cover image Can Israel Survive?

Can Israel Survive?

Richard Cohen. Simon & Schuster, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-1-4165-7568-9

Caveat lector: despite its title, much of this disjointed book is not about the current situation in and future prospects of the country of Israel. Rather, Washington Post columnist Cohen has written a series of short essays about modern European anti-Semitism, pre-Holocaust diplomacy, and the repercussions of the Holocaust, all of which helped shape Israel’s founding in 1948 and its history since. Cohen largely reduces Israel’s history, and its basis for legitimacy, to these factors, as when he reductively states, “Israel was created not just in reaction to anti-Semitism but by anti-Semitism.” More seriously, Cohen’s prose sometimes assumes too much knowledge on the part of his readers rather than making his argument clear, leading to possibly confusing, even contradictory, analyses, as when he notes that the Jews “foisted the nakba (the Palestinian term meaning “catastrophe” for the exile wrought by the 1948 war following Israel’s independence) on the Palestinians, but then states on the same page that “the driver of events was... the Arabs.” He also calls Israel the product of “mistakes of time and place—a last-gasp colonial enterprise... the settlement of an alien people in the midst of the Islamic world,” leading readers to wonder whether the title should be “Should Israel Survive?” Cohen’s writing is too muddled about whether it deserves to do so. [em]Agent: Mort Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (Sept.) [/em]