
The Tel Aviv skyline, as seen from Na’ale, just northwest of Ramallah, June 17, 2020. Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images.
In May of 2024, Ireland, Spain, and Norway, in coordination, recognized Palestinian statehood. Doing so did not end the war between Israel and Hamas, improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, or have any noticeable effect on Palestinian political arrangements. But recognition, according to Ireland’s then-Prime Minister Simons Harris, “gives hope” that a two-state solution will one day be implemented. The idea seems to be that the creation of an independent Palestinian state is the only acceptable (and even inevitable) outcome of the conflict, and will somehow fix the underlying causes of the current war.
Ireland may be an outlier, even among European nations, in the extent of its hostility toward Israel, but the underlying sentiment is widely shared. On October 16, 2023—less than a week after a Hamas-run statelet in Gaza had massacred 1,200 Israelis—then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Saudi news outlet Al Arabiya that the two-state solution is necessary for the Middle East. He repeated the sentiment in November 2023, March, May, and July 2024, and again in his final interview with the New York Times last month. Likewise, the late Martin Indyk, a former American diplomat who might be taken as representative of American pro-Israel Jewish liberals, wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs a year ago arguing that the Gaza war proves precisely how necessary a two-state solution is. If the present cease-fire holds, discussions of “the day after” in the Gaza Strip will become more urgent, and Palestinian statehood will no doubt take center stage.
To most Israelis, including many who support the two-state solution in principle, such calls appear bizarre and even in poor taste—a “reward for terror,” as Prime Minister Netanyahu put it last May in response to the Irish-Spanish-Norwegian initiative. But whether we like it or not, despite the two-state solution’s tanking popularity in Israel itself, in the international arena it remains the consensus solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, supported by virtually all of Israel’s Western allies, perhaps with the exception of parts of the Republican party. Others believe that while the Israel-Palestinian conflict is too hard a nut to crack in the foreseeable future, territorial concessions—whether unilateral or in the context of a partial agreement with the Palestinians—could at least mitigate the conflict. (For the rest of this essay, I will use “territorial concessions” to refer to all these approaches: the creation of a Palestinian state that fully ends the conflict, a partial deal that creates the political framework for such a state even without final status agreements, and also unilateral withdrawals in the mold of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza.)
We can distinguish three lines of argument in favor of territorial concessions. The first one is moral: just as Jews have the right to self-determination, the right to live in a state of their own, the Palestinians have this right too: although they cannot have all of historic Palestine, they have the right to a state on all or most of the land that Israel didn’t control before 1967. The second argument is based on self-interest: “the occupation corrupts,” as some members of the Israeli left put it, and the prolonged conflict and the decades-long status quo in which Israel rules over another people has a corrosive effect on every aspect of Israeli society. Thus, for Israel to be a “normal country,” it must create a state of normalcy in which it lives side by side with the Palestinians, rather than ruling over them.
The third argument is also based on self-interest, but focuses not on domestic consequences but external pressures: Israel cannot occupy the Palestinians forever, because the present status quo is unsustainable and the world won’t put up with it indefinitely. In the words of the former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, there is an impending “diplomatic tsunami” that will engulf Israel if it continues on its current path. Israel, in this scenario, will be forced to withdraw from most of Judea and Samaria with or without an agreement if it doesn’t want to become a pariah state; therefore it’s better for Israel to withdraw sooner, on its own terms. (A note on terminology: I will varyingly call the territory west of Jordan that Israel captured in the Six-Day War as the “West Bank” and as “Judea Samaria,” often to emphasize different historical and political aspects of this area. No political or moral point is intended with this terminology.)
Of the three arguments, the third is by far the most influential both in Israel itself and among Israel’s liberal supporters in the West. For a long time, I found it persuasive myself, and once I despaired of a two-state solution, I came to favor unilateral withdrawal. But the events of the past five years have changed my mind. That process started with the Abraham Accords, which upended much received wisdom, most importantly then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s now widely ridiculed 2016 warning that “there will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace,” and culminated with the world’s reaction to Israel’s war in the wake of October 7. Now I don’t believe withdrawal is wrong because of Israel’s divine right to the land, or because its historical and biblical claims should trump all other concerns. Nor do I think Israel should simply pursue its security concerns at all costs, international opinion be damned. Rather, I have come to oppose territorial concessions because I am convinced they will lead to exactly the sort of consequences their proponents fear. My aim, then, is to make the realist case for maintaining control of the West Bank.
For readers of the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, or serious Israeli journals, this might sound like a paradox. Received wisdom among diplomats and international-relations experts is that territorial concessions will facilitate Israel’s full integration in the region, contribute to the peace process with the Palestinians, and mend ties with current and potential partners, both in the West and in the Arab world, who are currently alienated from the Jewish state. Even most opponents of territorial concessions agree that these are likely advantages of the policy they oppose; they just find them insufficient to outweigh the security threat that further withdrawals would pose to Israel, or are unwilling to give up land they see as rightfully belonging to Israel just for the sake of intangible “diplomatic credit.” Thus, to many readers “the diplomatic case against territorial concessions” might sound a lot like “the pacifist case for war,” “the liberal-democratic case for absolute monarchy,” or “the pro-natalist case for vasectomies.”
Yet, in the present essay, I will argue that there is indeed a powerful diplomatic case against territorial concessions, which, once we grasp the nature of Palestinian national aspirations and the main drivers of Western (especially American) attitudes to Israel, should appear not only credible but irrefutable. In fact, I will argue for a much starker claim: the fear of diplomatic isolation is reason to oppose rather than to support territorial concessions. If Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, and especially if it were to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state, in the long run it would become more diplomatically isolated than it is today, perhaps in serious danger of becoming a pariah state.
