NO ONE can say with any certainty that the two-state solution was viable before the war in Gaza. I can imagine arguments that the war made it more viable and also that it made it less viable. But, really, its viability doesn’t have a lot to do with the immediate strategic/political situation. There isn’t any other solution; this one is unique. People keep coming back to it because there’s no other way to go. It survives, therefore, I guess, it’s viable.

But it isn’t in great shape right now, even though everyone knows what each side would have to do to realize this solution. The Palestinians have to end their civil war, and form a provisional government that recognizes Israel and represses all terrorist activity. The Israelis have to form a government that recognizes the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own, defeats the settler movement, and begins the evacuation of the settlements.

The nice thing about these two lists of what-ought-to-be-done is that they don’t require any mutual engagement. Settling their civil war and repressing terrorism are things that the Palestinians can do-indeed, have to do-by themselves. And Israelis can defeat the settler movement and move the settlers out of the West Bank without a “partner” on the other side and without handing over territory. Move the settlers out and the army in. That would be a sufficient indication of a readiness to withdraw, just as the repression of terrorist activity by the Palestinians would be a sufficient indication of a readiness to coexist. The readiness is all. After that, negotiations would not be difficult (well, they would be difficult, but success would be possible, as it isn’t now).

Of course, each side would find the necessary moves much more comfortable if the other side was “readying” itself at the same time and at the same pace. But it is important to insist that both Israel and the Palestinians can and should act independently, whatever the other is doing. Rabin in 1992 and Barak in 1999 should have moved immediately, the day after their electoral victory, to take on the settler movement. They should have provoked a fight, and won it (as they would have done), and begun the process of bringing the settlers home. The argument against doing this was exactly the same one that many Palestinians made against repressing the terrorists: Why should we start a fight among ourselves when there is no near prospect of a final settlement? In fact, all anyone needs in order to act is the idea of a settlement-and the only idea that can motivate the actions I have described is the two-state solution.

What is necessary on each side is internal unilateralism. By contrast, external unilateralism-as in Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza (and the original Kadima plan to withdraw in a similar way from the West Bank)-is not a good idea. The actual establishment of a Palestinian state and the fixing of its boundaries-that has to be negotiated, and the negotiations must wait until the negotiating partners are sure about each other’s readiness. At this moment, they are not sure at all, and each of them is right to be unsure. The zealots on both sides are too strong. This might be the result of the Gaza war, except that the situation was so dark before the war.

The next Israeli government will stand considerably to the right of the current one, its leaders unwilling to challenge the settler movement (if they aren’t actually supporters of the movement). But that’s what the polls were already suggesting in the months before the war. The drift rightward is the inevitable result of Hamas’s rocketing of Israeli cities. Among Palestinians, the confusion of “resistance” and terrorism seems deeply entrenched, but that was also true, at least in Gaza where the rockets were coming from, before the Gaza war began.

It seems that everyone who supports the two-state solution-the last Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Saudis-hoped that Israel would win a decisive victory in Gaza. The failure to win decisively strengthens the opponents of two states. That’s not an argument that Israel should have “finished” the job; there were good reasons for an early cease-fire. In any case, the long-term outcome of the war is unknowable right now. If the rocket fire from Gaza stops and if internationally supported mechanisms are put in place to prevent the smuggling of rockets-that may be victory enough to make Israelis more ready to withdraw from the West Bank. And the experience of the war, the way Hamas fought and the way Israel fought, may undercut Palestinian support for terrorism as a political strategy-as the 2006 fighting apparently did in Lebanon, though that didn’t look to be the case immediately after the fighting ended.

I have stressed internal unilateralism, but each 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. In the international system, states can help make new states and give them legitimacy; they can’t abolish states to which they have already given legitimacy (as Israel would have to be abolished for the sake of a one-state solution). They can recognize and proliferate entities like themselves, and that is the only “solution” they can offer to the Palestinians. Once there are two states, and a boundary they both accept, then it will be possible to talk, if anyone wants to talk, about confederations and unions. But not now. Europeans could form a union only after the post-Second World War settlement had fixed the boundaries of all the European states. Israel and Palestine need a postwar settlement.

