Roger Cohen, "If Not Now, When?": Liar!

Roger (Iran is "not totalitarian") Cohen is again back to his old tricks. In a New York Times op-ed entitled "If Not Now, When?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/cohen-if-not-now-when.html?ref=opinion), Cohen writes:

"To have citizens on one side of an invisible line and disenfranchised subjects without rights on the other side does not work."

"Disenfranchised subjects"? Disenfranchised by whom?  Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January 2005, but his four-year term ended in 2009, and there have been no subsequent elections in the West Bank.

Cohen notes:

"The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, insists that not one Israeli soldier will be allowed in Palestine."

However, Cohen fails to observe that Abbas also insists that there will be no Jews in the Palestinian Authority following an Israeli evacuation of the West Bank (see: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Comment-Palestine-without-Jews-321572).

Cohen goes on to say:

"There are hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the West Bank with no plans to go anywhere."

But as surely known to Cohen, Israeli/Palestinian peace talks to date have all taken into account land swaps, and the overwhelming majority of these Israeli settlers reside in areas that will be retained by Israel.

Cohen observes near the end of his opinion piece:

"In Jerusalem’s Old City I was walking this year down from the Damascus Gate. Crowds of Palestinians were pouring out of a Friday service at the Al Aqsa Mosque. A large group of Orthodox Jews was moving in the opposite direction, toward the Western Wall. Into this Muslim-Jewish melee, out of the Via Dolorosa, a cluster of Christians emerged carrying a large wooden cross they tried to navigate through the crowd. It was a scene of despair for anyone convinced faiths and peoples can be disentangled in the Holy Land. Looked at another way it was a scene of hope, even mirth."

"Despair"? "Mirth"? How about "tolerance"? At a time when Christians throughout the Muslim Middle East are being murdered and subjected to horrific abuse, when Sunnis and Shiites are at each other's throats, and when Baha'is and Sunnis are imprisoned and tortured in Iran, there is only one nation in the region where people enjoy religious freedom: Israel.

Netanyahu should risk more to reach a peace agreement with Abbas? Maybe. But then unilateral evacuation of Gaza by Israel resulted in years of rocket fire into southern Israel. Were rockets to be fired from the West Bank, Israel's largest cities - Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa - and Ben Gurion Airport would all be within range.

In short, it's easy for Cohen to urge Netanyahu to take risks, when Cohen's home in Brooklyn stands no chance of being flattened by a Palestinian Grad missile.