Understanding Territorial Withdrawal is motivated by a question of timely importance: Under what conditions do military occupations end? The book is structured around an analysis of five distinct cases of Israeli occupation. Pinfold characterizes three of these as resulting in withdrawal—the Sinai Peninsula, Southern Lebanon, and, more controversially, even before October 2023, the Gaza Strip—while two persist as occupations: the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Pinfold develops the empirical building blocks of his theory through process tracing within each case, drawing on interviews with Israeli decision makers and political elites, in addition to other primary and secondary qualitative sources. Pinfold then applies his theory of territorial withdrawal to two US occupations—that of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 and of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Pinfold’s theory emphasizes how withdrawal is an outcome of interactions within and across three “arenas of bargaining”: the domestic arena, which includes interactions between the occupying power and the general public within the occupying state; the international arena, which consists of relations between the occupying power and international parties; and the bilateral arena, which captures interactions between the occupying power and “the population within the occupied territory and/or the other actor(s) claiming sovereignty over the territory” (24–25). Analyzing the Israeli cases across these three arenas of bargaining culminates in a set of six conditions that, Pinfold argues, are jointly necessary and perhaps sufficient to generate territorial withdrawal. Three conditions relate to how the occupier’s incentives to withdraw emerge. First, Pinfold claims that substantial violence in the bilateral arena precedes each withdrawal. However, withdrawal only occurs when this escalation in violence leads external actors, first, and, subsequently, public opinion within the occupying state to reassess the strategic utility of the occupation and, thus, to begin lobbying for withdrawal. From these first three conditions, it is clear that violence is systemically important to Pinfold’s theory, but predicted outcomes hinge on whether that violence generates increased pressure on the occupier from international actors and, critically, the domestic population. The final three factors that necessarily accompany withdrawal, according to Pinfold, are these: first, it will result from a gradual, rather than spontaneous, decision-making process; second, it is never “truly unilateral” (2); and finally, withdrawal from one territory will be accompanied by the entrenchment of occupation in another.

The book thus presents a neatly succinct theory of territorial withdrawal. The multiple cases of Israeli occupation are fruitful to place in comparison to one another; the contrast between Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai and its de facto annexation of the Golan Heights is particularly illuminating because of key contextual similarities across the two cases.

This book, like other research on the topic, faces the challenge of defining what actually constitutes an occupation and, thus, what constitutes its end. In the introductory chapter, although Pinfold references three distinct definitions, he also provides what might be interpreted as the assumed definition for the remainder of the book: “Occupation occurs when one state controls a territory that the broader international community… recognizes as belonging to another actor” (5). Nonetheless, in a footnote, the author admits that the concept’s definition can be “subjective and contested.” For example, in both popular discourse and the international relations literature, it is common to define occupation as a form of militarized territorial control that the occupier perceives or intends to be inherently temporary. This definition is closest to that used by David Edelstein in his oft-cited work on the topic. Pinfold weaves this feature of occupier intent into his definition too. For example, he justifies his universe of cases—which is narrower than other existing studies of territorial control and withdrawal—by describing modern occupations as distinctly “temporary” or, at least, implicitly impermanent and by asserting that “occupiers are more likely to withdraw than colonizers” (8–9).

There are also those cases of territorial control that the occupier merely describes to certain audiences as temporary. Unfortunately, by either criterion, Israel’s nearly 57-year-old control over the West Bank no longer seems to qualify as an occupation. Since at least the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israeli leaders have neither appeared to perceive the occupation as temporary nor have they really dared to describe it as such. Under right-wing leaders, permanent control over part or all the West Bank has been de facto government policy; even left-leaning leaders rarely speak of full withdrawal. Thus, a final definition of occupation might pay no attention to what the occupying power intends to do or what it says it intends to do; rather, it might be used to describe empirical realities where states control territory militarily while refraining from applying de jure annexation. This less conceptually restrictive definition— stripped of its reliance on the nebulous factor of occupier intent—seems better suited to the universe of cases Pinfold seeks to describe. By this definition, occupation can certainly coexist with colonialism or with de facto annexation. Such a definition of occupation—which emphasizes continued military rule—allows for a cleaner separation of causes and effects in Pinfold’s theory of withdrawal. Occupier intent, in its broadest sense, belongs on the explanatory side.

