As Israeli ministers sit around the table for a crucial cabinet meeting, some suggest annexing the Gaza Strip. One discusses the importance of working on Western public opinion to explain Israel’s right to control the West Bank. Known for his right-wing opinions, that minister adds that the Arabs living in the area should get Israeli residency and only later receive citizenship. Another participant, from the other side of the political spectrum, argues that despite the moral, democratic, and even security problems with refusing immediate citizenship to West Bankers, he is not yet willing to raise that possibility. Instead he believes Israel must prioritize the strategic depth the area provides.

One former security official promotes creating a Palestinian entity—even a state—in some parts of the West Bank with Israel annexing other areas. A fourth—considered particularly charismatic—suggests autonomy for West Bankers, perhaps linked to Jordan. Countering that position, a fifth minister wonders how the international community, so opposed to anything that smacks of colonization, will ever accept a plan for autonomy rather than independence.

Israel’s justice minister believes that the failure to clarify Israel’s intentions regarding the territories will ultimately expose the country to international criticism and undermine its crucial relations with the U.S. He also warns that absent an Israeli withdrawal, there is danger of a binational state “in the not-too-distant future.” Such a scenario, he emphasizes, will soon lead to Jews becoming a minority between the river and the sea and Israel being “done with the entire Zionist enterprise and become a ghetto.” The education minister warns that if Israel publicly announces its refusal to budge, only to fold later under international pressure, it would be disastrous.

Rather than a debate among Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Bezalel Smotrich, or other Israeli politicians in recent decades, the above discussion took place during a cabinet debate in the weeks immediately after Israel’s historic victory in the Six-Day War. Since then, these same dilemmas of annexation versus autonomy, or how to balance strategic depth with democratic imperatives, fears of international criticism, and looming threats of binationalism, have neither disappeared nor been resolved.

It is such dilemmas that Rafi DeMogge describes in his excellent Mosaic piece, much of which I broadly agree with. Six decades later, plus ça change.

DeMogge suggests three arguments in support of territorial concessions. One is the moral argument—that partitioning the Holy Land between the two peoples who live there is a just solution—a position with which I sympathize. Another is that military occupation over another people will inevitably lead to human-rights abuses and weaken democratic aspects of Israeli society, with the corollary that Israel needs to end its control over the Palestinians for its own sake, rather than theirs. This too I think is accurate. While DeMogge doesn’t specifically say so (although I think it’s inferred), these positions are unlikely to convince an Israeli public deeply suspicious of Palestinians intentions, maximalist rhetoric, and revanchism and wary of how territory can be used as a launchpad for genocidal attacks.

DeMogge’s main focus, though, is on criticizing a third argument: that without territorial withdrawal, Israel will become increasingly isolated, a pariah state. The corollary is that the country should leave the West Bank (or parts of it) of its own initiative before it is drowned by a diplomatic tsunami. DeMogge counters that what ultimately matters for Israel’s international legitimacy is not the presence or absence of high-level diplomatic meetings but rather war and Palestinian deaths. And because even after Israeli withdrawal, war is likely to continue between Israelis and Palestinians, and because such a war might well cause even more Palestinian casualties, Israel will find the diplomatic cost of withdrawing even steeper than the diplomatic cost of not withdrawing.

Here too DeMogge has a point. If the international community wants to encourage Israel to withdraw from territory, it needs to provide it with diplomatic support when the country is subsequently attacked from the ceded territory—support that has all too often been lacking in Israeli wars in Gaza and Lebanon over the last two decades. Based on these points, DeMogge concludes that competent conflict management must take precedence over utopianism and for the foreseeable future, nobody has suggested anything better than the status quo.

As noted, I broadly agree with much of the piece. But I’d like to raise one quibble and one notable omission from the arguments.

The quibble relates to the connection between international condemnation and Palestinian casualties. I was studying at a British university during the second intifada and remember being shocked by the censure of Israel’s responses to the murderous terrorism in the country’s streets, cafes, and buses. In the London Times Janine di Giovanni wrote of how rarely in over a decade of reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo had she seen such deliberate destruction and disrespect for human life as in Jenin. The Guardian painted Israel’s actions in the city as every bit as repellent, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made, as 9/11.

Around this time, the American public intellectual (and man of the left) Paul Berman published Terror and Liberalism investigating how liberals understood terrorism and violence. Berman sought to demonstrate the difficulty so many liberals have internalizing the existence of evil and totalitarian movements. Instead, they believed there was no such thing as pathological or irrational ideologies, “no movements that yearn to commit slaughters, no movements that yearned for death.” For them, the world was by and large a rational place, with terrible atrocities indelibly linked to oppression. The greater the atrocity, the greater the oppression that must have caused it.