Before continuing, I want to make explicit that I am only setting forth an argument in favor of the supposedly “unsustainable” status quo (more on this term later) in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip there is no status quo to speak of: the war is still ongoing, and although a cease-fire is in effect as I write these lines, there is no guarantee that this truce will lead to the final cessation of hostilities.
The argument I will present stands on three legs: (1) the nature of Palestinian nationalism and the likely character of any future independent Palestinian state or autonomous Palestinian polity, (2) the factors that determine public opinion about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the West, especially in the U.S., and (3) the probable dynamic that would result from the transformation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict into a state of protracted war between Israel and an independent polity over which Israel no longer exercises security control.
I. The Nature of Palestinian Nationalism
Let me begin with a claim that will strike many readers as bold, but which seems to me obvious: if a Palestinian state were to be established, it would almost certainly find itself in armed conflict with Israel. The exact wording is important here. I don’t necessarily think that after a peace treaty, the newly established Palestinian state’s recognized government would declare war on Israel. Rather, the state would find itself in an armed conflict with Israel, either as a belligerent party or as a passive victim unable to exert full sovereignty within its borders and restrain terrorist groups like Hamas. In short, a Palestinian state or quasi-state would either be like Iran, which turned from an ally into an enemy state after the Islamic revolution, or like Lebanon, whose south is de-facto ruled by Hizballah and whose agreements with Israel are therefore unenforceable by the Lebanese state. The main basis of this assessment is threefold: (a) historical experience with the peace process and the Israel-Arab conflict, (b) Palestinian public opinion, and (c) the historical failure of Palestinian state-building.
The first point is known to all: past Israeli diplomatic concessions have almost exclusively been followed by waves of terror, rather than in-kind diplomatic responses by Palestinian leadership. Shortly after the unsuccessful Camp David Summit in 2000, Yasir Arafat launched the second intifada. A few years later, after Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas overthrew the Palestinian Authority in a violent coup and almost immediately began launching rockets at Israel. And while there was no formal diplomatic process to speak of with Hamas, many analysts were surprised by the timing of the Simchat Torah massacre, as it came at a period of relative calm in the Gaza Strip, during which Qatari cash was allowed to flow in and record numbers of guest workers could commute from the Gaza Strip to Israel.
It is difficult to establish causal connections between these events, so I will refrain from saying that Israeli gestures of goodwill resulted in political violence on the Palestinian side. I can make do with a much weaker claim: as a rule, acts of goodwill on the Israeli side have not been reciprocated, and in fact have often been followed by increased levels of political violence.
It could be said, and has often been claimed by Israel’s critics, that Israel’s gestures in the above cases were insufficient. I won’t litigate the point here, because it ultimately is not germane to the thesis I’m advancing. For even if Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer of a Palestinian state and Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal were in some sense “insufficient”—that is, even if Israel should have offered more to the Palestinians than it in fact did—one might expect that limited and flawed gestures of goodwill would be answered by similarly constrained gestures by the other side. After all, trust-building doesn’t occur in a single day; it’s a gradual process that begins with modest attempts at forging good will. Thus, even those who maintain that Israeli overtures toward the Palestinians in recent decades have been inadequate must concede that they were better than nothing. The reaction to such overtures on the Palestinian side, meanwhile, has almost always been worse than nothing.
It bears noting that the Palestinians aren’t unique in this regard. Throughout its history, Israel has only fought one major war with an enemy on territory that it had previously taken from that enemy: this was the Yom Kippur War, which occurred six years after Israel emerged victorious from the Six-Day War and occupied the Sinai Peninsula. All other major wars occurred before Israel occupied enemy territory—the Six-Day War in 1967 and the First Lebanon War in 1982—or shortly after, and plausibly as a result of territorial withdrawal—examples include the Second Lebanon War in 2006; all previous Gaza operations starting in 2008; and of course, Israel’s ongoing multi-front war with various Iranian proxies. Israel’s history thus suggests that withdrawing from captured territory is significantly more likely to lead to war than capturing territory.
The second reason to be pessimistic about territorial concessions to the Palestinians is Palestinian public opinion. The Palestinian education system from a very early age teaches violent anti-Semitism, encourages terrorism, and glorifies martyrdom—this much is widely known. And there is ample, immediate evidence of extreme and pro-terror views throughout Palestinian society.
Khalil Shikaki, one of the most respected Palestinian political scientists, has been conducting social surveys since 2000 and regularly publishes them at the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR). These polls consistently show an extremist society in a state of perpetual mobilization. Support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad fluctuates not because of temporary waves of moderation, but due to these organizations’ effect on Palestinians’ well-being. For instance, before October 7, support for Hamas was generally higher in Gaza than in the West Bank, but afterward that trend reversed, presumably because Gazans have suffered much more from the war with Israel than their compatriots in the West Bank.
Moreover, many parameters remain fairly constant over time. For example, support for the October 7 attack has remained around 70 percent among Palestinians, and even before October 7, support for armed struggle and terror attacks against Israel’s civilian population was very high. Support for the two-state solution is consistently low, and even most supporters of the two-state solution answer the follow-up question of whether armed struggle should continue for the liberation of all of historical Palestine after Palestinian independence affirmatively.
Importantly, in response to the question of why the October 7 attack happened, only a small minority of Palestinians mentioned Israel’s military occupation and an even smaller share mentioned the settlements; the most popular answers were “to free Palestine” and “to protect al-Aqsa mosque.” The creation of a fully independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank would be unlikely to accomplish either of those goals.
