Mistake

It's not a new idea that some smart people think that Israel was a mistake. Richard Cohen, a pretty hard core Israel supporter made the case like so:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself 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.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel's. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

Cohen doesn't think that it's a mistake that can or should be be remedied, and neither do I. Israel is where it is and is overwhelmingly more powerful than all its enemies combined - for the moment. Cohen thinks that Israel needs to "hunker down with history,"

The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue.

That was his advice four years ago, and Israel has done a singularly bad job of taking it. Would it, could it work? Only if the world changes, and Muslims become modern peoples with modern ideas and objectives.

Of course the world will change, but maybe not in that way. At least equally plausible is a Muslim world with the modern superweapons and a medieval world view. Can Israel survive in a world where multiple Muslim states have nuclear weapons? Only if somebody finds a way to make peace.