Roger Cohen, "The Two-State Imperative": Ignoring the Facts

I will never forget how Roger Cohen attempted to convince the world in 2009 that Iran is not totalitarian. Recall how Cohen wrote in June 2009 immediately prior to a fraudulent election that ignited the Green Revolution (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/opinion/11iht-edcohen.html):

"For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days."

"Giddy"? Yeah, right. Well, today Cohen is back with more self-serving bullshit.

In a New York Times op-ed entitled "The Two-State Imperative" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/opinion/global/roger-cohen-the-two-state-imperative.html?_r=0), Cohen writes:

"Netanyahu speaks now of avoiding the bi-national state. Yet his Likud Party has been (and remains) a forthright proponent of just such a policy. After the lightning Israeli victory in the Six-Day war of 1967, Messianic Jewish thinking surged. If Israel now held all Jerusalem and the West Bank, how, in the minds of religious nationalists, could this recovery of Eretz Israel — a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — not reflect divine will?

It is this conviction that lies behind the steady expansion of settlements in the West Bank, where some 350,000 Jews now live, with another 250,000 in annexed East Jerusalem. Nothing as yet suggests Israel is ready to abandon the maximalist territorial temptation of the past 46 years.

And so the heart sinks."

The heart sinks? Oh really? But consider:

• No mention by Cohen that it was the first Likud prime minister, Menachem Begin, who returned Sinai to Egypt in exchange for a negotiated peace.

• No mention by Cohen that it was a right wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who evacuated Gaza after forcefully removing the remaining Israeli settlements there.

• No mention by Cohen that Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat acknowledged that "an aerial photograph provided by European sources shows that settlements have been built on approximately 1.1% of the West Bank" (http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/erekat-olmert-offered-palestinians-territorial-equivalent-of-west-bank-1.393484).

• No mention by Cohen that most of the "expansion" is occurring in settlement to be retained by Israel,  as previously agreed in prior negotiations with the Palestinians, pursuant to any two-state solution involving land swaps.

• No mention that "annexed East Jerusalem," which includes the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Wailing Wall, also consists of areas to be retained by Israel, as previously agreed in prior negotiations with the Palestinians, pursuant to any two-state solution involving land swaps.

Cohen continues:

"Yes, the heart sinks because acceptance on both sides of the ever more invisible 'other' is still so stunted and attachment to the idea of holding or recovering all the land still so tenacious."

Needless to say, Cohen forgets to tell his readers that Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert (also a past member of the Likud) offered Arafat and Abbas an independent state along the 1967 lines with agreed upon land swaps, and that Olmert even offered Palestinian control of east Jerusalem. Arafat and Abbas refused.

As once stated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

I suppose this is the reason it is so convenient for Cohen to ignore the facts when writing his opinions.