Every honest observer who is interested in peace must take a long, hard look at Shikaki’s surveys. These surveys paint the image of a society where extremists are a firm majority, where the desire to extinguish Israel and with it all Jewish presence from historical Palestine is ubiquitous, and where the primary driver of these attitudes isn’t past wrongs that the Palestinians suffered from Israel (real as these may be), but religious fundamentalism and an eliminationist liberation theology. Western analysts often emphasize that one must sharply distinguish between Hamas and the Palestinian people. While the distinction is important for wartime conduct (Israel has obligations toward non-combatant civilians that it doesn’t have toward Hamas fighters), at the ideological level the distinction is all but fiction.
Even during periods when Hamas as an organization is unpopular among Palestinians, its ideology and behavior are an authentic expression of Palestinian nationalism and Palestinian national aspirations today. Two-statists often claim that any future Palestinian state must be democratic and peaceful, but as the PCPSR polls reveal, these two requirements are incompatible: any democratic Palestinian state will represent the views that are dominant in its population, and those views are anything but peaceful.
This leads me to the third reason for my skepticism: a very weak history of Palestinian state-building. Many people to whom I presented the previous two considerations—the failure of past Israeli gestures to elicit a Palestinian response in kind and the fanaticism of the Palestinian national ethos—responded by pointing out that Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and that the population of these countries is also extremely hostile toward Israel. But, as these critics rightly point out, such examples of cold peace are nothing to scoff at—we aren’t dreaming of friendship with the Palestinians, but merely looking for peaceful divorce from them.
My answer to this is twofold. First, cold peace of this sort indeed has security implications, for it means that Israel is always potentially just one revolution away from war with these countries. When the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt amid the 2011 Arab Spring, relations with Israel rapidly deteriorated. The new president, Mohammad Morsi, announced that he would honor the peace treaty with Israel, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the treaty would have survived more than a year of Islamist rule in Egypt. In the event, the Islamists were driven out of office, and Egypt-Israel relations reverted to their pre-2011 state, but who can say when and where the next revolution will strike, and if it will prove more durable.
Second, even putting this point aside, I don’t believe that the lessons with Egypt and Jordan are applicable to the Palestinians, due to extremely weak state-building capacity in Palestinian society. Here, too, history doesn’t augur well for peaceful relations. Hamas overthrew Fatah and took control of the Gaza Strip shortly after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. In the West Bank, the (highly unpopular) Fatah faction of the PLO remains in power, but its rule over Areas A and B is tenuous and wouldn’t be sustainable without an Israeli military presence. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority has limited sway over its ostensible constituents on the ground; armed militias wield considerable power, and much of the local population is aligned with Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, or other jihadist organizations.
This is important because it suggests that even if Israel withdrew from most of the West Bank, whether unilaterally or as part of a diplomatic agreement, and even if the unpopular Palestinian Authority (or its successor) sincerely tried to retain peaceful relations with Israel, the experiment would in all likelihood crash on the rocks of reality. Without the IDF’s presence—entailing frequent raids and extensive intelligence on the ground—the Palestinian entity’s peaceful government would be overthrown or would give way to anarchy throughout the West Bank, which would quickly be overrun by local jihadist militias.
Even in the best-case scenario, relations with Palestine would resemble Israel’s relations with Lebanon rather than with Egypt. Lebanon has no significant territorial dispute with Israel, and while there is no love lost between the two countries, peace doesn’t face insurmountable ideological obstacles. But in practice, peace is impossible between Israel and Lebanon because the Lebanese state doesn’t exercise sovereignty over the south of the country—Hizballah does, even in its present, weakened state.
To sum up: withdrawal from the West Bank, whether unilateral or mandated by a peace agreement, would eventually result in a state of war between Israel and the Palestinian entity. This is because (1) the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict gives us no reason to believe that peaceful and conciliatory steps on Israel’s part will be reciprocated, (2) Palestinian nationalism is eliminationist in nature, and the war on any collective Jewish presence in historic Palestine is part of its very essence, and (3) Palestinian state-building suffers from chronic weakness, which rules out the possibility that a determined autocrat could maintain peaceful relations with Israel despite the population’s overwhelming opposition.
I suspect that many readers agree with much of the above but begin to wonder at this point: what does this have to do with diplomacy, and how is this a diplomatic rather than security-based argument against territorial concessions?
II. What Really Shapes International Opinion about Israel
Many Israelis, as well as liberal Zionists abroad, believe that some form of territorial concession is unavoidable in the long run due to “international pressure.” That is, if Israel attempts to hold on indefinitely to territories that are widely viewed as essential for a future Palestinian state, then Israel will face a “diplomatic tsunami.” It will grow increasingly isolated and could eventually become a pariah state; without trading partners or allies, Israel would find its very existence severely threatened. This argument is often put forward even by pro-Israel pundits and politicians, including three former Israeli prime ministers: Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and most recently (in 2021) Yair Lapid. It arguably influenced the former prime minister Ariel Sharon, too, when he decided in favor of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. And similar warnings have also been frequently heard from other Israeli politicians on the center-left, for example the former head of Kadima and prime-ministerial candidate Tzipi Livni, and the current leader of The Democrats (a party recently created by the merger of Labor and Meretz), Yair Golan.
I have come to believe that this line of reasoning is misguided, and that the discussion of Palestinian nationalism in the previous section is important for understanding why. I don’t deny that continued military occupation, with no end in sight, has a diplomatic cost for Israel. My claim is that ending or curtailing the extent of this occupation would have an even more severe diplomatic cost, and therefore when we compare the diplomatic cost of the occupation with the most likely alternative, continued occupation remains Israel’s diplomatically safest option.