Relatedly, readers of Pinfold’s book may also have some questions about what precisely constitutes withdrawal. The definition of occupation I offered earlier requires us to define the extent and nature of military control. Writing before Israel’s reinvasion of Gaza in 2023, Pinfold’s characterization of the Gaza Strip as a case of withdrawal seems to refer to the removal of fixed military installations and civilian settlements, where applicable, from within the territory. However, continued military control over the territory—that is, the strict regulation of imports and exports, of the movement of people in and out of the territory, and of Gaza’s seas, all of which continued from the time of “withdrawal” through the time of Pinfold’s writing—does not fall within his conception of occupation. As I pen this review, Israel has, in response to a set of coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas militants that claimed the lives of some 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, entered the fifth month of its overwhelming military assault on Gaza. This has certainly been a reoccupation—or, more accurately, a dramatic escalation of Israel’s uninterrupted military rule over the territory—with hundreds of thousands of soldiers mobilized for the war effort. It has also claimed the lives of more than 29,000 Palestinians, an estimate that will surely be surpassed by the time this review is published; displaced the majority of Gaza’s population; and left vast swaths of Gaza’s housing, critical infrastructure, and society in ruins. The Israeli government has been unambiguous in signaling its intent to retain indefinite military control over the territory, with segments of the right wing calling for the reestablishment of Jewish settlements and “encouraging” the outmigration of those Palestinians who survive the war. By 2005, the violence of the Second Intifada and the “demographic threat” that Palestinians posed to Israel’s Jewish majority fed into the decision to evacuate Israel’s settlements in Gaza, according to Pinfold’s analysis. By contrast, the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 seem to have fueled a scorched-earth campaign seeking total domination.

Understanding Territorial Withdrawal further claims that, after the signing of the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s, Israel partially withdrew from the West Bank. However, is withdrawal from Palestinian towns and cities—those, for example, in the part of the West Bank known as “Area A"—really withdrawal if Israeli forces can, and do, still enter at will to raid Palestinian homes, if roads between these communities are still patrolled by the Israeli military and dotted with checkpoints, and, most importantly, if all Palestinian civilians living in these communities are still subject to Israeli martial law, including detention without charge, searches without warrants, and restrictions on their travel, while Israeli Jewish settlers, living mere kilometers away, are granted the full rights of Israeli citizens? Further, Pinfold reports that, in Haiti, the United States initially wanted to be left “in control of Haiti’s finances and the Gendarme d’Haiti, while also retaining a military presence” (212). To be clear, Pinfold does not classify the latter, hypothetical example as a case of withdrawal but as a form of “exit.” Unless these are truly the types of outcomes that Pinfold seeks to explain, we should conceptualize such cases of “withdrawal” differently. Better links to the literature on colonialism would aid in theorizing such cases of incomplete withdrawal that, in themselves, are critical to understanding settings of military rule that seem to perpetuate themselves indefinitely, in one form or another.

This book draws on revealingly frank and evocative direct quotes from the author’s interviews with nearly 40 senior-level Israeli political and military elites, including multiple former prime ministers, all of whom strikingly agreed to forego anonymity. The material from these interviews constitutes one of the book’s defining contributions: the author’s access is indeed impressive. The interview material combined with detailed process tracing allows Pinfold to piece together nuanced shifts over time in Israeli strategy. Unfortunately, the Israeli political elite perspective seeps from the primary source material into the analysis in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s misleading claim that Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, agreed to “full autonomy” for Palestinians (158) is offered without context, such that a reader would be forgiven for assuming that Begin’s proposal allowed Palestinians to exercise some form of territorial control (it did not) or that, under his plan, Palestinians would be able to promulgate their own laws (they would not). At other times, it projects Israel’s own goals onto other actors. For example, the United States’ support for the holding of Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 is described as a “misstep” (152). To be clear, this statement refers to a position that Palestinians should have the right to vote for the leadership of their political institutions—institutions that were, admittedly, hamstrung by design, given their limited territorial and functional control in the context of continued Israeli occupation. Thus, this was a far cry from the demand that, for example, Palestinians should have the right to vote within the state that rules their lives. Still, even in this limited sense, one might only conclude that enfranchising Palestinians is a “misstep” if the priority is a Palestinian government that Israeli occupiers can effectively co-opt and manage.

