Shany Mor offers a critique of the konseptziyot (plural of konseptzia) that governed Israeli strategy before October 7, 2023. The Hebrew term “konseptzia” used to be shorthand for the assumptions that exposed Israel to its last security disaster: the Yom Kippur War, in 1973. The term connotes deadly groupthink. In the early 1970s, Israeli officials underestimated their Arab enemies’ intentions and capabilities; they did the same with Hamas before it massacred 1,200 Israelis last October.

Today’s Israeli right attributes the prewar Gaza konseptzia to naivete about Palestinian politics. Mor offers a competing account: assigning blame, on the left, to international organizations and the ideas of the 1990s Oslo process, and on the right to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli settlers.

Mor is careful to say he is not complaining about all settlers—just adherents of “ right-wing religious settler Zionism.” Mor then specifies two charges against them: “state capture” and the diversion of IDF manpower and resources to defending remote West Bank outposts. Now, whatever the prewar errors of Israel’s security services (not least their optimism about Hamas) they simply cannot be blamed on right-wing settler Zionism. But Mor’s argument suffers from errors more fundamental than a single misattribution of blame. Mor’s case against the konseptziyot is itself written under the influence of a konseptzia: the anti-settler konseptzia, which opposes Jewish communities in the West Bank as a moral stain and a burden, and a main source of Israel’s insecurity and delegitimation.

As with other konseptziyot, the anti-settler konseptzia is more often assumed than defended by its adherents. That’s a shame—konseptziyot everywhere are under withering scrutiny these days. In which spirit, we’d like to offer our own critique of the anti-settler konseptzia, and of Shany Mor’s application of it in particular. Our view, briefly, is that the anti-settler konseptzia better explains Israel’s current security predicament than any of Shany Mor’s nominees.

The anti-settler konseptzia says that Jews, and only Jews, should not live in the West Bank. If this sounds uncharitable, it is because anti-settlers so often sanitize their konseptzia with legalistic, righteous-sounding terms: as opposition to a “population transfer” to “occupied territory,” or to “right-wing” “messianism.” Let’s imagine for a moment that these arguments to which these terms gesture were successful and the anti-settler konseptzia won out. The West Bank’s half-million Jewish residents (perhaps also a quarter-million Jews in east Jerusalem) would be expelled and Jews would be prevented from moving in. That’s all. Palestinians would stay. Anyone else—Germans, Swedes, the many Israeli-Arab homeowners to which anti-settlers never object—could live there too. Jews alone would have to go. The West Bank would be Judenfrei.

Anti-settlers never put it that way. They think of themselves as good liberals. So they impugn the motives of the Jews who live in the West Bank—as messianic, right-wing, ultra-religious, ultranationalist, and so on. But so what? In liberal societies, opinions about God and politics don’t affect property and residency rights. Saying Jews can live in the West Bank only if they aren’t trying to hasten the redemption is as illiberal as saying that blacks may live in Scarsdale only if they don’t admire Stokely Carmichael.

Another anti-settler tactic is to accuse settlers of a conspiracy. In Shany Mor’s terms, settlers have “captured” and “reconstituted” the Israeli state, diverting it from its true “strategic interests.” If settlers are conniving operators “far outside the realm of ordinary political lobbying,” then their individual rights to just live and raise their kids where they like might deserve less respect. But Israel is full of self-consciously political communities—vegan moshavim, bi-ethnic peace cooperatives, old-school communist kibbutzim, industrial parks—whose residents are never accused of conspiracies and whose rights to live where they like are never questioned.

The anti-settler case ultimately rests on a belief that Jews don’t have the same right to live in the West Bank the way they do in Tel Aviv. Michael Walzer, the political theorist and left-wing Zionist, advocates “a return of the settlers to the homeland on the other side of the Green Line—like the return of the pieds noirs to France” after Algerian independence. Jews, in other words, are alien to the land. Such arguments are often paired with the claim that the West Bank itself is distinct from—or as Shany Mor says, “occupied” by—Israel. Settlers are accused of manifesting and advancing Israel’s illegitimate claim to rule—as Walzer writes, of seeking “to expand Israeli territory” beyond the current boundaries of the “Israeli state.”

