Michael Walzer is a hugely-influential voice in the Jewish community. He can bring a lot of the New Republic crowd and the liberal interventionists and even leftleaning intellectuals along with him wherever he goes. Well, here is an important new piece by the political theorist in Dissent, saying that the U.S. must pressure Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories for the sake of the two-state solution.
The piece is notable for its frankly realist thrust, one I share: give them a state, goddamnit, that's how the world works! And Walzer's concession that the Gaza war didn't work. You have to wonder what that does to his neat calculations at the start of the war, finding it was just fine. Now he talks about the "awfulness" of the Gaza war. Awful for who?
I wonder if Walzer, while sharply critical of the Palestinians, is not on the same road so many other Jews are on: waking up to Israel's soulless militarism. I said at the start of Gaza that this was the end of the Israel lobby. Walzer's piece affirms this truth. Walt and Mearsheimer–whom Walzer, word had it, refused to debate/share a stage with–have been making many of these points for years, and right now Walzer needs Walt and Mearsheimer and the realists a lot more than he needs Malcolm Hoenlein, the ZOA or the ADL.
Let's celebrate Walzer's fresh thinking:
[E]ach side needs more than a little help from its friends. Israel and
the Palestinians need heavy and continuous pressure to address the
obstacles in their own camp. Clinton and his team tried too hard, I now
believe, to bring the two sides together before either of them was
ready. Arafat, who probably believed in terrorism as a strategy, was
less ready than Barak, who apparently was prepared to challenge the
settlers—but not quite yet. It would have been better in the 1990s, and
it would be better now, to work on each side separately. A division of
labor might make sense, with the Americans concentrating on Israel and
the Europeans (with help, perhaps, from Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi
Arabia) on Palestine, but the interventions would have to be equally
strong and the external partners equally committed to their tasks: the
repression of terror by the PA and the defeat of the settler movement
by the Israeli government. Perhaps the awfulness of the Gaza war will
produce a new sense of urgency, if not in Israel and Palestine, then in
the United States and Europe.
Note that this external assistance could have no other goal than two states.
