Roger Cohen in today's NY Times tackles the aftermath of the raid on the cargo ships from Turkey and questions the legitimacy of the victimhood/force strategy for its difficulties. Let us hope the clear thinking that has often been a hallmark of Jewish traditions can come into focus.

Israel is a liberal democracy stuck in the blind alley of a morally corrupting 43-year-old occupation that has made force its reflexive mode of operation. Several factors have nudged the country rightward: religious-settler extremism; obliviousness to the Palestinian plight now concealed behind walls; Russian-imported strands of Arab-baiting intolerance. But it is still a liberal democracy, home to a level of debate and openness unknown elsewhere in the Middle East. This needs broader acknowledgment.

What Israel in turn must realize — before it is too late — is that the real threat it faces today is not one of destruction but of de-legitimization. Its tactical lurches, often violent, do not add up to a strategy; they have resulted in a shocking erosion of Israel’s stature. I was talking the other day to the Israeli ambassador to a West European nation and he complained that he could rarely set foot on a university campus these days. Universities represent the future.

The only way to re-legitimize Israel and integrate it is an end to the occupation and the achievement of a two-state solution, with Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people and Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people. Israel cannot do this alone. Feckless Arab powers must step forward.

But Israel emphatically cannot do this, ever, by succumbing to a deeper and giddier embrace of those terrible twins, victimhood and force — terrible because at once addictive and blinding.

Roger Cohen

NY Times Editorial

5-10-2010