Pinfold also describes the United States as “mishandling” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s offer to Syria to conditionally withdraw from the Golan Heights (178), a view shared by one of Pinfold’s interlocutors, a high-level member of Israel’s negotiating team, but one that is certainly debatable. Although Pinfold does attempt to characterize both the Israeli and Syrian official perspectives on the failed diplomatic process, he concludes by claiming that, by refusing to engage with the Israeli government in a high-profile publicized summit, “Syria’s leaders failed to appreciate the importance and intransigence of Israel’s domestic arena” (197). Did they? Or did they face their own, potentially substantial, domestic costs of conceding to Israel’s preferences? The proposition that a deal on the Golan would have “‘saved Syria from civil war’” (198)—a quote from the interview with Ehud Olmert—is particularly galling. No part of the Syrian protest movement, the violent repression of which by Syrian regime forces led the country down its current tragic path, ever demanded or sought Syrian concessions to Israel. The author follows Olmert’s unsubstantiated speculation with this statement: “Whether this counterfactual is true or not, it encapsulates the fact that Israel and Syria’s prolonged negotiations over the Golan is a story of missed opportunities” (198). Perhaps, but it “encapsulates” this lesson by opportunistically attaching the untold horrors and atrocities that Syrians have experienced since 2011 to a process to which they bore no relation.

Perhaps as a result of the sample of interview subjects and primary sources, the book’s consideration of the bilateral arena regularly conflates the occupied population with the “enemy,” or adversary, of the occupier. Understanding Territorial Withdrawal includes quotes that trivialize mass human rights violations, such as the following excerpt, haunting in its now timely relevance, on the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population:

Of course, the other problem with such a scenario is that the unlawful deportation of displaced persons by an occupying power constitutes a war crime.

Another excerpt from the author’s interview with Ehud Olmert is inserted uncritically: “If we want to prefer the sanctity of the land…we have only two options and both are terrible. One option is to transfer the non-Jews that live there and empty the territories. The other option is that these non-Jews will…become full Israeli citizens, which will mean we lose Israel as a Jewish state” (132). This quote reveals, according to Pinfold, “that West Bank Palestinians have created an enduring dilemma for policymakers” [emphasis added]—rather than, for example, demonstrating the, to many readers, disturbing and bewildering perspective that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the granting of citizenship to Palestinians are equally terrible prospects for Israel.

The true puzzle is here. This is what a reader—one who is not steeped in the eliminatory rhetoric that Israeli political elites have regularly used toward Palestinians—needs to understand. Pinfold’s theory claims that territories such as the West Bank and the Golan Heights possess enough value to Israeli citizens—whether “intangible” religious, cultural, or historic significance or strategic worth—that neither pressure in the bilateral nor in the international arena has been sufficient to persuade Israeli leaders to withdraw. In its simplest sense, the theory risks producing the mundane conclusion that Israel has not (and perhaps will not) withdraw because Israelis do not want to. Even so, Pinfold misses an opportunity to fully interrogate the implications of these perpetual occupations, including how they are sustained by the cruel logics expressed by some of his interlocutors.

Given that the book’s goal is to develop and test a theory of what leads an occupying power to withdraw, it makes perfect sense to have the narrative focus squarely on the incentives of the occupier. However, there is very little attention to political complexity or nuance within the occupied population. Certain elements of basic historical context on the occupied populations are either missing or flawed. For example, Pinfold writes, “The West Bank began the twentieth century as a nondescript backwater in the Ottoman Empire,” and “initially, the Ottomans ruled the West Bank and its surrounding environs as one single unit” (127). The West Bank cannot be conceptualized during the Ottoman Era as separate from the city of Jerusalem, which, although not an economic heart of the empire, was certainly far from a “nondescript backwater.” Further, towns such as Nablus served as important links between the Balqa region in modern-day Jordan, Jerusalem, and coastal towns such as Acre and Haifa. What is today the West Bank was part of the land that Ottoman officials, Arab locals, Zionist immigrants, and European colonial powers alike all referred to as Palestine. However, Palestine was not governed “as one single unit” by the Ottomans. Most of it fell within the larger vilayet (province) of Syria, but portions of historic Palestine were later incorporated into the separate vilayet of Beirut, and the city of Jerusalem itself—along with, for example, the nearby towns of Hebron and Bethlehem—was granted a special autonomous status.

