THE joy of a Scarlett Johansson performance lies in watching her vacillate evasively in the face of grave alternatives, sensing all the while, with delicious dread, that she will ultimately make the wrong choice. In "Match Point" we see her alternately provoke and resist Jonathan Rhys Meyers' adulterous craving for her, then helplessly give in. In "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" we watch her scattered quest for self-actualisation draw her step by step into a psychotic menage a trois with Javier Bardem* and Penelope Cruz. Ms Johansson projects a seductive combination of cleverness, empathy and poor appetite control; the characters who get involved with her already suspect they're in for a wild, shamefully enjoyable, probably disastrous ride, at the end of which they will have learned things about themselves they wish they didn't know. Her latest love triangle, pitting Oxfam, an international charity, against SodaStream, an Israeli home soda-machine company, has ended with Ms Johansson in the arms of the Israelis, and like Mr Rhys Meyers at the end of the second act in "Match Point", they are probably now wondering what to do with her. To recap the basics: Ms Johansson had been acting as a celebrity ambassador for Oxfam since 2007. She became SodaStream's spokeswoman last year, and cut an advertisement the company had intended to air during next week's Superbowl. (In a nice bit of foreshadowing, the ad begins with Ms Johansson proclaiming: "Like most actors, my main job is saving the world"—in this case apparently by encouraging people to make soda at home rather than buying Coke or Pepsi.) The problem is that SodaStream has a factory in an industrial park linked to the Israeli West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim, where it employs some 500 Palestinian workers and about as many Israelis. Oxfam says it "is opposed to all trade from Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law." When Palestinian groups pointed out the conflict, Oxfam began pressing Ms Johansson to choose a side.

Ms Johansson, perfectly cast for the role, dithered and tried to have it both ways. SodaStream presents itself as a model employer for its Palestinian workers, committed to a two-state solution. Ms Johansson embraced that line in a statement in the Huffington Post, saying SodaStream "is a company that is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbors working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights." That argument cuts no ice with Palestinian groups, who say SodaStream pays Palestinians less than Israelis, or with Oxfam, which says that trading with Israeli companies operating in West Bank settlements legitimates the occupation regardless of how they treat their workers. Forced to choose, Ms Johansson picked the patron who hadn't demanded she make a choice.

Presumably money was one factor in her decision, but there are a lot of others. The SodaStream controversy, even though it concerned only the company's presence in the settlements, was inevitably caught up in the broader BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) campaign, which calls on consumers and companies to cut off ties to all Israeli companies and institutions until the state reaches a peace agreement with the Palestinians. There would have been no way for Ms Johansson to drop SodaStream without appearing to lend support to the BDS movement, which even many liberal American Jews view as extremist and anti-Israel. That would be a very difficult move for a Jewish actress; even Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist journalist and peace activist, has had trouble distinguishing his support for boycotting companies that do business in the territories from the more radical BDS movement.

In part, that's because Israel has deliberately set about to erase the lines between its pre-1967 borders and the settlements, in both physical and economic terms. With the state subsidising housing and economic development in the settlements, Israeli financial institutions have no real way to extricate themselves from the settlement project. Earlier this year that led to the decision by PGGM, a major Dutch pension fund, to cut off its tens of millions of euros' worth of investments in Israel's top five banks: it could not reconcile them with its corporate code of ethics. Other large European financial institutions are considering doing the same. Israeli infrastructure companies are equally unable to separate themselves from activities in the territories, and European infrastructure firms have now begun cutting off joint ventures with Israeli counterparts. Like Ms Johansson, they are finally being forced to choose.

In another sense Ms Johansson's waffling was typical of a Hollywood vision of liberal politics in which entrenched conflicts are simply misunderstandings that can be resolved through personal contact and (bogus) emotional catharsis. Film stars often have an extremely sophisticated understanding of how power works in Hollywood, and a hopelessly naive understanding of how power works in politics. (A deeper interpretation might be that personal contact and bogus emotional catharsis really are important elements of how power is deployed and negotiated in Hollywood, leading film stars, who are mostly pretty canny, to misinterpret how things work elsewhere.) It's a convenient illusion that you are helping to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by "bringing people together", even if everyone is being brought together on land confiscated from Palestinian territory and under economic arrangements that erase the borders between Israel proper and the West Bank.

But Ms Johansson isn't the only one in this drama who has tried to have things both ways for as long as possible. Israel has watched with growing anxiety as Palestinian activists have succeeded in forcing Oxfam and Ms Johansson to make a choice. The divestment of European firms, the growing power of liberal Jewish organisations that oppose and denounce the occupation, the intense blitz of visits by John Kerry to force progress in the peace process, the widening cracks in Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition: all of this points to what Thomas Friedman characterised this week as a turning point in the relationship to the territories. The question of whether Israel has the intention and the willpower to ever pull out is finally going to have to be answered. Last week a top Israeli think tank laid out a new bottom line: if the peace talks with the Palestinians fail, Israel is simply going to have to unilaterally pull out of the 85% of the West Bank it hasn't directly occupied. The indecision, the deferral, the fantasy of Greater Israel is going to have to end.

I remember driving past Ma'aleh Adumim as a child in the early 1980s, when the first buildings were going up. Even then, you could tell this was the start of an affair that was going to end badly. Israeli liberals said it too; once this is built, they said, we'll never get out of the West Bank. The question, for Israel, was whether it really wanted to get out of the West Bank. The past 30 years have shown that while part of Israel, its intellect and superego, knows it needs to pull out, another part...well, let's just say Israel has poor appetite control. An Israeli map that reaches straight to the Jordan is indeed seductive. All that ancient Jewish history, the jutting crags and deep oases; why not have all of it? Ah, but it was trouble from the start. Israel never should have gotten into it. If it's lucky, it may still have one last chance to get out.

*This post initially misremembered Javier Bardem as Antonio Banderas.