Readers are meant to accept that alien settlers must be removed so the land can return to its normal, Jew-free condition. But serious programs to expel and bar entry to non-Jewish ethnic compatriots of colonial settlers elsewhere in the world are rare. Even Australian and Canadian and American activists who open public events with land acknowledgements don’t seek to expel their countrymen of European or African descent.

As it happens, kicking Jews out of the West Bank would make even less sense than kicking descendants of settler-colonists out of the New World. Jewish cities and towns filled Judea and Samaria—the traditional names for the regions roughly encompassed by the West Bank—thousands of years ago, just as they filled the rest of the Land of Israel. Jews living in the West Bank are part of the great indigenous restoration project known as Zionism, every bit as much as those living in the Galilee or the Negev.

The West Bank’s tradition of existence as a distinct territory is too brief for it to have its own settler-colonists or its own indigenous group. The West Bank’s borders are merely the armistice lines marking Jordan’s unlawful conquests during Israel’s 1948–9 War of Independence. The names “Judea” and “Samaria” (of ancient Israelite origin) were universally used until the Jordanian occupation. The name “West Bank” was invented by the Hashemite rulers of Jordan’s short-lived empire on the Jordan River. But Hashemite rights to the territory were never recognized, either by the League of Nations or by the United Nations.

For 400 years, Judea and Samaria were indistinct parts of the Ottoman-ruled Levant. Britain conquered most of the Levant in World War I, and was given a mandate—the Palestine mandate—by the victorious allies of World War I to rule, as a unit, what maps today label as Jordan, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. The mandate charged Britain with reconstituting the Jewish homeland and encouraging “close settlement by Jews on the land.” With League authorization, Britain subsequently limited the Jewish national home to the territory west of the Jordan River, but the League recognized no other national rights in that portion of the mandatory territory. Not even the rights of Palestine’s Arab natives, who were indistinct from the Syrian Arabs with whom many of their leaders in the post-World War I period hoped to unite. Whatever Palestinian Arab national identity was emerging at the time wasn’t restricted to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza; equally, no one argued the Jewish homeland was restricted to the rest of Palestine.

The popular notion that the West Bank is distinctly Palestinian—and by implication, distinctly not Jewish—is insupportable. It is also irrelevant to settlements. Many groups do live on the homelands of others without being thought to offend any moral or legal principle. Only the Jews are indicted for it.

Anti-settlers sometimes argue, in a more technical vein, that settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention’s ban on an “occupying power” transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” But Jews in the West Bank are not transferred or deported; they move there because they want to move there. (Israel often subsidizes communities in the West Bank, just as it does elsewhere, but we will not insult the intelligence of anti-settlers by suggesting they confuse subsidies with compulsion.)

Moreover, as one of us (Avi Bell) has argued elsewhere, the West Bank is neither “occupied” nor “Palestinian territory” as the terms are generally understood in international law. Jordan, from which Israel conquered the West Bank, lacked any legitimate claim of possession prior to 1967, and Jordan abjured any claims to the territory in its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. There is no warrant in the law for considering Israel a belligerent occupier under the circumstance. Moreover, only states can have territorial sovereignty and, since Palestinians have no state, its territory cannot be “occupied” by Israel. Palestinian Arabs plausibly have a claim to self-determination in the West Bank, but so do Jews. In fact, Jewish self-determination, as well as Israel’s claims to the West Bank, is anchored in the League of Nations-approved Palestine Mandate of 1922 and other principles of international law. No similar treaty anchors the Palestinian claim.

If anything, the West Bank’s legal and political history strengthens rather than weakening the rights of all Israelis—Jews included—to live there. But whatever the West Bank’s history and current status, Jews have a right to live there, because Jews have a moral right, as human beings, to buy property and live anywhere. Israel is not a ghetto.

