Larry Derfner, "Israel’s Next War Is Always ‘Inevitable’": Hezbollah and Syria Are Not Crazy?

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In a guest New York Times op-ed entitled "Israel’s Next War Is Always ‘Inevitable’," Larry Derfner observes:

"Hezbollah and Syria are well and truly deterred, and if Israel were to simply let them be, they would have to be crazy to strike first."

Got it: Hezbollah and Syria (that is to say, what is left of Syria) are not crazy. It obviously doesn't matter to Derfner that Syria's Assad is a mass murderer and a war criminal willing to gas his own people, as per those hotbeds of right wing thinking, New Republic and The New Yorker.

It also doesn't matter if Hezbollah's head, Nasrallah, has repeatedly called for the annihilation of Israel in his rabidly anti-Semitic diatribes. After all, sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. (Now if only you could tell that to the Jews in Europe who refused to believe what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.) Moreover, a rational Nasrallah would of course never launch his 100,000+ missiles at Israel's ammonia plant in Haifa and its nuclear facility in Dimona, notwithstanding his threats to the contrary. And even if instructed to do so by his masters in Tehran, who are also sane, notwithstanding their savage persecution of Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Baha'is, Christians and homosexuals and calls to annihilate Israel, Nasrallah would refuse, notwithstanding the fact that he sent his fighters to be slaughtered in Syria's civil war at Iran's behest.

Yeah, right.

Larry Derfner? At the bottom of the Times op-ed we learn that "Larry Derfner, a journalist, is the author of the forthcoming memoir 'No Country for Jewish Liberals.'" No mention by the Times that Derfner was fired by The Jerusalem Post after writing in his blog in August 2011, following a terrorist attack outside of Eilat (my emphasis in red):

"But if, on the other hand, we were to say very forthrightly what many of us believe and the rest of us suspect – that the Palestinians, like every nation living under hostile rule, have the right to fight back, that their terrorism, especially in the face of a rejectionist Israeli government, is justified – what effect would that have? A powerful one, I think, because the truth is powerful. If those who oppose the occupation acknowledged publicly that it justifies Palestinian terrorism, then those who support the occupation would have to explain why it doesn’t. And that’s not easy for a nation that sanctifies the right to self-defense; a nation that elected Irgun leader Menachem Begin and Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister.

But while I think the Palestinians have the right to use terrorism against us, I don’t want them to use it, I don’t want to see Israelis killed, and as an Israeli, I would do whatever was necessary to stop a Palestinian, oppressed or not, from killing one of my countrymen. (I also think Palestinian terrorism backfires, it turns people away from them and generates sympathy for Israel and the occupation, so I’m against terrorism on a practical level, too, but that’s besides the point.) The possibility that Israel’s enemies could use my or anybody else’s justification of terror for their campaign is a daunting one; I wouldn’t like to see this column quoted on a pro-Hamas website, and I realize it could happen."

Derfner subsequently removed the post and apologized, saying in part:

"My intention was to shock people into recognition, but I ended up shocking many of them into revulsion, and twisting what I wanted to say into something I didn’t and don’t mean at all."

All of which raises the question what it takes to get a guest opinion piece published by The New York Times. If you are Jewish, or better still Israeli, and write something horrible about Israel, does this increase your chances exponentially? As pointed out by Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer and by others, it sure seems this way.