My argument for this claim is simple. As we have seen, territorial withdrawals have not led the Palestinians to become more peaceable, but just made it easier for them to attack Israel. Israel is then forced to respond to such attacks with military force. And the diplomatic cost of such military responses far exceeds the diplomatic cost of the occupation. Let us examine why.
When assessing the diplomatic damage of certain actions, two things are worth paying attention to: concrete diplomatic steps taken and shifts in public opinion. The latter is important because while government policy isn’t always in sync with public opinion, in democracies the latter tends to shape government policy in the long run.
The concrete diplomatic steps taken against Israel since October 7, 2023 hardly need elaboration, but a quick review of the most important developments is still useful:
- In December 2023, South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
- In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
- Throughout the war, several countries introduced arms embargos against Israel, among them Italy, Japan, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The UK and France at least considered such steps, and in a symbolic move, France banned Israeli companies from its annual defense expo. While the U.S. and Germany didn’t introduce a formal embargo, there is evidence that they slowed down or entirely blocked the sale of certain weapons to place pressure on Israel (a technique that the analyst Michael Doran terms an “Italian strike”).
- Bolivia completely severed all diplomatic relations with Israel. Several other countries (including Bahrain, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa) withdrew their ambassadors.
- Several countries recognized a state of Palestine, and shortly thereafter, the UN General Assembly voted to grant new rights and privileges to Palestine as an observer state.
- Academic boycotts picked up in the wake of the war. Dozens of universities in Spain suspended ties with Israel; in Ireland, Trinity College Dublin agreed to student protesters’ demand to divest entirely from Israeli firms.
- Several countries, including the U.S., issued personal sanctions against individual Israeli citizens, including ministers, Knesset members, and military personnel.
When taken together, we might call these measures a diplomatic tsunami, even if one very different from that Barak, Olmert, and so many left-leaning commentators have been warning against. These steps were taken not in response to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, but in response to Israel’s military response to the Simchat Torah massacre, which happened nineteen years after Israel stopped occupying the Gaza Strip. Some of the hostile diplomatic steps directly address the Palestinians’ quest for statehood, but their timing clearly and intentionally coincided with the war and not with any roadblock in the peace process.
Ireland, Spain, and Norway have never been particularly pro-Israel, but they were joined in recognizing Palestinian state by a fourth EU country, Slovenia. And these countries could have chosen a number of other occasions to grant this recognition: in response to failed negotiations over Palestinian statehood in the 2000s, any time Israel announced the building the new homes in the West Bank, during the first Trump administration’s final months in 2020 when the Israeli government appeared to consider annexing parts of the Judea and Samaria, or even during the much-publicized Sheikh Jarrah expropriations in 2021—all actions that, in the language of diplomats, are usually seen as “unhelpful for achieving a two-state solution.” Yet these countries crossed the Rubicon only in response to the Israel-Hamas war, an event whose antecedent cause was Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
The present war is not unique in creating diplomatic backlash. In fact, it fits a reliable pattern: Israel faces heavy diplomatic headwinds whenever it is at war (the longer and bloodier the war, the stronger the headwinds), and diplomatic pressure ebbs at quiet times. The present war is an extreme case, since it is unusually long and has an unusually high death toll compared to previous conflicts. But the phenomenon itself—diplomatic hostility resulting from Israel’s fighting terrorist groups on its borders—is familiar. One doesn’t have to go back further than the second intifada (2000–2005), which shortly predated the founding of the infamous BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement. But one could easily also take the example of the First Lebanon War in the 1980s.
The BDS movement wasn’t the second intifada’s only outcome. In 2002, shortly after then-Prime Minister Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield—the military operation that crushed the second intifada—the European Parliament passed a non-binding resolution that called for an arms embargo and economic sanctions against Israel and for suspension of the EU’s trade agreement with Israel. Again, this decision wasn’t passed in response to settlement expansion or perceived bad faith during the peace process, but in response to a military campaign. The U.S. itself used the threat of an arms embargo to force a cease-fires on Israel in 1973, 1982, and 2014.
This pattern holds for the last few decades of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The backlash was usually proportional to the intensity of Israeli military operations. But the former reliably followed the latter: after Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), the efforts to stop infiltration during the 2018 Gaza border protests, Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), and of course the present war.
Let me now move on to another dimension of diplomatic standing: public opinion. By far the most important country is the U.S., and it’s well-known that Israel has become a more partisan issue over the past two decades: while support among Republicans remains steady, Democrats are now divided between a pro-Israel and a pro-Palestinian faction. Moreover, opinion surveys consistently show that younger voters (especially young Democrats) are less pro-Israel than older ones. Before we move on to the war’s effect on public opinion, I need to make a few preliminary remarks, because I believe this opinion shift in the U.S. is poorly understood and frequently misinterpreted. Let’s look at some of the most frequently cited explanations.
The first is that Benjamin Netanyahu undermined bipartisan support by antagonizing Barack Obama. This argument assigns far too much weight to poor chemistry between two leaders for a relatively short period. More importantly, it doesn’t explain why younger Democrats are more critical of Israel than older ones. If anything, the youngest Democrats today could hardly remember the personal antagonism between Netanyahu and Obama, since they were children at the time, so according to this explanation’s logic they should resent Israel less than their elders.
Two somewhat more plausible arguments are that a younger generation of Americans increasingly sees Israel not as the David of the conflict but as the Goliath, and that there has been no progress on the peace process over the past fifteen years, effectively since Netanyahu’s return to political power in 2009. But neither of these theories explains the divergence between the parties, i.e., why there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats two decades ago and much more difference today. Since both parties’ voters observed both the stagnation of the peace process and whatever constitutes “Goliath” status for Israel today, the trend for younger voters to be more hostile to Israel should be bipartisan.