The arguments so far explored sit awkwardly with the liberal Zionism most anti-settlers profess. The core anti-settler idea is the anti-liberal policy of anti-Jewish housing discrimination. And the rights of Jews to live in the West Bank rest on the same grounds that support the rights of Jews to live in the rest of Israel. To deny the former is to deny the latter.

But anti-settlers have more prudential arguments, too: that settlements make Israel unsafe and prolong Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Here we turn from the anti-settler konseptzia to Mor’s analysis.

Shany Mor argues that pre-October 7 Israel was “lulled into complacency” about Gaza by settlers demanding extra Israeli troops to defend against West Bank terrorism which was itself the fault of the settlers. By resettling the small outpost of Homesh in the northern West Bank, Mor claims, the settlers ended fifteen years of calm following Israel’s 2005 expulsion of the residents not only of Homesh, but of other northern West Bank settlements as well: Sa-Nur, Ganim, and Kadim.

Mor is wrong about Gaza and wrong about the West Bank. Few troops were near Gaza because Israeli security officials wrongly assumed that an invasion from Gaza was not a threat—one doesn’t station troops to defend against non-threats. West Bank terrorism was rising before the war, and troops were required to suppress it for the sake of all Israelis. Mor is probably right that the very existence of Jews in the West Bank invites terrorism, but as Hamas graphically demonstrated on October 7, that’s equally true of every Jewish Israeli community everywhere. It is odd indeed to accuse Jews in Efrat of moral failure for needing IDF protection while affirming the moral right of Jews in Sderot to expect it.

The prewar konseptzia on Gaza was widespread and false, but not of settler vintage. Settlers opposed, while anti-settlers supported, the Israeli policy most responsible for the current disaster: Israel’s 2005 withdrawal of security forces from Gaza (and attendant expulsion of settlers from Gaza and parts of northern Samaria) under then-prime minister Ariel Sharon. The Jewish communities terminated in 2005 had reduced terrorism in two ways. When Israelis live near known or possible terrorist hotbeds, Israeli security services gather intelligence and disrupt terrorist cells. Moreover, Israeli settler communities are usually well-armed, the benefits of which redound to all Israelis whenever one of their residents neutralizes a Palestinian terrorist. After Israel withdrew from Gaza, Israeli security services were limited to distant technological surveillance and occasional incursions. If it were up to the settlers, the IDF would never have left Gaza, but would have operated continuously on the ground against Hamas. Without Jewish civilians to anchor an IDF presence inside the strip, Gaza incubated the terror regime responsible for the current war.

The West Bank, from which Israel never withdrew, has been far calmer than Gaza over the past two decades. Israel’s 2002–5 campaign against the second intifada was succeeded by regular operations. Mor correctly notes that West Bank terrorism got worse (though not Gaza-level worse) in the years before October 7. But blaming the settlers gets things backwards. In the years before the current war, Israel’s security services informally assigned more security responsibilities to the Palestinian Authority in northern Samaria. The PA failed, and where it failed is precisely where Israel’s operations in the current war have been most intensive: in the northern cities of Tulkarm, Nablus, and especially Jenin. Things have been far calmer in the southern West Bank, where Jews are more densely concentrated. Taking advantage of northern Samaria’s thinned-out Jewish population to draw down Israeli forces was itself a failure of the anti-settler konseptzia, not a sound security decision.

Of course, even the most intensive West Bank operations have been nothing like those in Gaza: 5,000 West Bank terrorists have been neutralized, but civilian deaths, urban destruction, and Israeli casualties have been minimal. Israel’s longstanding presence spared the West Bank from Gaza-grade carnage; no Gaza-grade terror regime had taken hold. The settlers’ ongoing presence in the West Bank made Israeli security efforts more urgent and more precise—as Shalom ben Chanan, former head of the Judea and Jerusalem branch of the Shin Bet, explained in an interview, wherever there are Jewish communities, the IDF has to operate with greater regularity.

