Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits

From Ukraine to Afghanistan, occupations and exit dilemmas permeate contemporary geopolitics. However, the existing literature on territorial conflict rarely scrutinizes what makes states withdraw from occupied territory. This book addresses this research gap. It argues that an occupier withdraws when the policy’s costs outweigh the perceived benefits across three arenas of bargaining: (i) between occupier and occupied; (ii) within the occupier’s internal polity; and (iii) between the occupier and third parties. This book applies this framework to: (i) Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula between 1974 and 1982; (ii) Israel’s “unilateral” withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000; and (iii) the “unilateral disengagement” from the Gaza Strip in 2005. It contrasts the above cases to those of Israeli occupation, without exit in: (iv) the West Bank and (v) the Golan Heights. This book argues that each withdrawal was a gradual process of policy reassessment. Local violence escalated, which intensified international pressure against the occupier to change the status quo. This caused domestic opinion, which was previously pro-occupation, to endorse exit. Affirming this pattern with a probability probe of the US exits from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, this book constructs a generalizable framework for understanding territorial withdrawal. It delineates commonalities that manifested in each exit yet were absent in the cases of occupation without withdrawal. It thus provides a critical intervention for the study of international security, territorial conflict, and the Arab-Israel conflict alike.