In the empirical analysis of the bilateral arena, strong emphasis is placed on the political elites who are most likely to be involved in diplomacy with Israel. When we apply this final arena of bargaining to the occupied West Bank, the three million Palestinians living there, the government of the Palestinian Authority (the same one whose leadership evidently should not be elected by the Palestinian people), and various militant groups that have intermittently operated from within the West Bank (i.e., Hamas) are all collapsed into a unitary adversary. This is problematic for several reasons. First, as suggested in the earlier references to the Golan case, it largely ignores how occupied populations or domestic publics might shape or constrain the incentives of Israel’s diplomatic adversaries. Second, it oversimplifies the possible approaches used by the occupied population itself as, alternately, either “compliant” (135) or “violent.” This leads Pinfold to categorize all types of unrest, including civil disobedience, as violence. The First Intifada—the first major grassroots uprising against Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian Territories, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993—is described as violent on at least four separate occasions. It is never described as, for example, a mass movement that relied on coordinated, civil disobedience through the use of strikes, boycotts, popular demonstrations, and stone throwing, except when Pinfold notes that the Palestinian “shift away from civil disobedience” between the First and Second Intifadas in favor of armed violence “made it easier for the IDF to target hostile combatants and infrastructure” (141).

The Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 was, indeed, far more violent. Pinfold aptly describes the “ferocity” of some of the violence carried out by Palestinian groups; for example, by detonating explosives or carrying out suicide bombings in crowded Israeli population centers. More than one thousand Israelis were killed during the uprising. However, a word could have been spared for the disproportionately higher number of Palestinian casualties during the Second Intifada and destruction of civilian areas. Israel’s use of violence—which included the invasion and reoccupation of some of those same cities of the West Bank from which it had apparently withdrawn, and the wholesale destruction of large parts of the Jenin refugee camp and of Palestinian civilian infrastructure—is described not as ferocious but as “restoring security with kinetic force” and “denying and degrading enemy capabilities” (141). More than three thousand Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during the Second Intifada. Similarly, the nonspecialist reader may wonder about the 1929 uprising in Haiti, which is described as a campaign of “mass civil disobedience” (213) in one place—language that appropriately describes the student-led protests and strikes that preceded the violent Les Cayes massacre by US forces—and “enemy violence” (228) in another. When considering the main outcome Pinfold seeks to explain—the incentives of the occupier to withdraw or to stay—the reader is left unsure of how the behavior of occupied populations actually shapes this decision calculus. Too many actors are collapsed into the “enemy,” and too many strategic possibilities are collapsed into “violence.”

The oversights mentioned generate important and tricky questions not just for the author of this work but also for the field of international relations as a whole. If it is possible for one’s theory to survive, despite the erasure of the perspectives of occupied populations, then we are all in more trouble than we think. However, I believe these errors of omission and commission, at times, also undermine Pinfold’s theoretical argument. Here, I once again return to the case I know best, the West Bank. Pinfold emphasizes the nontangible value that the territory has to Israel—its religious significance and its symbolic value as land that is believed, by some, to be part of the historic Land of Israel. This is indisputable. However, the narrative also heavily relies on the assertion that Israel attaches different utility to different parts of the West Bank and thus is more willing or able to surrender control over portions of the territory than are Palestinians (see, e.g., 133, 142). The first part of this statement appears to be vindicated by Israeli policies that have, since the 1990s, delineated intricate, hyperlocalized boundaries between, on one hand, areas occupied by Jewish Israeli settlers and areas of key strategic value to Israel and on the other hand, Palestinian communities confined to the remaining 40% of the territory. What is also clear from myriad other sources and accounts of the conflict is that Israel only attaches less value to certain territory because Palestinians live on that territory. Thus, statements such as “the problem was not that both sides saw the West Bank as indivisible, but that Israel sought to divide the territory, while the Palestinians did not” (238) fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of Israeli-supported geographical divisions of the territory and thus misidentify the “problem.” The division is not based on the strategic utility of territory but rather on exclusion based on ethnic, religious, or what some would call racial grounds. Thus, the policy recommendation for the United States becomes either “to lobby for an Israeli exit from all of the West Bank or work to convince the Palestinians to accept a division of the territory” (242; emphasis added). It seems, perhaps, that the Jewish settlers who recently set fire to Palestinian homes, while residents were inside, in the West Bank town of Huwwara, and their political leaders, who have assumed powerful positions within the current Israeli cabinet, might also need some convincing. Unlike Pinfold’s conclusion that Israel’s policy toward the West Bank “has long been and will remain contradictory, ambiguous, and confusing” (167), many others have long recognized it for its unwavering clarity: controlling the maximum amount of land while minimizing the number of Palestinians who can remain on it.