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Ran HaCohen is a faculty member and staff member in the Department of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University, who also engages in literary criticism for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth (as long as he can condemn Israel in the process). Originally from the Netherlands, he grew up in Israel. He holds a B.A. degree in. in Computer Science, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies. He is a literary translator of German, English and Dutch. Occasionally, he writes at Antiwar.com, an anti-Semitic pro-terror "anarchist" website that claims it is only “anti-war” and “libertarian” but features many anti-Semitic columnists like Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and International Soldiarity Movement activist Kathy Kelly, as well as Cindy Sheehan. Antiwar.com claims that Israelis were actually behind the 911 attacks on the United States and blew up the World Trade Center Towers.

HaCohen, whose last name means he is from the highest Jewish priestly class and thus should take ultimate concern for his people, instead prioritizes ways to continually voice support and actions for Israel’s enemies among the Palestinian Arabs. A more suitable name for him might be Ran HaArafat or Ran HaKhomeini, given his undying regurgitation of Arab propaganda that is not backed up by facts.

For example, this non-effacing high brow intellectual recites the classic mantras of the Arabs: The Palestinians are “starving” because of Israel (despite plentiful food from the UNWRA Agency camps run by Hamas), the checkpoints are hurting their ability to work (as well as their ability to send terrorists in to murder Jews), the Security Barrier is an “apartheid wall” (though HaCohen agrees that no Jews should be allowed to live anywhere in a Palestinian state). HaCohen accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing” despite Israel’s fecund 20% Arab population and the Arab call to make Palestine Jew-free. These are but a few of the canards that HaCohen writes.

No amount of rational discourse or evidence will dissuade Ran HaCohen from his self-appointed Torquemada-like approach of assessing Jewish guilt for the war with the Arab world. You see, for HaCohen, it’s Israel’s intransigence (and what most rational people would call common sense) that hinders “peace”—always. As such, HaCohen is also a member of the “Mordechai Vanunu lobby.” Vanunu was the Israeli traitor who stole Israel’s nuclear secrets and endangered the lives of every man, woman and child in Israel by doing so, something that Ran HaCohen for some sick and twisted reason might consider a good thing. HaCohen wants Vanunu free to leave Israel contrary to his probation so he can voice support for Israel’s enemies abroad (and maybe help succeed finally in harming everyone in Israel?). Ran HaCohen sees nothing wrong with Israel’s enemies knowing her secrets of self-defense.

In fact, HaCohen described Vanunu’s theft of Israel’s nuclear secrets as an “extremely heroic thing!” The fact that Vanunu, an ardent communist who was insanely employed by Israel at its Dimona facility, expressed his heroism by selling the information for cold hard cash in a capitalist manner to a newspaper doesn’t disturb HaCohen, the idealist, one bit.

Large numbers of the children and elderly in Israel may go to bed hungry at night and eat in soup kitchens due to a 60 year old war and a world boycott initiated by the Arabs, but that, also, is of no matter to HaCohen who insists the Arabs have it much, much worse and always will because of Israel, mind you. HaCohen’s rant of the Arab party line is so consistent the Arabs even run screeds by him newspapers like Al Ahram in Egypt, hardly a bastion of freedom of speech or a balanced viewpoint vis-а-vis Israel.

The following is a quote from a column written in anti.war.com by HaCohen:

“Since 1967, Israel has never given up its claim on the occupied Palestinian territories; Israel has not dismantled a single settlement built there, and has never ceased to take Palestinian lands by an ever more sophisticated arsenal of dispossession: the "by-pass roads," the "checkpoints," the relentless harassment of the Palestinian population, and, at present, the project that epitomizes the policy of dispossession: the Apartheid Wall.”

The comments above were, of course, written just before the complete forced withdrawal of all Israeli communities from Gaza by the Israeli government that has resulted in over 4,000 missiles since then being fired on the city of Sderot and environs of southern Israel. Did the Disengagement change HaCohen’s views just a little bit toward Israel’s justification for self-defense?

