Those who want to annex Judea and Samaria and those who want to conjure a Palestinian state there agree on nothing except the premise that decides everything: the present arrangement cannot last. “Unsustainable” is the word, pronounced with the confidence of a law of physics and, in my experience, never once accompanied by evidence. I wrote last week about what that adjective does for a presidential campaign; it performs the same service for ideologues of every stripe, sparing them the tedium of demonstrating that a thing which has functioned for three decades is about to stop. Perhaps, before accepting the axiom, we should test it. There is an old rule about not fixing what isn’t broken, and it has outlasted every peace plan on record.

The rival demolition crews have, between them, produced exactly one durable piece of analysis: the case against each other. When the two-stater explains why annexation fails, he is entirely correct. Sovereignty without citizenship for millions of Arabs would hand the apartheid libel the factual scaffolding it has always lacked — today the slander is answerable precisely because those Arabs vote for the Palestinian Authority, pay its taxes, stand in its courts, and endure its misrule. Citizenship, on the other hand, would turn Israel into a laboratory testing whether a Jewish state can absorb an electorate schooled on martyr stipends and maps without Israel, and remain itself; no actuary alive would price that policy. The annexationist returns the favor with equal accuracy: a terrorist state on the hills above Ben Gurion Airport, governed by whichever faction shoots best, is — after October 7 — a proposal to schedule the next massacre and grant the perpetrators sovereign airspace. When each side is this persuasive about the other, the reasonable conclusion is that both are right, and that the thing they propose to replace deserves a second look.

Gaza is its own story, and I will keep it offstage; the Board of Peace, its pilot zones, and Hamas’s theatrical resignations can be discussed........

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