I believe that the real reason for the increasing party polarization in the U.S. is entirely different: it is driven by underlying demographic changes in the two parties’ electoral bases and has almost nothing to do with Israel’s actual behavior. It is a truism that the Israel-U.S. alliance is based on “shared values”; it’s rarely spelled what these shared values are. It isn’t just liberal democracy; rather, Israel and America are special in being countries with some of the highest levels of religious observance in the Western world. Strong pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. is closely related to religiosity and to ordinary Americans’ connection to the Bible. In this regard, the party split is sharp and growing.
According to Ryan Burge’s general social survey, in the 1990s, 63 percent of Democrats and 67 percent of Republicans said that they believed in God “with no doubt,” while the number rises to 80 percent and 84 percent, respectively, when you include those who believe with doubt. In the 2020s, 63 percent of Republicans still believe in God without doubt, and 82 percent believe with or without doubt—a very slight decline. However, only 56 percent of Democrats believe in God at all, and a mere 39 percent believe without doubt. Differential religiosity also explains the generational split: young Democrats are significantly less religious than older ones, so it’s not surprising that they are also less pro-Israel. Polls consistently show that atheists are one of the most anti-Israel of all religious groups, comparable in their hostility to the Jewish state only to Muslims.
I’m strongly convinced that the primary determinant of pro-Israel sentiment or lack thereof in the U.S. today is the strength of religious (typically Christian) belief, and not any particular Israeli policy. This observation is further buttressed by the radically divergent reaction of different groups to Israel’s conduct in the current war. For example, between 2023 and 2024 Israel’s favorability among 18-34-year-olds dropped dramatically (from 64 to 38 percent), whereas among those of 55 years and older it barely changed (from 74 to 71 percent).
I stress these points because if I’m right about the long-term trend—that the decline in American religiosity is linked to a decline in support for Israel—then the policy implications for Israel don’t follow conventional wisdom. Democrats are drifting away from Israel not because they are becoming increasingly impatient with the lack of a peace process, or with the behavior of this or that Israeli politician. Rather, they are drifting away because they have a much weaker sense of shared Judeo-Christian civilizational identity. Some commentators cite progressivism or “wokeness” as additional reasons, but I see these as downstream from the weakening of religious belief: wokeness gained steam because, for many young people, it seems to fill spiritual needs previously supported by traditional religiosity.
If this is so, then the notion that following any particular policy will change this long-term trend is illusory: growing antagonism toward Israel is primarily driven by demographic change and a sense of cultural alienation among young Americans, not only from Israel but from the U.S. too. Israel will never be able to mitigate this new attitudinal shift through the kinds of conciliatory measures it has become used to taking; regaining the support of young people on the left will entail a fundamental change of heart.
This is not to say, however, that Israel’s actions have no effect on American perceptions, only that whether the Likud or some other party leads the governing coalition, how many new housing units are approved in Ma’ale Adumim, or whether Israel is engaged in talks with the PA have little effect. What undeniably does make a difference is whether Israel is engaged in a war, the size of the conflict, and the extent of the damage to the civilian population.
We can confirm this point by bracketing the long-term trend and zooming in on year-to-year changes over the past quarter-century. When we look at Gallup polls about Israel’s favorability rating, we notice a ten-point dip among Democrats between 2000 and 2004 (from 60 to 50 percent), which coincides with the second intifada. After this we see fairly little change until the 2023 Gaza war, when Israel’s favorability took a serious hit, at least among Democrats.
While the second intifada and the Gaza War seem to have damaged Israel’s favorability rating, especially among Democrats, the peace process had no effect whatsoever. Barak’s 2000 Camp David offer, Olmert’s 2008 offer to Abbas, and the 2013–2014 peace talks between Netanyahu and Abbas had no measurable effect on attitudes to Israel. The arguments that these diplomatic initiatives were insufficient, that Israel didn’t do enough to achieve a real breakthrough, and so forth all miss the point. One would expect that an American public seriously invested in, and highly attuned to, the peace process would be sensitive to progress on this front; and if the progress is modest, one would expect the American public’s reaction to it to be modest, but noticeable. This, however, is not at all what we see: the change that followed these attempts at diplomatic progress was zero. The most reasonable lesson one can draw from the Gallup poll is that the American public is sensitive to war and to Palestinian mass casualties but fairly indifferent to the diplomatic process, movement toward or away from two states, and other related issues that exercise policy wonks.
The Gallup poll isn’t our only evidence that people mostly care about war and Palestinian deaths and not about the diplomatic process. Another indirect route to the same conclusion is to look at BDS resolutions at American university campuses. Only a small share of Americans support, or have even heard of, BDS—and many of these resolutions were subsequently defeated—but we can still consider the ebb and tide of anti-Israel resolutions on university campuses a rough barometer of sentiment on the progressive left.
The BDS campaign was launched in 2005, after the second intifada. When we look at the trend line, what we see is that divestment resolutions first peaked in 2014 and 2015, in the wake of Operation Protective Edge (27 resolutions); they slowly trended down until 2020 (less than five resolutions); they went up again in 2021 (fifteen resolutions) after Guardian of the Walls; they went back to fewer than five in 2022; and finally, they shot up again after the October 7 (24 resolutions in 2023–2024). Thus, while BDS officially brands itself as an anti-occupation movement, the pattern of their resolutions gives much more the impression of an anti-war movement. BDS primarily thrives on war and Palestinian deaths, not on the stalling of the diplomatic process and the continuing military occupation, so long as it comes with a low enough death toll.
