This is a guest post by Phoebe Maltz.

There have been a number of solid take-downs of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s Israel series, by Eamonn McDonagh here and by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin and more. These critics provide sound evidence of just where Cohen gets Iran, Israel, and the Middle East wrong. This needs pointing out, but risks falling right into Cohen’s clever trap. He wants to get The Zionists all riled up, because the more goats he gets, the more readers will take the time to comment on his “courage.”

The implied opponent in all of Cohen’s articles is an American Jew of the old school, a living anachronism in today’s thoroughly Jew-friendly world. (A world that includes, of course, the haven for Jews that is Iran. ) Cohen’s imaginary Jewish sparring partner cries anti-Semitism if someone brushes up against him unintentionally on the subway-think Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld”-and invokes the Holocaust when someone suggests that falafel originated amongst the Arabs, not the Israelis. He is, in short, a reader saddled with a victim mentality and incapable of subtle thought, one with little to no resemblance to the columnist’s actual critics, Jewish or otherwise.

But if Cohen were to admit that Jews, even pro-Israel ones, are capable of nuance, he would no longer come across to his admirers as the lone voice of reason in a sea of hysteria, the only Jew willing to admit that Israel falls short of perfection. There is thus no place in Cohen’s framework for an American Jew who thinks Ahmadinejad is evil but not Hitlerian. Having apparently received some “outraged correspondence from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany,” Cohen goes on to present things just as simplistically: if Iran isn’t Nazi Germany, then it can’t be so bad. Of course, one could argue that fear among right-thinking people of Nazi analogies has now reached the level that calling Hitler ‘Hitlerian’ would itself be understood to violate Godwin’s Law.)

But it’s in the look-how-great-postwar-Germany-turned-out-whereas-oh-boy-look-at-Israel column, more even than the lucky-are-the-Jews-of-Iran one, that things get truly out of hand. For whatever reason, Cohen thinks the case against Israel is best made by pointing out how lovely Germany is these days, what resilience the German people have shown. To accuse Cohen here of, oh, I don’t know, blaming the victim is, though accurate, to fall into the columnist’s trap once more: if you point out that part of Germany being calmer than Israel might have something to do with the fact that Israel’s heritage is that of genocide’s victims, not its perpetrators, then you stand implicitly accused of being one of those Jews who thinks the Holocaust means Israel gets a free pass. There should be a way of saying, no, obviously a tragic past doesn’t make Israel - or for that matter, any formerly colonized people - immune to criticism, and that things haven’t been a walk in the park for Germans either, what with the guilt over what grandpa might have been up to way back when… all the while admitting that there no analogy to be had between the German and Israeli cases. There should be a way to convey this, but instead we are supposed to look admiringly at this man, a Cohen, willing to bravely concede that, after all, the Germans are superior, if not racially, then politically, culturally, what have you. Well, what do you know.

Forgive me, then, for supposing that Cohen’s main interest is not, as Tobin argues, “to split the U.S.-Israel alliance,” or anything policy-wise, for that matter, so much as to win Acceptably-Universalist Jew of the Year Award, bestowed annually upon a Jew so courageous as to side with the non-Jewish majority whenever Jews are in duress. He was already in the running for this award before he even got started on Iran, revealing his belief that while Don Imus insulting blacks in the US should get him fired, not too much should be made of an analogous anti-Jewish media scandal in France - a country whose history towards Jews is not entirely unlike that of the U.S. towards blacks.

But it’s in the Iran columns that he seals the deal. A Jew ‘brave’ enough to ‘admit’ that Israel’s no better than its enemies, to stand up to the powerful Jewish lobby making things so difficult for him to speak freely from his lowly post as a New York Times opinion-shaper, what could be more admirable? Granted one can never know the inner motivations of a writer. What can be known is that the decision to use one’s visibly Jewish byline as a way to gain credibility and a fan base while writing unfavorably (read by anti-Semites as ‘truthfully’) about Jews is a journalistic tradition with a long history, one in which Cohen, in my reading at least, is taking part.