[Washington Post] Richard Cohen - This zealotry, this ideology, this religious fervor is not something we in the West know how to deal with. The fight is no longer over territory - the West Bank, Gaza - but over the very existence of Israel. The people who seem to hate Israel most, who will kill to kill it and die for it to die, are not reclaiming ancestral land - no Iranian pines for his lost orange grove near Jaffa - but instead cannot abide the very idea of Israel. If these are the "birth pangs of the new Middle East," then what is being produced is not some cute, babbling democracies but a hideous monster. Just wait until he reaches for a nuclear weapon.
2006-08-15 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive