Can Martin Regg Cohen write about Palestine with any integrity?
By: Naji Kanafani
While Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn promotes himself as a “progressive”, the limits of his progressivism are apparent whenever it comes to the issue of Palestine. Cohn has long enjoyed a certain level of legitimacy as a reliable interpreter of events–in the Middle East especially–by highlighting his 11 years working as chief of the Middle East and Asia bureaus—though, mysteriously—his profile in the Toronto Star is unclear on how long he served in the former.
As it turns out, Cohn only spent four years in the Middle East, a factoid he inadvertently revealed during a January 2024 appearance as founder and host of the Democracy Forum at Toronto Metropolitan University. Capitalizing on his progressive bona fides, Cohn has repeatedly expressed racist, progressive-except-for-Palestine dog whistles to the public for the past year and a half.
Blaming the victim
In his Oct. 18, 2024 column “Hamas leaders have been killed before, and the movement lives on. This time is surely different”, Cohn engaged in a particularly disgusting form of Zionist genocide apologia masked as geopolitical commentary. He assigns blame for the destruction of Gaza on Hamas, its “gift to Gazans”, rather than Israel, which has dropped all the bombs that destroyed Gaza, and the Western states, which have supplied the murder weapons. Cohn repeats the lie about “the massacre of 1,200 Israelis…mostly civilians” in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, ignoring the fact that most Israelis have undergone mandatory military training and service in which they have abused and killed Palestinians, and the role the Hannibal Directive had in killing large numbers of Israelis.
He justifies Israel’s genocide by claiming that the Oct. 7 attacks—erasing the context of 16 years of the siege on Gaza and 76 years of Zionist colonization—had “created the conditions for self-eradication”. Self-eradication, folks. A truly callous, ahistorical statement particularly given the history of armed Jewish resistance to anti-semitic oppression. If this same characterization was ever made of Jews who rose up against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, it would rightly be considered antisemitic. Yet, Cohn blaming the Palestinians for their genocide is perfectly acceptable in the pages of the Toronto Star.
The mirror image of Cohn’s victim blaming can be found in the habitual exoneration of Zionist violence. Grossly downplaying the scale of violence that Israel has visited upon every square metre of Gaza, Israel’s campaign of genocide—as concluded by too many reputable organizations to count—was portrayed euphemistically as a “fierce counteroffensive” in Cohn’s Oct. 18 column. Similarly, Israel’s destructive war with Hezbollah in 2006 was also described as “a fierce Israeli counterattack”. Israel’s latest war in Lebanon is described as “an inevitable counterattack”. One wonders if Cohn would have described Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union that led to the deaths of over 20 million Soviet citizens, as merely a “fierce counteroffensive” against communism.
“Idealogical clichés masked as knowledge”
Like most Zionists, Cohn expresses his “knowledge” of the region by mocking Islamic sensibilities under the cover of writing on the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah. At various points in his Oct. 1, 2024 column “Hezbollah’s leader was revered by his followers. The man I met was a religious warlord”, he mockingly referred to Nasrallah as “a living god”, “the deity” and “a false prophet”—language meant to offend Muslim beliefs about Allah, the Prophet Muhammad and holiness in Islam.
His fixation on sarcastically calling Nasrallah a “deity” is based on the shallow observation that there were “larger-than-life propaganda billboards plastered across his benighted land” when Cohn interviewed him sometime in the “late 1990s”. Does having your face on a billboard make you a “deity”? By Cohn’s measure, every Arab ruler is similarly a “deity”, meaning there are at least 22 deities in the monotheistic Arab-Islamic world. In Lebanon, there are “larger-than-life billboards” for every big and small-time political party leader from Gemayel to Franjieh to Chamoun to Geagea to Berri to Hariri to Jumblatt to Nasrallah and more names likely unfamiliar to Cohn. So using the word “deity” in this context is meant to do one thing: insult Muslim conceptions of divinity.
Readers are also treated to a series of predictable orientalist clichés featuring “Kalashnikov-wielding bodyguards”, “the drive through winding streets”, and finally, the “characteristic black turban of a Syed”. The simple fact that Martin could not name the amameh by its correct terminology demonstrates his ignorance. One would think after having “spent four years in the Middle East”, Cohn could’ve figured out the correct word.
Cohn is part of a corps of Western “experts” on the Middle East who, in the words of Edward Said, “tended to monopolize discussion principally by using…ideological clichés masked as knowledge”. In this case, creating the appearance of being knowledgeable about the Arab-Islamic world, only to push more sophisticated religious bigotry against Muslims.
Ignorance of Arabic
Another of Said’s criticisms of Western “Middle East experts” is that most of them do not even know Arabic, putting into question their reliability as narrators and interpreters of events in the Arab-Islamic world. Cohn follows in this time-honoured tradition, though he tries to pre-empt these accusations in a November 5, 2023 column where he insists “I still count in Arabic when I have insomnia, and I still use my favourite Arabic words as mantras when meditating”. Nfu5ha Martin.
