Hitchens on Israel

Find the article here.

Some interesting outtakes:

The questions of principle and the matters of brute realism have a tendency (especially for one who does not think that heaven plays any part in the game) to converge. Without God on your side, what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place? Israel may not be the rogue state that so many people say it is—including so many people who will excuse the crimes of Syria and Iran—but what if it runs the much worse risk of being a failed state? Here I must stop asking questions and simply and honestly answer one. In many visits to the so-called Holy Land, I have never quite been able to imagine that a Jewish state in Palestine will still be in existence a hundred years from now. A state for Jews, possibly. But a Jewish state …

For me, the Israeli family is not the alternative to the diaspora. It is part of the diaspora. To speak roughly, there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews. Well, irony is supposed to be a Jewish specialty.

And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza's ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.