Roger Cohen in the New York Times:
I hear more hostility to Israel around the world than at any time I can recall.
The United States, traumatized, made mistakes after 9/11. Too often, it shunned prudence and rode roughshod. Israel is in some ways an extension of the United States. The line between what’s domestic and what’s international in the relationship is flimsy. It’s therefore not surprising that Israel, too, has erred on the side of warmongering this past decade.
The war on terror, an expression dropped by President Obama, was a catchall phrase that enabled Israeli leaders to bundle the Palestinian national struggle into the terror camp, where much of it did not belong. This has proved a terrible distorting lens.
I sense some Israeli realization at last that this course — the terror-propagating Gaza sardine can, the ad-hominem outrage of the reaction to the Goldstone report on Gaza, the facile recourse to disproportionate force, the repetitive “no Palestinian interlocutor” complaints, the too spin-doctored slogans of constant existential threat — leads only to a dead end. Israel can do much better.