Ah, Israel/Palestine, where thinking Westerners go to play! How many people with an advanced degree in the humanities can resist fiddling with competing national narratives of victimhood? The stakes—peace, no less—give the whole thing a frisson of importance lacking in so many other parts of intellectual life. How fortunate the world is to have the Holy Land, without which everyone might have to grapple with the baffling nature of the entire planet or the dreary failures of their own societies.

In “The Two-State Delusion,”...