What's The Plan?

Douthat wants an Israeli strategy:

It is not enough to argue, as many defenders of current Israeli policy do, that “Arab intransigence” is responsible for the bind in which Israel finds itself. Because if the Palestinians are as intransigent as a Charles Krauthammer or a James Kirchick believe them to be, then the case for an Israeli exit strategy from its West Bank entanglements only becomes that much stronger. (After all, if you think they’re intransigent today, just wait till 2030, when there may be more Arabs than Jews in the West Bank and Israel …) Like Noah Millman, I suspect that Ariel Sharon understood this point, and that his Gaza pullout was intended as a dress rehearsal for a similar withdrawal from the rest of the occupied territories. Sharon is gone, and the world has changed since then, but the basic calculus still holds: If comprehensive peace negotiations can’t or won’t succeed, than Israel’s long-term survival may depend on its ability to endure the agonies of unilateral retreat.