To sum up, Israel’s reputation suffers the most when it is attacked and decides to defend itself, and holds steady otherwise. Many sincere supporters of Israel, and many Israelis, are concerned that the stalling of the diplomatic process and Israel’s continued failure to separate from the Palestinians will lead to Israel’s growing international isolation. But a preponderance of evidence shows that this concern is based on an empirically unfounded assumption about the primary driver of attitudes to Israel.
At least in the U.S., long-term trends are primarily a function of level of religious observance, and short-to-medium-term fluctuations largely follow the intensity of the armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians: when the conflict is low-intensity and its death toll is low, public opinion is steady, and there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for the occupation and for the stalling peace process. When the conflict is high-intensity and many Palestinians die as a result, public opinion turns more against Israel. Ultimately, what matters is war and death, not the presence or absence of high-level diplomatic meetings and final-status negotiations.
These conclusions also make intuitive sense. Few Americans take intense interest in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. They can hardly be blamed for not caring much about the minutiae of Olmert’s offer to Abbas or Netanyahu’s share of the blame in the early breakdown of negotiations in 2014. War is an entirely different matter, especially given the depth of coverage it receives from the Western press. It is regularly broadcasted, sometimes in a very graphic way, and the human suffering it causes is direct, tangible, and to many viewers, heart-wrenching. This is even more true of a protracted and high-intensity war like the one Israel has been fighting against Hamas since the October 7 massacres. It would be surprising if Israel’s wars didn’t get significantly more attention than Israel’s diplomatic efforts or its static, dull, ongoing occupation in the West Bank.
III. War, Not Failed Peacemaking, Can Bring a Diplomatic Tsunami
In the foregoing sections, I made two central claims. First, I argued that if Israel makes further territorial concessions to the Palestinians, the most likely result will be increased armed Palestinian violence against the Jewish state. Both the last half-century of history and decades of polling indicate that this would be the most likely result. Second, I also argued that—despite much-repeated and often well-meaning warnings to Israel—ongoing military occupation and lack of diplomatic progress don’t cause international isolation. Rather, war and the death of large numbers of Palestinians do. From these two points, we can draw a conclusion that many will find disturbing. Territorial concessions will likely cause war with the Palestinians, which in turn will cause many Palestinians to die. Thus, territorial concessions will likely lead to Israel’s increased international isolation. Israelis and friends of Israel abroad should therefore oppose such concessions.
When I present this reasoning in conversations with friends and colleagues, one objection I sometimes get in response is that so far all of Israel’s territorial concessions to the Palestinians were either merely theoretical but ultimately unrealized, or unilateral. A final-status agreement that truly puts an end to the conflict would be entirely different: unlike Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal, it would give Israel enough diplomatic credit to wage war against any future Palestinian state that violates the agreement. I’m at a loss about how to respond to this objection, since it seems detached from all evidence.
When Israel is criticized for its conduct in the Gaza war, the criticism is simply the death toll. Most critics don’t go as far as libelously describing Israel’s conduct as a “genocide”; they merely say, as Antony Blinken repeatedly did, that “too many Palestinians are dying.” Surely if the death toll had been identical but Israel had been waging war against a sovereign Palestinian state that violated a peace treaty, the number of Palestinians who got killed in the war would still be considered too high. In fact, all of Israel’s moderate critics accept that Israel had a legitimate casus belli after October 7, but maintain that by now it has gone too far and “used up its diplomatic credit” because of high casualty figures.
Perhaps Israel’s perceived diplomatic credit would last somewhat longer if the Palestinians had violated a peace treaty to attack Israel, but soon enough a point would come when Israel hasn’t yet prevailed in the war but would be seen as already having killed too many Palestinians to continue any further. One can also safely assume that terrorist organizations operating from a de-jure Palestinian state—like Hamas in the de-facto Palestinian state of Gaza or Hizballah in Lebanon—would go to great lengths to embed military assets in civilian infrastructure in order to increase civilian suffering and garner international sympathy.
If the West intends to give Israel more wiggle room to defend itself against a future Palestinian state that violates its peace treaty than it does against Palestinian polities that don’t enjoy full statehood, it has shown no indication of that. Peace treaties can’t make much of a difference, since Hamas has repeatedly violated internationally brokered cease-fire agreements and that seems to buy Israel little credit. If anything, I would expect the diplomatic backlash to be stronger in the case of war between Israel and an independent Palestine, since full-blown statehood and full UN membership would give the Palestinians a range of diplomatic and quasi-legal tools against Israel that they currently don’t possess.
In fact, we don’t need to speculate too much about American behavior in a case where a state of Palestine were to sign a peace treaty of Israel and later attack it. American policy toward Israel and its many adversaries has been fairly consistent over the past few decades: strong support for Israel in words, material support (arms and ammunition exports and the use of the UN Security Council veto) in the war’s initial stages, and then a push for “de-escalation” before Israel could fully capitalize on its battleground gains. This is how the U.S. behaved in the Yom Kippur War, the First and Second Lebanon Wars, and also in every war and smaller armed confrontation between Israel and Iran’s Axis of Resistance.
The idea of full U.S. (let alone broader international) support for a war between Israel and an adversary until the latter’s complete military defeat, just because Israel had an obvious casus belli when the war started, has always been a fantasy. The U.S. has never behaved that way and there is no reason to expect it to behave this way in the future, especially not under Democratic presidents worried about appeasing a growing anti-Israel constituency. This means that territorial concessions to the Palestinians would significantly deteriorate both Israel’s defensive posture and its diplomatic standing. In the event of a surprise attack, Israel’s partners would acknowledge that the state of Palestine (or whichever armed group carried out the attack) was the aggressor, but they would still do everything in their power to prevent Israel from militarily overwhelming the aggressor in the resulting war.
