The penultimate chapter of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (2007) deals with the problem of Israel and Palestine—and with anti-Semitism. Although Cohen is of Jewish ancestry (he’s an atheist), he’s no rah-rah supporter of Israel, but takes what I see as a reasoned and pragmatic view. But he also recognizes the religious roots of Islamic terrorism and its motivation by its unrealizable desire for a caliphate and a hatred of Western modernity. I again recommend reading Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9-11. It’s a book I’ve often recommended to those who pin terrorism largely on Western colonialism, but the repeated refusal of those folks to read it speaks volumes about their close-mindedness.
In the passage below, Cohen proposes the only viable way to settle the Israel/Palestine problem (I despair of a solution), and also attacks the foolish notion that once that issue is solved, we no longer need to worry so much the Middle East, for the lack of a settlement is often touted as the paramount problem in that region and the main issue that exacerbates Islamism.
From pp.353-354:
Why couldn’t they [“the rich world’s liberal leftists”] support democracy in Iraq, Syria. Iran, and North Africa—not to mention China and North Korea—along with the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settler? Why did they, like Western governments at their worst, ignore dictatorial and genocidal regimes? No liberal would want to live in a state ruled by al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Liberals, socialists, women, gays, freethinkers and Christians could not possibly prosper in an Islamist Palestine or Islamist anywhere. Rather than think about what life would be like under the new far right, they revived the old racist belief of the Left that what was intolerable for white-skinned peoples was fine for lesser breeds.
There was a motive beyond the usual singling out of democracies for special treatment which explained the focus on Israel, although few liked to admit it. Because totalitarian movements of the Right said Israel was their greatest grievance, there was a temptation to appease them by pretending that Israel was the greatest abuser of human rights in the world. Leaving aside the dangers of allowing Islamists to determine a liberal political agenda, the myopia the fixation brought ignored the fact that a solution to the conflict required a confrontation with both the Jewish and Muslim ultras who could accept no compromise in their contested ‘holy’ land. From the pont of view of the practical poltics of dividing territory, the liberal argument on Israel wasn’t a great help because it could call for concessions from only one side.
The bigger question was whether it would help calm the Islamist explosion. I’ve been very hard on today’s liberal-left, so I will end with the hope that it is right. A just settlement for the Palestinians is a good thing in itself and should be pursued regardless of whether the fanatics want it or not. Everyone knows what it is—a return to the 1967 borders, the tearing down of walls, a confrontation with maniacs from all religions who regard the holy land as the exclusive preserve of their god. Maybe if the international community were to deploy troops to safeguard Israel’s borders, it will happen. If it does, we will see if a settlement vindicates the current liberal view. Perhaps it will. Perhaps it will satisfy all the Islamists who are currently saying that their wars in Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir and Somalia, and their terrorist campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Britain, France, Spain, the United States, Denmark, Holland, Canada and Australia are part of a unified war against paganism and for a Caliphate. Maybe they will shake themselves and say ‘fair enough, we realize that now you’ve addressed our root cause, we don’t want a theocratic empire after all and will return to civilian life’.
If the liberals and leftists are wrong, and there are good reasons for thinking they are horribly wrong, history will judge them harshly. For they will have gazed on the face of a global fascist movement and shrugged and turned away, not only from an enemy that would happily have killed them but from an enemy which already was killing those who had every reason to expect their support.
While You Can’t Read This Book is more recent and perhaps more timely given its theme of Leftist censorship, What’s Left? is essential reading for a historical perspective on how the Left’s abandonment of Enlightenment ideals, its hypocrisy, and its susceptibility to identity politics is not unique to this decade. Cohen has a good grasp of political history, takes the long view, and is a very good writer.
