Alex Dunae

[Today, Israel’s] national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel’s political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania — “everyone’s out to get us” — no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt’s famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with Missiles,” describe Israel as “Serbia with nukes.”

In a world of failed and failing states, does the international community and Canada have a responsibility to intervene, including militarily, in the affairs of nations that grossly fail to protect their citizens’ human rights? Or, have we learned in recent years that the use of force against sovereign states necessarily creates more problems that it solves?

As Barack Obama ponders whom to pick as agriculture secretary, he should reframe the question. What he needs is actually a bold reformer in a position renamed “secretary of food.”