Berman’s chapter on the second intifada suggested that Western opprobrium towards Israel peaked not when Israeli actions were at their most aggressive, but rather when Palestinian violence—often in the form of suicide bombing—was at its height. Indeed it was in the early months of 2002 that large numbers of people felt impelled to express their fury at the Israelis. It was then that the South African (and Parisian) writer Breyten Breytenbach published a piece in Le Monde that argued suicide terror was the measure of Israel’s supremely repugnant quality. It was then that Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist, described Ariel Sharon’s siege of Yasir Arafat in his compound as a “crime comparable to Auschwitz.”

For Berman, Palestinian suicide bombings produced a philosophical crisis among those who wanted to believe that a rationality governs the world. Those protests against Israel thus helped to “explain” the unexplainable: it was the Israeli oppressors’ fault.

The correlation therefore should not be, as DeMogge suggests, between accusations of genocide and Israeli responses or Palestinian casualties but between these accusations and Palestinian atrocities.

This applies both during the second intifada and more recently since October 7.

Now for the omission, namely how demography promotes the logic of partition and territorial withdrawal. At its simplest: with a similar number of Jews and Arabs living between the river and the sea, Israel cannot remain a Jewish and democratic state in the long term if it continues holding on to the territories. It’s a warning not just sounded by Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapiro in 1967, but more recently by the former head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, and two former heads of Mossad, Meir Dagan and Tamir Pardo. For Pardo, the absence of a two-state solution was an existential threat to Israel.

Curiously, while DeMogge quotes the warnings of the former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert about diplomatic isolation without a West Bank withdrawal, he omits their warnings about the emerging binational state. It’s also peculiar that an author who chose the name DeMogge as a pseudonym and is a self-described “demography enjoyer” should have left the demographic aspect out of the debate. In fact, the only time demography appears in the piece is in discussing generational changes within America.

The threat of a looming binational reality isn’t some sort of scare tactic, an exaggerated, cataclysmic prediction that always remains just over the horizon or passes innocuously into thin air. It bears greater similarity to the story of the boy who cried wolf. Shapiro may have been wrong to predict its imminence in 1967. But in 2025, demographic parity is basically here. And despite the far-right’s embrace of Donald Trump’s impractical (and immoral) plan for the forced mass-emptying of Gaza, the demographic balance is not going to change significantly in Israel’s direction. Were the Palestinian Authority (PA) to collapse and Israel to retake control over Areas A and B (another far-right hope) or were Palestinians to drop their national aspirations and demand civic rights between the river and the sea, the Zionist dream would be under threat.

Unlike the Zionist movement, the Palestinian national movement never prioritized a state, instead concentrating on denying statehood to the Jews. As the Palestinian negotiator and academic Ahmed Khalidi explains, statehood is a relatively recent addition to Palestinian aspirations. The main Palestinian impetus after 1948 was of “return,” focusing on reversing the loss of Arab land and patrimony rather than on the fulfillment of classical post-colonial self-determination. For the generation after the Oslo Accords, that Palestinian “liberation” impulse was partially defused, as the newly formed PA channeled its energies into providing healthcare, education, trash collection, and policing (often on behalf of Israel). But the Palestinian movement could quite effortlessly revert to its revolutionary form. As the group of PLO leaders who returned from exile in Tunis to sign and promote Oslo get older, a new generation of Palestinians may conceivably decide they are better off trying their luck in Israel’s Knesset than under the PA’s corrupt nepotism.

In light of the demographic impetus pushing towards withdrawal and the security logic of staying put, what might be possible under the circumstances? It’s worth emphasizing—as DeMogge does—that, like in 1967, the policy options available are not between good and bad, but between poor and terrible. Several years ago, the former national security advisor Yaakov Amidror (generally considered politically right-of-center) detailed what he called Israel’s “inelegant solutions” in the West Bank. “The right has no sound response to the demographic argument against annexation” Amidror explained, “while the left has no serious solution to the security threat stemming from Palestinian statehood. Therefore, Israel must choose the lesser evil. Israel’s choices are not a matter of right or wrong, but of electing to assume one set of risks over the other.”

There is unlikely to be a short- or even medium-term solution for those hoping for partition. But choosing to keep that option open—to me a necessity—would mean curbing the far-right proposals for creeping, de-facto annexation. Might the model Israel tried in northern Samaria—in which isolated settlers were evacuated with the IDF staying in place—be worth considering in the medium term? Might it be possible for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Trump administration to find some common ground that could facilitate normalization and the de-facto end to the Israeli-Sunni conflict? Might Israel be able to express support for partition in theory while gaining international and regional support for deep Palestinian institutional and cultural changes?

As Khalidi and another negotiator-cum-academic, Hussein Agha, have written, “the contemporary Palestinian national movement—founded and led by Arafat and embodied by the PA, Fatah, and the PLO over the past half century—is reaching its end.” Indeed, we are a chain-smoking-almost-nonagenarian’s heartbeat away from chaos in the West Bank.

Israel needs to be prepared for what comes next. I agree with DeMogge that annexation and withdrawal are unwise policy proposals at the current moment and concur that the country should strive for incremental improvements in the everyday life of all residents between the river and the sea. But it also needs to place the dangers of binationalism front and center, and take steps to minimize its risks.