Wealth & Money Quote by Lee H. Hamilton

Hamilton’s sentence is built like a piece of congressional choreography: calm on the surface, forceful in its sequencing. “Should support” frames U.S. involvement as steadying, not domineering, but it also asserts that Washington has both the leverage and the obligation to shape outcomes. The key move is the ladder of inevitability he constructs: “historic Gaza withdrawal” becomes merely “a first step,” which then points toward “a final settlement,” which is defined not as coexistence in the abstract but as a specific end-state: “a permanent Palestinian state.”

The intent is to lock policy to a destination. By treating withdrawal as a milestone rather than an end, Hamilton tries to preempt the political temptation - in Israel, in the U.S., and among Palestinians - to cash in the optics of disengagement and stop. The subtext is a warning against the familiar cycle: symbolic moves followed by drift, violence, and hardened “facts on the ground.” “Permanent” is doing heavy lifting here, signaling that anything provisional (autonomy, interim zones, endless negotiations) will simply become a holding pattern that radicals can exploit and moderates can’t defend.

Context matters: the “Gaza withdrawal” points to Israel’s mid-2000s disengagement, a moment marketed by some as peace-by-unilateralism and feared by others as a way to freeze the West Bank question. Hamilton, a foreign-policy institutionalist, is insisting the U.S. treat Gaza not as a containment exercise but as a down payment on sovereignty “in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank” - a phrase that quietly concedes land swaps or exceptions while planting a stake against permanent fragmentation. It’s incrementalism with an endpoint, designed to keep pragmatism from becoming an excuse for paralysis.