Eden Lenner. Book Review- Winning The War Of Words . One

Eden Lenner Book Review- Winning the War of Words One problem for someone trying to offer a defense of Israel despite the determined intellectual attack on the country in recent years is that, while the assault is simply and easily understood; the defense is harder to explain. To defame the country one simply needs to say ‘colonization’ or ‘apartheid’, and add a photo of a soldier manhandling a child, but to defend Israel requires an expansive understanding of at least 100 years of history in both Europe and the Middle East, an understanding of how we have reached this moment, and of what Israel’s only choices are right now. Anyone trying to explain Israel’s case needs to be mature enough to make sense of this to people outside the†¦show more content†¦Like many Israelis, she had her mind changed by the Palestinians repeatedly rejecting Israel’s peace offers and by their use of brutal terrorism. She writes that she noticed, what she had previously regarded as legitimate critici sm of Israeli policies was in fact something different, it was an ideology disturbing in its intention and content. She concluded that this criticism wasn’t about a two-state solution at all, but it ‘only very thinly masks a deep and visceral hatred for the state and its people that cannot be explained by mere criticism for the policies of some of its elected governments.’ Things move so far and so fast in the Middle East that some of the pieces here already seem like distant history just a year or two after happening and being written. If Iran, in 2013, ‘felt that the economic pressure and the credible threat of military intervention were to threaten its very survival, it might, just as Assad did with the chemical weapons, go as far as give up the entire nuclear program altogether.’ Before 2014 started was a relatively peaceful time. But of course, we know now that the West will never make such a threat, that the mullahs will have their way, and that the Americans are in retreat amidst the confused ruins of their policies as the Russians move in. Wilf’s views are particularly sharp towards the regional turmoil due to many in the West being