Even if the territorial concessions were conditioned on a peace agreement, the world wouldn’t accept the Palestinians’ abrogation of that agreement as a basis to reverse the territorial concessions. A diminished Israel would simply be stuck with an enemy state that enjoys full diplomatic recognition and support from the West. And because it would control more territory, it would also have greater military advantages; Israel would thus have to fight harder, and likely cause more damage. (Compare, for instance, the civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure the IDF has caused in the present war in Gaza to its concurrent efforts to stop Hamas in the West Bank.)
Proponents of territorial concessions often justify their demand that Israel take the risk of further withdrawals by pointing at the power differential between Israel and the Palestinians. For example, Amos Oz famously claimed that if the Palestinians attack Israel after a withdrawal, Israel could “simply reoccupy” the West Bank. I hope that by now it’s clear that this kind of thinking is entirely detached from reality. If this were true, Israel could have “simply reoccupied” Gaza after the capture of Gilad Shalit in 2006, and certainly after the October 7 attacks. Instead, the reoccupation of Gaza is seen around the world as an uncrossable line. If Israel tried to reoccupy the West Bank after unilaterally withdrawing from it, the international backlash would be immense and Israel would find it exceedingly difficult to complete such a mission.
Now imagine that Israel tried to reoccupy the West Bank after it had become part of a sovereign Palestinian state. The entire world, the U.S. included, would oppose the conquest of any part of this new state of Palestine. It wouldn’t matter who started the war or whose fault it was; nor would it matter how many Israelis died in an October 7-like attack that originates from the West Bank. Immediately after the attack, the U.S. would issue a dramatic press release, ensuring Israel of its support and reaffirming its “right to defend itself.” But very soon afterwards, Washington would also clarify that Palestinian statehood is irreversible and that while Palestine indeed violated its peace treaty with Israel, this gives Israel no right to violate the fledgling state’s territorial sovereignty. If Israel decided to forge on anyway, it would face arms embargos, Security Council resolutions, mandatory sanctions, and possibly a naval blockade—in other words, a diplomatic tsunami.
In fact, I’m highly confident that even Israel’s liberal supporters abroad, who now encourage territorial concessions on the basis that it would give Israel “diplomatic credit” to defend itself vigorously if attacked, would find that they are unable to stomach the idea of defeating the aggressor in a grueling war once they saw how much bloodshed that entails. In making this prediction, I’m not accusing them of dishonesty; I think they are sincerely convinced that should it become necessary for Israel’s self-defense, they would support such a war when push comes to shove. I’m not accusing the pundits and diplomats who warn of the coming diplomatic tsunami of dishonesty, either. I believe that they themselves would react much more harshly to the war that would inevitably result from further withdrawals than to the continuing status quo, and I think that they don’t know this about themselves.
Some readers might think that this is arrogant on my part: I profess to know better how Israel’s liberal supporters would behave in certain situations than they themselves know. But I stand behind my assessment, because I think that these sympathetic liberals are fundamentally in denial about the nature of Palestinian national aspirations. That is, they tend to think the Palestinian national movement strives for political independence, better economic circumstances, and an end to the indignities of occupation; in reality, it strives above all for the destruction of Israel. This denial is much more an article of faith than a conclusion based on evidence (since all evidence points in the opposite direction), which means that these liberal Israel supporters cannot seriously contemplate the idea that the October 7 attack wasn’t a fluke but an authentic expression of Palestinian nationalism, and exactly the sort of event that should be expected in the wake of further withdrawals.
To sum up the argument so far, everything about the history of the Israel-Arab conflict indicates that further withdrawals won’t lead to lasting peace and won’t even build trust, but will instead destabilize the region and lead to increased levels of violence against the Jewish state. Moreover, since international public opinion tolerates war and mass casualties much less well than belligerent occupation and long-term low-level violence, territorial concessions will over time cause Israel to be more rather than less diplomatically isolated.
Until now, I’ve explicitly and intentionally set forth my argument in amoral terms. The diplomatic case for territorial concessions is always advanced on realist grounds, and my goal here has been to respond in kind. This doesn’t mean that moral considerations should play no role in Israel’s policy, but it seems to me that such considerations would ultimately lead to the same conclusion. If, as I’ve argued, war and Palestinian deaths are the most likely cause of Israel’s diplomatic isolation, and the best way to prevent war is not to cede territory, then my argument in principle should appeal, on moral grounds, to anyone interested in saving Palestinian lives.
IV. If Not Two States, Then What?
What’s the implication of the foregoing argument for rational Israeli policymaking? Many opponents of territorial concessions on the right support partial or full annexation of Judea and Samaria. Not me: just because Israel shouldn’t make further territorial concessions, it doesn’t follow that Israel should therefore annex territory. Israel hasn’t become diplomatically isolated while holding on to Judea and Samaria, but this doesn’t mean that annexation wouldn’t cause significant backlash. Moreover, I’m not persuaded that annexation would bring any tangible benefit to compensate for such backlash.
Nor do I advocate for dissolving the Palestinian Authority, as some people on the religious right desire. I won’t discuss here the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel; nor will I try to defend its stridently irredentist and anti-Semitic school curriculum or its pay-for-slay policy. I merely observe that in the context of a strictly diplomatic argument against territorial concessions, the PA is clearly a net benefit to Israel. Israel’s far-left critics recognize this correctly when they call the PA a subcontractor and legitimizer of Israel’s military occupation.
