Robert Satloff is the Segal Executive Director of The Washington Institute, a post he assumed in January 1993.
Articles & Testimony
The supposed “status quo” that some commentators are pushing Israel to embrace is so disfigured and hollowed out that it no longer meets the definition of the phrase.
“Clever” is an appropriate term for the counterintuitive essay titled “To Save Itself from International Isolation, Israel Must Hold On to the West Bank.” An argument that rejects solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict advocated by both the left and right—withdrawal and annexation, respectively—is a clever way to claim the middle ground, where most sensible people like to be. And at a time when even the president of the United States has his own creative (and, perhaps, fanciful) ideas for the future disposition of people living in some of the disputed territories, there is no better word than clever for suggesting that the best approach is to stand pat and do nothing. But dig more deeply and one will find that this paean to the status quo is too clever by half, with the “status quo” it embraces so disfigured and hollowed out that it is, in fact, a very different thing from the dictionary definition of “the existing state of affairs”...
