The Washington Post has published its share of dumb columns in recent years, but today’s piece by Richard Cohen, Hunker Down With History, takes the cake.  With Israel fighting for its life on two fronts, Cohen advises Israelis not to forget that Israel is a mistake.

It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. 

In Cohen’s view, Hamas, Hezbollah and most other Muslims in the Middle East are who they are: Jew-hating barbarians.  They can’t help it, so holding them accountable for their murderous anti-semitism is pointless.  The real culprits are the Jews, who have enraged Muslims by having effrontery to establish a thriving state in their ancestral homeland.

This argument displays a breathtaking ignorance of history.  The Jewish people lived in Palestine for thousands of years, long before Islam was even founded.  Their claim pre-dates those of the local Arabs who subsequently settled there.  Besides, Arabs showed little interest in Palestine before Jews started building a state there in the nineteenth century.  Indeed, most of Palestine was widely regarded as pesthole before the Jews arrived.  Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, famously painted a very unflattering portrait of the region in The Innocents Abroad:

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are un-picturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze… It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

One wonders what Twain would say if he could see Israel today.

Cohen also urges Israel to exercise “restraint” in dealing with genocidal terrorists.  “Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.”  That would turn Israel into an “occupier” again and give the Arabs yet another casus belli.  Instead, Israel should make the “smart choice” by abandoning the West bank, retreating to its pre-1967 borders and “waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else.”

This is a prescription for Israel’s destruction, and Cohen knows it.  Hunkering down and hoping that your enemies will lose interest in killing you is not a strategy.  That’s especially true in this case, where Israel’s enemies have a long history of apocalyptic Jew hatred.  The only solution is the one that Israel is implementing: beating on its enemies until they are either dead or too weak to pose a threat.