His grasp of Arabic does not extend to the rest of the language, however. Writing in his Nasrallah column that “the mullah was all too human”, Cohn uses the word mullah, a word used by Farsi-speaking Muslims in Iran and the Central Asian republics, whereas Arabs use the word sheikh or mawlana. Again, the purpose is to covertly introduce anti-Muslim prejudice (mullah connoting a racist image of Shia religious fanatics and Iranian “theocracy”) while appearing erudite and educated about the topic.
There are other telltale signs that Cohn does not know Arabic. For instance, Cohn lets his readers know at the top and bottom of his Nasrallah column that Hezbollah means Party of God, perhaps to overcompensate for his lack of Arabic. He repeats this tactic in his Oct. 18, 2024 column, letting us know that Hamas is “an (not the) Arabic acronym for Islamic resistance movement”.
These empty factoids may be a revelation to the clueless and ignorant, but this information can be found in a simple Google search. But I would hazard that he, like so many Jewish Zionists, is completely ignorant of Arabic, only deploying it to mock, belittle and/or vilify the language by associating it with Israel’s “enemies”. As Said wrote decades ago, Zionists like Cohn take advantage of “entrenched cultural attitudes…deriving from age-old western prejudices about Islam, the Arabs and the Orient.”
The two-state delusion
Against the backdrop of 16 months of genocide, Cohn resurrects the “two-state solution”. There’s a reason Cohn desperately clings on to the same Oslo Accords that Israel itself refuses to acknowledge: part of his legitimacy as a “commentator” on the region hinges on the fact that he was there attending the peace talks. Acknowledging that Oslo was a failure would delegitimize his position as a reputable commentator on the issue of Palestine given how glowingly he talks about the Accords.
This capitulation agreement, according to him, is what put the Palestinians ”on the map.” Can Cohn explain why, if Palestine was “already on the map”, Israel categorically opposed its bids for full membership in the UN, UNESCO, the ICC, ICJ and other international bodies? Why have settlements–themselves war crimes–tripled in population since the signing of the Accords? How long was Palestine going to remain “on the map” as it shrank day by day for 30 years after Oslo was signed? It is impossible that Cohn is ignorant of the settler pogroms and land thefts being committed daily in the West Bank, yet he continues to engage in this fiction of a “two-state solution”.
It comes as no surprise that Cohn laments the failure of the “promise” of Oslo. The Israelis were going to get everything they wanted, make painless land swaps, and permanently exile millions of Palestinians. As Said wrote in The Question of Palestine, “everything positive from the Zionist standpoint looked absolutely negative from the perspective of the native Arab Palestinians”.
Living in the delusion of the two-state solution, it appears that Cohn never read the fine print of the agreement, which included conditions such as a demilitarized Palestinian state, the right of Israel to invade Palestinian territory at will, no control of air, land or sea crossings, and no right of return for over 9 million Palestinian refugees. Or he read the fine print and thought the Palestinians should be grateful for the scraps.
In his November 5, 2023 column “What I saw in my journey through the war against peace in the Middle East”, Cohn, deploys the phrase “the war against peace”, with the primary responsibility resting with “the rejectionists” of the Palestinian armed resistance. He does not even acknowledge that the same two-state rejectionism is overwhelmingly common in Israeli society and the official position of the governing Likud Party. It is Israel that relies on war to avoid peace.
Cohn also insists that his “aim is not to tell you what to think, merely to make you think”. Yet, towards the bottom of his article, dismissing any discussion of a one-state solution, he writes: “Two states for two peoples remains the sole solution…it becomes cruel to perpetuate the fantasy that Palestinian refugees will return with the keys to the homes they left behind in Haifa 75 years ago.” Cohn’s contempt for the Palestinians is undeniable. He forgets that Palestinians often have their land deeds, in addition to the keys to their homes. And as Said wrote decades ago, “What matters is that they are entitled to return, as international law stipulates.” Cohn is openly justifying Israel’s decades-long defiance of international law while masquerading as a progressive.
Progressive-except-for-Palestine
Martin Regg Cohen, trying desperately as he can to maintain the contradiction between being “progressive” and an unashamed Zionist, occasionally blurts out what he really thinks when it comes to Palestine. At the aforementioned session of the Democracy Forum, Cohn tries to simultaneously establish his authority and ignorance on the subject by stating “I spent four years in the Middle East and I don’t have the answers”—yet his columns indicate that he believes he does have the answers, namely rejecting the one-state solution (“a recipe for anarchy”) and blaming Palestinians for resisting their own annihilation.
Immediately after acting out his feigned humility, Cohn belittled our movement’s understanding of the issue, saying “everyone’s an armchair expert…but that’s another…I don’t want to be judging folks”—as he judges folks in an open forum. If you truly “don’t have the answers” Martin, try listening more and talking less.
Progressive-except-for-Palestine types like Cohn can take the progressive position when writing about domestic issues such as Doug Ford’s corrupt government, bike lanes, criminalization of homelessness, and Indigenous relations. Yet, any pretence of progressivism dissipates the moment Cohn broaches the issue of Palestine, which he has shown himself incapable of writing about with any kind of moral consistency or intelligence.