Testing the Logic of Unilateral Withdrawal: Lessons from the History of the Labor Zionist Movement

Abstract

The combination of pessimism regarding the possibility of a negotiated settlement and a recognition that maintaining the status quo in the Occupied Territories is impossible has led leading Israeli policymakers to advocate a policy of unilateral withdrawal. This policy is at least partially based on the assumption that nationalist movements inevitably adapt to externally imposed realities. However, as this article demonstrates, even the famously pragmatic Labor Zionist movement did not shift its vision of the appropriate borders of their state in response to externally imposed territorial limits. Rather, when such ideological transformations took place, they were more closely linked to the contingencies of domestic and intra-movement politics. Unilateral withdrawals are thus unlikely to contribute to a resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, in part, because they are animated by a faulty assumption about the mechanism of ideological transformation.