A last note: it is critically important right now to address the suffering of the people of Gaza, and no one seems to have figured out a way of doing that-perhaps there is no way-without strengthening Hamas. So be it. But Hamas is obviously not “ready” for negotiations and not ready to get ready. Its refusal to recognize Israel and its commitment to terrorism are, for now at least, central features of its identity. So, I am afraid, is its rabid anti-Semitism: the Hamas Charter reiterates an ancient hatred that long predates the Zionist project and the wars of 1948 and 1967. It solemnly insists that the Jews as a people are responsible for the French and Russian revolutions and for the two World Wars. And that’s part of the message delivered every day and every week in Hamas schools and mosques-which is not a sign of readiness. Perhaps we need to think about a three state solution, with only two of those states-Israel and the PA’s West Bank-preparing themselves for peaceful co-existence.

Michael Walzer is editor of Dissent. This article also appears as a part of a Democratiya symposium.

Article orginally reproduced on:

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=211

Everyone now has his fingers crossed for Ari Folman and all the creative artists behind “Waltz with Bashir” to win the Oscar on Sunday. A first Israeli Oscar? Why not?

However, it must also be noted that the film is infuriating, disturbing, outrageous and deceptive. It deserves an Oscar for the illustrations and animation – but a badge of shame for its message. It was not by accident that when he won the Golden Globe, Folman didn’t even mention the war in Gaza, which was raging as he accepted the prestigious award. The images coming out of Gaza that day looked remarkably like those in Folman’s film. But he was silent. So before we sing Folman’s praises, which will of course be praise for us all, we would do well to remember that this is not an antiwar film, nor even a critical work about Israel as militarist and occupier. It is an act of fraud and deceit, intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how lovely we are.

Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country’s good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful – but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened – so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey “information”? We have this waltz.

The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the “we shot and we cried” syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization – another absolutely essential ingredient in public discourse here – and voila! You have the deceptive portrait of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.

Folman took part in the Lebanon war of 1982, and two dozen years later remembered to make a movie about it. He is tormented. He goes back to his comrades-in-arms, gulps down shots of whiskey at a bar with one, smokes joints in Holland with another, wakes his therapist pal at first light and goes for another session to his shrink – all to free himself at long last from the nightmare that haunts him. And the nightmare is always ours, ours alone.

It is very convenient to make a film about the first, and now remote, Lebanon war: We already sent one of those, “Beaufort,” to the Oscar competition. And it’s even more convenient to focus specifically on Sabra and Chatila, the Beirut refugee camps.

Even way back, after the huge protest against the massacre perpetrated in those camps, there was always the declaration that, despite everything – including the green light given to our lackey, the Phalange, to execute the slaughter, and the fact that it all took place in Israeli-occupied territory – the cruel and brutal hands that shed blood are not our hands. Let us lift our voices in protest against all the savage Bashir-types we have known. And yes, a little against ourselves, too, for shutting our eyes, perhaps even showing encouragement. But no: That blood, that’s not us. It’s them, not us.

We have not yet made a movie about the other blood, which we have spilled and continue to allow to flow, from Jenin to Rafah – certainly not a movie that will get to the Oscars. And not by chance.

In “Waltz with Bashir” the soldiers of the world’s most moral army sing out something like: “Lebanon, good morning. May you know no more grief. Let your dreams come true, your nightmares evaporate, your whole life be a blessing.”

Nice, right? What other army has a song like this, and in the middle of a war, yet? Afterward they go on to sing that Lebanon is the “love of my life, the short life.” And then the tank, from inside of which this lofty and enlightened singing emanates, crushes a car for starters, turning it into a smashed tin can, then pounds a residential building, threatening to topple it. That’s how we are. Singing and wrecking. Where else will you find sensitive soldiers like these? It would really be preferable for them to shout with hoarse voices: Death to the Arabs!

