Jeffrey Blankfort and Jack Ross have responded to Michael Walzer's piece in Dissent calling for the defeat of the colonization movement in the West Bank in order to save the two-state solution. Blankfort:
and, like others who advocated it in the past but never did anything
to seriously make it happen, he sees Israel's existence as a Jewish
state (one that he could support) slipping away. The two-state concept is, however, dead, as it should be, given what a
Jewish state has produced thus far, and the notion that the settlers
can easily be removed from the West Bank
reflects a mindset that refuses to accept how right-wing and racist the
Israeli population has become.
a relatively small number of settlers in Gaza which never had the same grip on the Zionist mentality or its concept of Jewish history as does the West Bank, the settlers in the West Bank will not leave quietly and they have so deeply penetrated the army that a civil war would be assured. Perhaps, that is what's needed but with Netanyahu and quite likely, Lieberman
in the government, and the settlers being a major basis of their
support, it is not likely to happen. Nor will Palestinians, be they in
Hamas or other groups, stop resisting the occupation as long as that
occupation exists.
Jack Ross:
perspective. What he asks of both sides is unrealistic, the Israelis
probably have as little control of the settlers in the end as Arafat
ever had over most of his own people. Walzer's narrative of Camp David
in this respect is significant – Arafat could probably have accepted
the offer at Taba if not Camp David, his people could not, and that was
the impetus of the Second Intifada.
At
the same time, what Walzer is calling for is where the establishment
and the Administration are right now, which is to quickly and
desperately implement the two state solution as the train is leaving
the station. It is indeed significant if the likes of Walzer and J.J.
Goldberg are now dropping any pretense on "the other side of the
street", that is, Marty Peretz and his confederates.
A word also
then about Dissent itself: In the most recent issue, it was announced
that Mitch Cohen was stepping down as an editor. Cohen, who among
other things endorsed the Iraq War when Walzer did not, was unambiguously close to the Euston Manifesto
crowd, and likely fell out with Walzer over the direction of the
magazine. That is, Cohen wanted to take the magazine to the frontlines
of the Eustonite polemical war, and Walzer did not, preferring the
magazine to go the way of Partisan Review, living out its days in quiet detachment and irrelevance.
