David Bromwich comments on Michael Walzer's piece in Dissent on the two-state solution:
What must be done on both sides has been clear for a long time. Many Israeli
commentators–among them Uri Avnery–have been saying it. Palestinians (both
Fatah and Hamas) must suppress terrorist acts against Israel; and Israel must
evict the settlers from the colonies on the West Bank.
The officious idea that any steps toward a resolution on either side must be
mutually approved, agreed on, and guaranteed by a prior monitoring apparatus,
was, as Walzer observes, a pedantry that stood in the way of initiating the
solution as early as 1993 and again in 2000. Both Rabin and Barak could have
begun to remove obstacles on the Israeli side as soon as they came to
power. Of
course, such a beginning will hardly be made voluntarily today by a far-right
Netanyahu coalition ministry. That is why the relevant pressure must come from
the U.S. The boldness of Walzer's article lies in its view of the intermediate
goal of a non-expansionist Israel: to "defeat the settler movement." Nobody of
comparable stature, among left-liberal supporters of Israel, has ever put the
case so directly. And his formulation of the necessary methods is as plain as
his statement of the goal: "move the settlers out and the army in."
Note that, in Bob Simon's 60 Minutes segment concerning the West Bank, Tzipi
Livni spoke for one moment with the same directness. Israel is a state, said
Livni; and, using the powers of the state, it must prove its efficacy
by acting
to control its delinquent citizens. Move the settlers out and the army in.
This will not be as easy as the grammar of a simple sentence makes it sound.
Every Israeli ministry from 1973 on has been implicated in the spread of the
settlements; and the reconciliation of fanatical settlers with the secular
government of Israel in the queasy "unity" aftermath of the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin was a strangely disturbing episode–a moment of false healing
which had broad consequences. There are settlers in the IDF; the resistance
here will be wilder and more tenacious than it was in Gaza. But the ground of
the necessary resoluteness has at last been acknowledged.