I saw the “Waltz” twice. The first time was in a movie theater, and I was bowled over by the artistry. What style, what talent. The illustrations are perfect, the voices are authentic, the music adds so much. Even Ron Ben Yishai’s half-missing finger is accurate. No detail is missed, no nuance blurred. All the heroes are heroes, superbly stylish, like Folman himself: articulate, trendy, up-to-date, left-wingers – so sensitive and intelligent.

Then I watched it again, at home, a few weeks later. This time I listened to the dialogue and grasped the message that emerges from behind the talent. I became more outraged from one minute to the next. This is an extraordinarily infuriating film precisely because it is done with so much talent. Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit. The war has been painted with soft, caressing colors – as in comic books, you know. Even the blood is amazingly aesthetic, and suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines. The soundtrack plays in the background, behind the drinks and the joints and the bars. The war’s fomenters were mobilized for active service of self-astonishment and self-torment.

Boaz is devastated at having shot 26 stray dogs, and he remembers each of them. Now he is looking for “a therapist, a shrink, shiatsu, something.” Poor Boaz. And poor Folman, too: He is devilishly unable to remember what happened during the massacre. “Movies are also psychotherapy” – that’s the bit of free advice he gets. Sabra and Chatila? “To tell you the truth? It’s not in my system.” All in such up-to-the-minute Hebrew you could cry. After the actual encounter with Boaz in 2006, 24 years later, the “flash” arrives, the great flash that engendered the great movie.

One fellow comes to the war on the Love Boat, another flees it by swimming away. One sprinkles patchouli on himself, another eats a Spam omelet. The filmmaker-hero of “Waltz” remembers that summer with great sadness: It was exactly then that Yaeli dumped him. Between one thing and the other, they killed and destroyed indiscriminately. The commander watches porn videos in a Beirut villa, and even Ben Yishai has a place in Ba’abda, where one evening he downs half a glass of whiskey and phones Arik Sharon at the ranch and tells him about the massacre. And no one asks who these looted and plundered apartments belong to, damn it, or where their owners are and what our forces are doing in them in the first place. That is not part of the nightmare.

What’s left is hallucination, a sea of fears, the hero confesses on the way to his therapist, who is quick to calm him and explains that the hero’s interest in the massacre at the camps derives from a different massacre: from the camps from which his parents came. Bingo! How could we have missed it? It’s not us at all, it’s the Nazis, may their name and memory be obliterated. It’s because of them that we are the way we are. “You have been cast in the role of the Nazi against your will,” a different therapist says reassuringly, as though evoking Golda Meir’s remark that we will never forgive the Arabs for making us what we are. What we are? The therapist says that we shone the lights, but “did not perpetrate the massacre.” What a relief. Our clean hands are not part of the dirty work, no way.

And besides that, it wasn’t us at all: How pleasant to see the cruelty of the other. The amputated limbs that the Phalange, may their name be obliterated, stuff into the formaldehyde bottles; the executions they perpetrate; the symbols they slash into the bodies of their victims. Look at them and look at us: We never do things like that.

When Ben Yishai enters the Beirut camps, he recalls scenes of the Warsaw ghetto. Suddenly he sees through the rubble a small hand and a curly-haired head, just like that of his daughter. “Stop the shooting, everybody go home,” the commander, Amos, calls out through a megaphone in English. The massacre comes to an abrupt end. Cut.

Then, suddenly, the illustrations give way to the real shots of the horror of the women keening amid the ruins and the bodies. For the first time in the movie, we not only see real footage, but also the real victims. Not the ones who need a shrink and a drink to get over their experience, but those who remain bereaved for all time, homeless, limbless and crippled. No drink and no shrink can help them. And that is the first (and last) moment of truth and pain in “Waltz with Bashir.”

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent

Taken from: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1065552.html