Nope.

One article written by HaCohen perhaps explains his ideas on pacifism as not being basically only against war, but of a narcissist’s view of the world that always embraces the ever-attacking enemy and always justifies enemy actions. You see, Ran HaCohen classifies himself as an all-knowing intellectual. In the article he derides “…Israel’s intellectual elite…” for being regarded “as a sane oasis of rational, moderate, peace-loving liberals,” and provides us with his lofty opinion that such liberals who supported Israel’s self-defense against Hizballah two summers ago provide us “ a few snapshots of Israel’s intellectual cheerleaders on their current patriotic march supporting the devastation of Lebanon.” Kidnapped soldiers, civilians bombarded by Katyushas and Hizballah claiming land that even the UN (for once) says is Israel’s do not qualify for support against Arab irredentist claims for the Muslim ummah. Apparently, HaCohen thinks true intellectuals should be in a suicide pact for the enemy. HaCohen thinks that intellectuals must always be for peace and cannot independently support war in any form, even for self-defense.

OK, so the man is a pacifist, however illogical. At the same time, HaCohen would have us believe we now must embrace the enemy’s propaganda in war at all time and even disseminate it among Israel’s and America’s youth through our educational system.. Apparently to do any less, even for former members of the Peace Now camp, is to betray one’s superior intellect as an academic, something HaCohen must think true intellectuals exhibit.

But surely HaCohen’s unrelenting claims of dispossession of Arabs by Israel ignores the same dispossession by the Arabs of Jewish communities in Gaza and the West Bank in 1948? What of Gush Etzion, legally owned land where the Jews were massacred even after the armistice? And does HaCohen maintain Israel gave the Arabs nothing when even the architects of Oslo conceded all of the West Bank and Gaza that were offered to Arafat who took the area then walked away and continued terrorism?

Only just this last week as this article went to press an eight-year-old Jewish boy lost a leg in a missile attack from Gaza. Have these events changed Ran HaCohen’s rants that maybe the Arabs seriously do not want peace? Not a bit. HaCohen wants them to have all of the West Bank too, despite empirical evidence that missiles would be fired on Tel Aviv from there, just as they are fired from Gaza.

“By-pass roads” were created because Jews in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) cannot drive their cars without being shot at or having rocks thrown at them by Arabs. Despite this, they are used by Arabs who are willing to undergo a security check and thus used by Arab taxi drivers all the time. Claiming that the security fence, erected only after repeated suicide bombings and terrorist attacks by the Arabs is an “apartheid wall” is especially galling given Israel’s population that is over 20% Arab whereas the Arabs leadership says Palestine must be “Jew-free” and has on the books a death sentence for selling land to a Jew.

But HaCohen, who likes to consider himself a reasonable man, displays no such qualities at all. In one article at Antiwar.com he bemoans the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin , killed by Israel as “barbarism” in an allusion to Nazi barbarism in World War II. Surely, HaCohen knows (or does he?) that Yassin, who was once released earlier from custody by Israel for plotting terrorist attacks before, was responsible for the deaths later of at least 350 Israelis, some of them US citizens?

But the best example of HaCohen’s logic is his equating in the same article the allied bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the worst of war atrocities. HaCohen cynically wears on his sleeve as justification for his narcissism that some of his family were in the Holocaust in Europe, while he ignores the Holocaust that was also going on in the Pacific under the Japanese. On a personal level, this writer’s late uncle who flew 35 missions over Germany was sweating bullets over being sent next to fight Japan when those two atomic bombs forced the issue. US estimates were one million casualties if Japan had to be invaded.

Even after the bombings, the Japanese military attempted a coup to keep the war going. Such analogies by HaCohen with the ongoing conflict with the Arabs (Nazi allies in that war and Nazi acolytes even today) show he may be a literary critic, but knows nothing of history and is totally irresponsible where the lives of the people of Israel and the free world are concerned.

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