Israel, Iran and Fear
NY Times / Roger Cohn
20-Apr-2009 (5 comments)

I've been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program. Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.” But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?

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IRANdokht

Shministim

by IRANdokht on Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:50 PM PDT

A few months ago I posted a petition to save the Israeli youths from prison.

ISRAEL'S YOUNG CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS. The Shministim are Israeli high school students who have been imprisoned for refusing to serve in an army that occupies the Palestinian Territories.

//december18th.org/

IRANdokht


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Bedros

The Israelis themselves recognise they're on borrowed time

by Bedros on Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:39 PM PDT

Yes Xerxes and Bavafa, Israeli teenagers and Israelis in general are always going on about their "fears" and the fact that no one seems to love them. They ARE in love with themselves but they are not so good at closely examining their own behaviour which might help them understand why they are so Not loved throughout the world.

For the most part I found Cohen's series on Iran to be good. It was refreshing to read some opinion and slices of life from Iran written by someone who has actually spent time in the country. That would be as opposed to the foxnews et al American blockhead media commentators who have never been near Iran and consider an exotic foreign excursion to be a trip to Canada.


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Bavafa

Well said, Xerxes.

by Bavafa on Mon Apr 20, 2009 09:20 AM PDT

If I was an Israeli teenager, I would be far more worried about the actions of my own State as one day, sooner then later, I would have to answer for it.

Mehrdad


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default

An Israeli Teenager must be very afraid

by XerXes (not verified) on Mon Apr 20, 2009 07:57 AM PDT

They got a Nazi regime and they as the youth of today will be responsible to answer for the actions of the adults of today and yesteryears. For now the world is silent because of politics, but no one forgets what the Fascist regime is doing. Israeli government must be stopped.


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Fred

The clueless Roger rules

by Fred on Mon Apr 20, 2009 03:43 AM PDT

The clueless Roger says: “despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.” 

 With all the mileage on him in observing and reporting the international events, the clueless still can’t differentiate between the rabid Islamists and the country they’ve taken hostage.  

The uber lefty has swallowed whole his newest best friend the NIAC lobby’s claptrap about the Islamists being pragmatic master strategists.

True the Islamists are into survival of their rule but their method, perpetual state of terror at home and abroad, is bound to bring total ruin to Iran and lead to cataclysm elsewhere.


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