Richard Martin Cohen
From the celebrated syndicated columnist for ,The Washington Post,, comes a passionate testimony to the necessity of Israelâ€™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 Israelâ€™s policiesâ€”its seizure of the West Bank, for instanceâ€”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 anotherâ€”and the lastâ€”of Europeâ€™s many colonial enterprises, is a willful misreading of history.,Israelâ€™s challenges are manyâ€”demographic, political, ideological and, bit by bit, a steady erosion of its raison dâ€™Ãªtre. 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 â€œProtocols of the Elders of Zionâ€), will ultimately push aside their dictatorial regimes and establish Islamic-style democraciesâ€”more threatening to Israel than anything that now exists.,In the end, it is not the existence of Israel thatâ€™s on the line. Itâ€™s the efficacy of western values.
Cultural,Israel,Nonfiction,Politics
Israel: Is It Good for the Jews?