“Clever” is an appropriate term for the counterintuitive essay titled “To Save Itself from International Isolation, Israel Must Hold On to the West Bank.” An argument that rejects solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict advocated by both the left and right—withdrawal and annexation, respectively—is a clever way to claim the middle ground, where most sensible people like to be. And at a time when even the president of the United States has his own creative (and, perhaps, fanciful) ideas for the future disposition of people living in some of the disputed territories, there is no better word than clever for suggesting that the best approach is to stand pat and do nothing. But dig more deeply and one will find that this paean to the status quo is too clever by half, with the “status quo” it embraces so disfigured and hollowed out that it is, in fact, a very different thing from the dictionary definition of “the existing state of affairs.”

The core of DeMogge’s provocative argument is that, in his words, “withdrawing from captured territory is significantly more likely to lead to war than capturing territory.” The Camp David offer to withdraw from all the West Bank in 2000 led to the second intifada, he notes; the Gaza withdrawal in 2005 led eventually to October 7. Add it up and giving—or even offering to give—territory to Palestinians is a recipe for disaster. Therefore, he argues, the best solution for Israel’s political predicament with the Palestinians is to take territorial concession off the table while maintaining the allegedly “unsustainable” status quo.

DeMogge is certainly right about one big thing: what pundits and politicians frequently label “unsustainable” is anything but. After all, Israel’s control of the West Bank (Gaza is, as he notes, in a highly fluid situation and lies outside his argument) has been “unsustainable” for nearly 60 years, yet it goes merrily on. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians will soon mark—I think “celebrate” is even in order, but I may be in a minority on that—30 years since the Oslo II accord divided the West Bank into its current patchwork of Areas A, B, and C. It is worth nothing that this awkward, unwieldy arrangement, about which the vast majority of the world’s pundit and political class appears to know nothing, has lasted longer than both the British mandate for Palestine and Jordan’s control of the West Bank. It is, in fact, the longest-lived governmental system for this area since the Ottoman era.

What DeMogge doesn’t do, however, is examine what makes this allegedly unsustainable arrangement so sustainable. Instead, he reaches his conclusion about the irrationality of territorial compromise—he insists on calling it “territorial concession,” which gives a hint of where he is headed, of course—after a breezy dismissal of the three arguments employed by opponents of the status quo, two idealist (which can be summarized as “it’s morally wrong to deny Palestinians sovereignty in their own land” and “occupation erodes the moral character of Israel”) and one realist (“it is better for Israel to initiate a political solution than have one imposed on her, which is a political inevitability”). Then he offers an equally breezy dismissal of any piece of the historical record that runs contrary to his thesis, such as the nearly 50-year record of Egypt-Israel peace, a bedrock of Israel’s national security and an achievement that would not have happened without Israel’s territorial withdrawal. (The explosion of the first intifada, which doesn’t fit into his thesis, goes unmentioned.)

Even if one accepts his questionable, cherry-picked argumentation, the question returns: what makes the “status quo” which DeMogge champions so resilient? I believe that’s because, in answering honestly, he would find something that upends his entire argument.

Specifically, a critical element of the status quo is Israel’s sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit commitment since 1967 that—under the right circumstances, with the right partner, with the right guarantees, and with the right countervailing benefits—it would withdraw from some, most, or even nearly all the territory. That was the bargain at the heart of UN Security Council Resolution 242, on which all subsequent Arab-Israeli diplomacy has been based. That was the bargain that helped fuel the post-1967 flowering of the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and Israel’s remarkable transformation into a world-class, cutting-edge technological powerhouse. And, I believe, this was a critical element of the bargain that has produced the relative quiet the West Bank has enjoyed over the last twenty years since the quelling of the second intifada and the start of the long, unhappy, but impressively seamless administration of Mahmoud Abbas.

If there are any doubts about the “relative quiet” of the last twenty years, just look at the numbers: in the eighteen years between 2005 and 2022, before Hamas’s October 7 attack reverberated in the West Bank, Israel suffered a total of 334 deaths from terrorism. By comparison, in the eighteen-year period from 1968 to 1985, before any withdrawals, the total was 542; and in the fifteen years between 1986 and 2000, before the explosion of the second intifada, the total was 472. Of course, even the low numbers of casualties are too many, but one cannot dismiss the correlation between the existence of the Palestinian Authority and the lower numbers of terrorist deaths suffered by Israel, certainly in comparison to the period when it was solely in control of the entire West Bank. (For annual statistics, see here.)

Over the years, Israel has had eminently just and reasonable cause not to withdraw from that territory, but it has never repudiated the basic principle I just enunciated. To do so would change the status quo in a fundamental way—indeed, it would no longer be the “status quo.”

Does anyone believe that the Palestinian Authority would survive as a governing body in its current form if Israel removed even the potential, however hypothetical, of its eventual evolution into a sovereign power? Does anyone believe Israel would enjoy the remarkable degree of regional acceptance that it has today—including normal, peaceful relations with countries representing more than half the world’s Arab population—if it repudiated the potential, however hypothetical, for some withdrawal from some territories it won in 1967?

Does anyone believe the impressive bipartisan support for Israel in American politics would be nearly as strong and resilient if Israel declared that it would never, as a matter of principle, withdraw from an inch of territory, even if the Palestinians were led by a triumvirate consisting of the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr.?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is no, and therein lies the conceit at the heart of DeMogge’s argument. Remove the hypothetical potential of territorial compromise and the status quo that defines the current situation no longer exists. It would be something different, an announcement that “We’re here to stay, come what may. Deal with it.” Indeed, it is functionally the first cousin of an Israeli decision to annex the West Bank outside of a negotiation agreement with the Palestinians—namely, it is a policy antithetical to the post-1967 consensus, ambiguous as it may be, that was an essential ingredient in the cocktail that gave rise to Israel’s phenomenal growth and development these past six decades. Some will reconcile themselves to a new reality; others won’t. What is certain is that it is a new reality and not, by any stretch, the comfortable, satisfying, and surprisingly sustainable status quo that DeMogge claims to venerate.