Status Quoism Is a Temperament, Not an Ideology

I would like to thank Evelyn Gordon, Robert Satloff, and Calev Ben-Dor for their thoughtful and perceptive responses to my essay on the diplomatic costs of Israeli territorial concessions. Below, I’ll reply to each separately and then make some general observations.

I have little to add to Evelyn Gordon’s sympathetic analysis to my essay, other than that I regret that I wasn’t aware of her excellent 2010 article, “The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace,” which anticipates many of the points I made, and rings even truer today than it did fifteen years ago

But I’d like to point out that the phenomenon she describes—the dynamic of Israel’s perceived weakness emboldening and encouraging radical anti-Israel groups—is a special instance of the tendency for radicals to interpret a willingness to compromise as a sign of weakness. This dynamic was evident, for instance, during “the Great Awokening” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, when progressive activists accumulated power and bent mainstream culture to their liking by cowing the moderate majority into compromises that were increasingly skewed in the activists’ favor. Donald Trump’s clear electoral victory in November 2024 put an end to this process, and one can only hope that the progressive onslaught against Israel will soon hit a similar wall.