Even if settlers have property rights and make Israel safer, do they also put off a peace deal with Palestinians? Leon Wieseltier wrote this past winter that, of all the reasons for his career of opposition to settlements, he mainly objects that the settlement project “endanger[s] the state. It thwarts a reconciliation with the millions of Palestinians who already inhabit the territory.” Practically this means reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority which, Wieseltier writes elsewhere, has “for all its corruption and immobilism, . . . been in favor of a two-state solution for years.” Mor similarly laments that Netanyahu did not favor integrating Hamas into the PA, which would have “restored something like legitimate government to Gaza.”

We suspect anti-settlers think they’re on their firmest ground on the peace question—international law is technical and terrorism is multi-causal, but sanity and humanity require support for peace, which requires compromise, which requires rejecting settler absolutism.

But historically, preemptive concessions on settlements have produced neither peace nor a deal but greater violence. The outstanding examples were the 2005 expulsions of settlers from Gaza and northern Samaria—both terrorist hotbeds that Israel has been trying to pacify since October 7.

By putting their hopes in the violent men who run the Palestinian Authority, the anti-settlers intensify the conflict they hope to solve. The PA, which often expresses interest in a two-state solution during press conferences, assumed control over nearly all West Bank Palestinians following the 1993 Oslo Accords. Annual Jewish deaths from Palestinian terrorism tripled. The second intifada, beginning in 2000, was even bloodier. A tenth of the PA budget goes to stipends for convicted terrorists. PA school curricula earn annual condemnations from the European parliament for anti-Semitism. The ruling Fatah party routinely celebrates the hundreds of PA officials and Fatah members imprisoned by Israel for murdering Jews. Paying your people to murder Jews is—to adapt Don Barzini’s admonishment to Vito Corleone—not the act of a friend (or even of a peace partner).

But all the Israeli blood on its hands hasn’t made the PA popular among the Palestinians it rules. Polls consistently show miniscule support for any Palestinian political organization that lacks an official, dedicated terrorist wing (the PA conducts terrorism unofficially through its security services, which Palestinians resent for occasionally working with Israel against the PA’s terror rivals, like Hamas). After the October 7 atrocities, clear majorities of the Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza supported the slaughter of Jews. Fatah’s unpopularity explains the PA’s yearslong practice of postponing and canceling elections. A PA-run state would likely take one of two forms. Either it would either be openly dedicated to murdering Jews with the electoral imprimatur of its constituency (much like Gaza before the current war). Or it would remain quietly devoted to the same goal while also remaining a dictatorship (much like PA-ruled territories today). But in neither case could a PA-state win the support of honest, pro-peace liberals.

But let us assume that the PA was not filled with men whose rule elsewhere would have liberals sympathetic to a popular revolt. It wouldn’t matter, because to run a state, you need to survive, and the PA won’t survive without Israeli help. The PA was evicted by Hamas from Gaza in 2007, and it ceded the northern West Bank to terror networks in recent years. The problem with the PA is not its corruption or its immobilism. It is the PA’s 30-year career of permitting and sponsoring the terrorism that empowering the PA was originally meant to suppress.

Upon reflection, it is difficult to see what the anti-settler konseptzia gets right. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza prepared the ground for the terror regime responsible for the October 7 massacres. The war has cost Israel much blood and much treasure—and much international legitimacy, which Israel loses in proportion to the violence of Palestinian terrorism. The sanctions, boycotts, lawfare, and embargoes that occupy leftist academic fantasies when Israel is at peace become the policies of Israel’s allies when Israel is at war.

If the anti-settlers had had their way, the conditions for a Hamas-style massacre would have been replicated in the West Bank. Israel’s international standing would have suffered proportionately—to say nothing of the physical harm to Israel’s citizens and the carnage the subsequent war would’ve inflicted on Palestinians.

Israeli concessions have militarized the Palestinians, in turn discouraging Israelis to concede anything else. By consistently opposing Israeli concessions, settlers have worked against the factors militarizing Palestinians—and thus stood in the way of mutual radicalization.

For the sake of everyone between the river and the sea, the anti-settler konseptzia should be immediately scotched.