Bibi that the real existential threat to Israel is not Amalek but hubris: An attack on Iran that would put the Jewish state at war with Persians as well as Arabs, undermine its core U.S. alliance, and set Tehran on a full-throttle course to a nuclear bomb with the support of some 1.2 billion Muslims.
Cohen's closing doomsday scenario is more wrong both because it is a fiction meant to scare us and because it is ludicrous to imagine that the Israelis under Bibi or any other leader do not know and calculate every possible political and diplomatic outcome of every statement and action that they make.
Yes we are worried that Bibi may believe his application of the Amalek myth. But he's a hard-liner, not a maniac.
And isn't it utterly amazing to find a discussion of Amalek on the Times editorial page? Surely a proof that the messiah is on his way.
1 comment:
Rabbi, please explain:
WHY after so many years...,
Israel was NOT able to formulate CLEARLY, without any ambiguity,
the following perfectly JUSTIFIABLE requirements for Peace and 2-state solution ??(1) the tiny Israel be recognized as a Jewish state;(2) Return of palestinian refugees ...
permitted only within the borders of the new Palestinian state and/or the vast territories of Egypt or Jordan, or other brother Arab states (otherwise the first condition could NOT hold);
(3) Israel is willing to relinquish almost ALL "occupied territories" (annexed as a result of the 1967 Arab Invasion of Israel, a WAR that Arabs lost con brio ...)
in return for Peace and full recognition by the Arab world ...,
with the (!!) EXCEPTION of the tiny-tinyssimmo East-Jerusalem ..., finally re-united with the rest of Jerusalem, a sacred city to the Jews since King David proclaimed it his capital in the 10th century BCE !!
Why was it so difficult to CLEARLY formulate the above 3 conditions ??
After all it was a WAR in which the coalition of Arab states LOST, and Israel WON ...,
Israel annexed territories previously occupied by Syria, Egypt and Jordan:
Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem ,
and Israel is willing to return almost all territories (99.9999%), with the exception of East Jerusalem ??
What other state who was invaded, but won the war, would return all trophies of war ??
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