There is enough to Trump's "deal of the century" to inflict pain on both the Left and the Right in Israel. For there is not, and there will not be any peace plan with the Palestinians that makes any of the political sides' dreams come true. In fact, the term "peace plan" is a dramatic title for what usually is a type of compromise, reconciliation and mainly an expression of the balance of power between the sides. Ask me: Irit, how can you tell? Are you a political commentator who knows nothing but speaks confidently as if you are the Chairwoman of the Global Geopolitical General Council?
And to this, I shall answer: not a commentator, but a girl who reads books and watches movies, one who can tell the difference between them and reality, acknowledges the mythological power of a good story along with its ability to blur the vision of reality.
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The reality, with regards to counties, let alone Israel, will never deliver the perfect result. In order to have the perfect result, we invented Hollywood, which creates 90 –minute stays in a world where good defeats evil and everyone lives happily ever after. A quick review of the 100 Most Successful Movies of All Times shows that only one ends with the tragic death of the handsome hero. Spoiler alert: It's Titanic. And compared to a true disaster, the movie is very easy on the eyes and hearts.
At the end of Titanic we are required to shed a tear over the unfortunate fate of Leonardo DiCaprio's "Jack Dawson". The real world has shed tears over the ship's 1,514 fatalities. But people who want to make money in Hollywood focus on Luke Skywalker's and Superman's victories. The fantasy pays off when it's well-scripted, the actors are attractive and when Spiderman hops from one rooftop to another. It might be fatal when it's inhaled into the lungs and tries to be implemented in political life.
Ideologies are similarly affected by fantasies and utopias. In the right-winged fantasy movie, the State of Israel stretches from the sea to the Jordan area, the Palestinians willingly immigrate to Jordan, which is already a country with a Palestinian majority, and those who are left in Israel – will reconcile without conflict with it being a Jewish state.
But this movie has never been tried out in reality. Everyone knows that it is indeed a fantasy, and for those who don't – there is a special department in the Shin Bet security agency that will put them in administrative detention if caught with spray paint in their trunk.
The Left's script of a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel within safe and just borders, settlement eviction, and a trustworthy promise from the Palestinians not to engage in terrorism, has been repeatedly tried and by that it has broken a well-known Hollywood rule: Don't try to hop from one rooftop to another during a chase, because unlike Keanu Reeves in The Matrix – you will be scraped off the pavement with a spatula.
The 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip were not experiments pursued out of malice. On the contrary, they were driven by good intentions, faith in their success, and the will to do better by Israel and the Palestinians.
But they also followed a script in which both sides are equally right and wrong, and mainly strive towards the same goal: Peaceful coexistence; a script in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based on a geographical conflict and not on deeply-rooted religious indictment; and mainly a script that assumes that a problem whose foundations are based on partial understanding and on a "lands for peace" dream can really have a classic Hollywood ending, with both parties walking hand in hand into the sunset.
The benefit of the Oslo experiment is in its failure. The way to achievements in science is through experiments that either affirm or refute theories. The Oslo failure, followed by the disengagement, was supposed to enable its supporters to draw practical conclusions regarding its efficiency and to look for a new route that is not based on the Palestinians' goodwill and concurrence, on the support of the European Union and the sounds of a Shofar coming from the sky accompanied by a shower of purple bunnies.
Hard work pays off
This alternative route is meant to either create conditions where hate slowly dissipates, or to strengthen Israel so that it could create alliances that will enable greater support and freedom of action.
All that does not seem particularly glamorous or, in Hollywood's terms, it makes for a very long, boring, foreign film. This is also surprisingly similar to Netanyahu's term as prime minister, meaning mostly devoid of any big moves, but full of meticulous work, without much fanfare or drama but with careful anticipation for a window of opportunity.
The latter arrived in the form of US President Donald Trump who, like Netanyahu, was blessed not only with basic, healthy morals but also with a completely sober world view.
The singularity of Trump's plan is its full disregard to yesterday's fantasies, and a firm acknowledgment of the current situation on the ground, that was mainly established as a result of wars where, thank God, Israel won and the Palestinians and the rest of our enemies lost.
Why does the Left insist on latching onto the script "they are killing us only because they are poor and want to be rid of the occupation," despite the fact that the Arab world has never acknowledged Israel's existence within any border; despite the fact that the Palestinians rejected all offers of an agreement; despite the fact that the disengagement has not resulted in peace and quiet on the Gaza border, and despite the fact that there is no link between the Palestinians' dire economic state and their desire to eliminate Jews?
The human refusal to admit to a mistake is one of the reasons why. But so is the magnitude of the dream. The bigger the utopia – the tighter the sleeper's hold on their dream. We are not alone in holding on to pipedreams: The United States is a capitalist empire and a free market is one of its cornerstones but these days, one of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party's nomination in the 2020 presidential race is Bernie sanders – a hardline socialist.
Sanders claims that he is a social democrat, but the dream he sells is the communist one – a utopia of social engineering, equality and nullifying both personal and national identity. Utopias may have miserably failed to live up to reality, but still have an enthusiastic following.
And then there is Netanyahu, and he is also a part of the story.
I find it hard to believe that an ordinary person who truly understands politics of history is actually out there. In fact, I find it hard to believe that even politicians or historians do. But I do believe in the power of stories. The Left's dream of Oslo's success was cut short not by losing the elections, but by the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. This horrific incident left an entire political camp believing that had it not been for the assassination – there would be peace with the Palestinians.
But instead of elections we got an assassination, and instead of Shimon Peres as PM we got Netanyahu, Rabin's political rival. The 1996 elections became a narrative of different, almost biblical magnitude. Left-wing dreamers were rattled out of their dream of peace by three gunshots, and ever since then, they have been convinced that it is not reality that had dictated their failure but rather the villain who heads Likud, and who is preventing them from realizing their utopia.
And since the collective soul has an archetype memory, which is deep and solid and stubborn, the Left sees Netanyahu as having assassinated their dream and they seek to do the same to him from a legal and political standpoint, hench their support for the attorney general's decision to indict Netanyahu precisely at this time, which is also one of our greatest moments.
Ideologies are also affected by fantasies. In the right-wing fantasy movie, the Palestinians come to terms with Israel being a Jewish state.