As for the settlements, which receive so much attention the broader conversation about the West Bank, my argument here has little to say about them. A wide range of views and policies is consistent with the diplomatic case against territorial concessions that I’ve put forth, from a de-facto building freeze outside the main settlement blocs to further expansion even outside the blocs; in this essay, the case I made only rules out large-scale evacuation, which inevitably leads to military withdrawals and all the dire consequences I’ve described.
Devotion to the status quo is a fundamentally conservative disposition, not in the sense of being ideologically right-wing, but in the sense that it prefers the devil one knows to the devil one doesn’t, incrementalism to sweeping change, and the imperfections of the present to risky and unfounded experiments. As such, it doesn’t inspire idealists, but asks for grudging acceptance.
In the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, defense of the status quo also goes against a lot of conventional wisdom. One of the few things on which most of the right and the left agree in Israel (as well as in the broader pro-Israel community) is that the status quo in the West Bank is “unsustainable.” Not only center-left figures associated with what Ben Rhodes dubbed the foreign-policy “blob” make this claim regularly, but also writers who have an alternative vision for Israel’s future. For example, in an essay written in December of 2022, Hillel Halkin tries to square the circle by proposing a “two states, one country” solution where beside Israel’s Arab minority, Jews (today’s settlers) would also live in Palestine. Halkin doesn’t use the word “unsustainable,” but his message is identical in content: Netanyahu is “dragging us toward the abyss,” the settlements “bring Israel to the point of no return,” and so on.
Yet, as Elliott Abrams argued in Mosaic a decade ago, the rhetoric of unsustainability is misguided: a regional realignment is taking place in the Middle East, and that realignment was made possible by the supposedly unsustainable status quo that benefitted Israel over the past few decades. Abrams’s points are even more valid today, after the “unsustainable” situation in the West Bank has endured another ten years, than at the time of his essay’s publication. But an important point must be added.
Talk of political “unsustainability” implies that there is a different equilibrium that would be “sustainable.” For how long? Critics of the status quo rarely ask this question, because they implicitly assume that while the status quo that they criticize cannot last forever, their proposed way of replacing the status quo could. Not only two-statists assume this, but right-wing critics of the status quo as well, for example the journalist Caroline Glick and the former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who both wrote book-length defenses of their vision of “one Jewish state” that would include all of Judea and Samaria and (for Glick) the Gaza Strip as well.
The assumption that just because the status quo cannot last forever there must be something else that will, is itself flawed: it exemplifies what I elsewhere called “end of history” thinking. In reality, history never ends. Political arrangements come and go, and nothing about the status quo makes it inherently less stable than any of the proposed political solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That the status quo will have to end one day is true but trivial: Baathist rule in Syria also ended one day, and so will the mullahs’ rule in Iran, as well as oil dominance in the energy sector and the resulting importance of most Gulf states. But in the foreseeable future, there is no reason to build policy on these forecasts.
An unsentimental view of Israel’s regional realities should force us to replace the impossible mission of ending history in the Middle East with a more down-to-earth principle, one articulated by Hippocrates: first, do no harm. The directive to avoid harm doesn’t mean that Israel shouldn’t strive for incremental improvements in the everyday life of all residents between the river and the sea, which the Israeli writer Micah Goodman describes as “shrinking the conflict.” But competent conflict management must take precedence over utopianism, be it the left’s two-state solution or the hard right’s dream of Jewish sovereignty over all of the land. Israeli policymakers must instead focus on securing a better future for our children and grandchildren. For the foreseeable future, nobody has suggested anything better than the status quo.
The implications of this essay’s argument for Israel’s Western supporters, especially in the U.S., are also clear. Israel’s Western friends who would like to see Israel withdraw from further territories, let alone agree to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, must completely change their attitude to Israel’s wars. They need to abandon the language of “de-escalation” and clearly and unambiguously state that in any war between Israel and its adversaries, the goal should be not cease-fire for cease-fire’s sake, but total and unquestionable Israeli victory. They need to stop talking about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” a phrase that has become empty of content over the years, since in practice it often means little more than Israel’s right to intercept rockets in the air. Instead, they should emphasize Israel’s right to do what it must to defeat its regional adversaries, and to finish wars on its own terms and according to its own timing, not under American pressure. They should stop demanding that American assistance to Israel be conditioned on any of the great many constraints that U.S. administrations routinely want to impose on Israel’s war efforts; and they should view arms embargos as an absolute taboo.
Coming from an Israeli, this might sound self-serving and all too convenient, but it’s based on a rational understanding of incentive structures. Any friend of Israel who wants to encourage Israel’s withdrawal from parts of the West Bank should want to avoid a situation in which Israel finds the diplomatic cost of withdrawing even steeper than the diplomatic cost of not withdrawing. Lukewarm, hesitant, and unreliable support during a defensive war against an enemy whose base is territory from which Israel previously withdrew (as is the case of Israel’s current war against Hamas) sends Israel the message that heeding the call to withdraw isn’t merely dangerous but could even lead to the very outcome that the withdrawal was supposed to stave off: diplomatic isolation. Thus, anyone who wants to convince Israelis that withdrawal is in their interest should be steadfastly and unconditionally supportive of Israel when it finds itself at war.
Of course, we know that this is not how things work in reality. In practice, politicians and opinionmakers who see the greatest urgency in Israel’s relinquishment of additional territory also tend to be the people who are the most critical of Israel’s war effort, and indeed their criticism of the war is much harsher and much more vocal than their criticism of Israel’s management of the Israel-Palestinian conflict during quieter times. This means, however, that in view of its self-declared allies’ and partners’ easily observable revealed preferences, Israel has no incentive to make further territorial concessions. Quite the contrary: if Israel is truly concerned about potential diplomatic isolation in the future, it must resist the idea of territorial concessions with all its might.