The efforts to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel—the two-state solution: 2SS—have all but died and can’t be revived—with realistic hopes for success—for reasons highlighted in this post.
An alternative, a single state in which Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights, has been proposed by some as an alternative, but for reasons mentioned in the post, it is impractical. What’s more, Israelis on the far-right have their own version of the one-state formula: extending full Israeli sovereignty over almost the entire West Bank.
That leaves a future of continued occupation and repression, which in turn will ensure unremitting Palestinian resistance and Israeli crackdowns. Given the power asymmetry, Palestinians will suffer the most—as witness the First and Second Intifadas—but Israel’s occupation will become increasingly harder to sustain.
But the advocates of a 2 SS haven’t given up. The proposal has been revived recently by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Nasser Al-Kidwa, who served as the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Minister and UN ambassador.
Before I expand the argument that the 2SS has become defunct, some background on how the road to a 2SS came to be and where it has led.
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In the quest for a Palestinian state, encompassing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, alongside Israel, three years are particularly important: 1988, 1993, and 1995.
In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization proclaimed a Palestinian state, even though nothing of the kind existed. But, in what amounted to an implicit recognition that a Jewish state in Israel was a reality, the PLO also accepted the UN’s 1947 partition of Palestine, which created one state for Jews, and a second for Palestinians. In that same year, the PLO also renounced armed struggle and announced that it would pursue negotiations to achieve a Palestinian state on the basis of UN Resolutions 242 and 338.
The 1993 Oslo Accords—formally “The Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule”—set the stage for negotiations toward the 2SS. The PLO recognized Israel’s right to live in peace, Israel recognized the PLO as the Palestinian people’s sole legitimate representative, and both parties affirmed UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. The agreements provided for the selective withdrawal of Israeli security forces from the West Bank and Gaza (occupied by Israel following the 1967 Six-Day War), the transfer of some governing authority to the Palestinians, covering areas such as taxation, health, and tourism, and a five-year period to move Palestinian self-rule further forward.
Those years were to be used for discussing far more contentious matters. They included Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the borders between Israel and a self-governing Palestine, the status of Jerusalem, and the right of return for Palestinians expelled from the areas allotted by the 1947 UN partition plan to what would become the state of Israel the following year, elections in the West Bank and Gaza to create a Palestinian governance structure (the Palestinian Authority), and the creation of a Palestinian police force.
Oslo II (1995) provided for the redeployment of Israeli forces from six Palestinian cities—Bethlehem, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Qalqilyah, and Tulkarm—as well as the participation of Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, in PA elections. Israeli forces were redeployed from yet another city, Hebron, and the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B, and C, about which more later.
What happened in 1988, 1993, and 1995 was historic, but by 1995 there was nothing resembling a territorially-contiguous, sovereign Palestinian state covering the West Bank and Gaza. (Nor is there today.)
A host of controversial issues awaited resolution: the status of Jewish settlements on the West Bank (they continued to increase); how Jerusalem might be divided so that the eastern part of the city might eventually become the capital of a Palestinian state, while ensuring that Jews would have access to their holy sites there; and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their communities that had become part of Israel in 1948.
The negotiations of the 1990s were followed by others, notably the 2000 Camp David talks between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PA leader Yasser Arafat; the negotiations between Israel and Palestinian representatives at Taba (Egypt) in 2001; and the 2008 discussions between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, who represented the PA.
These efforts failed for many reasons, but the most important one was that the two sides had irreconcilable visions of what constituted a just outcome.
The Palestinians sought a full-fledged, territorially-unified, sovereign state encompassing almost all of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin—murdered in 1995 by a right-wing zealot who viewed the Oslo process as a betrayal of Zionism—Barak, and Olmert were unwilling to make the compromises required to give the Palestinians what they wanted, even though all three supported, in principle, a land-for-peace formula.
The Palestinians, who had already seen their historic homeland partitioned in 1947 and the proliferation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank (and for a time in Gaza) were unwilling to make additional substantial sacrifices.
In all of the negotiations held to achieve the 2SS, Israel held an overwhelming advantage. It occupied the West Bank and Gaza, had powerful security forces, as well as the near-unqualified backing of the United States, even though American presidents and diplomats served as mediators. As one U.S. official involved in some of the talks put it, the U.S. was “Israel’s lawyer.”
The First Intifada (1987-1993) and the Second Intifada (2000-2005)—Palestinian uprisings—made the talks even more contentious by increasing mutual mistrust and animosity. Many more Palestinians were killed during these uprisings than Israelis: 1,376 in the first, compared to 94Israelis and 3,000-5000 vs. 1,000 in the second.
While allowing for the harmful effects that the two uprisings had on the 2SS talks, it’s important not to abstract these rebellions from the ongoing expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and the day-to-day repressions and indignities that were integral to the occupation. Seeing them as spasms of irrational violence or as a rejection of peace with Israel—a not uncommon characterization—amounts to a caricature.
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A common view of the 2SS talks is that the Israelis made bold, good-faith concessions that the Palestinian leadership could never summon the vision and courage to accept. This is certainly the narrative of Israeli officialdom, which includes the claim that Barak proposed a Palestinian state covering virtually the entire West Bank, but was rebuffed by Arafat.
In fact, Barak didn’t offer anything that came close to a territorially contiguous state free of Israeli settlements, which, in any event, are widely seen as illegal under international law.
The map below depicts his conception of a Palestinian state—essentially chunks of disconnected West Bank territory broken up by Israeli settlements and roads. Barak also insisted that the future Palestinian state forfeit control of its airspace and the right to maintain armed forces, and allow an Israeli military presence on various parts of its territory.
Source:Decolonize Palestine
Olmert’s proposal contained more substantial territorial concessions, but it called for the incorporation into Israel of the largest Jewish settlement blocs and Israeli sovereignty over the corridor linking the West Bank and Gaza.
The chances of successful talks, already slim, were reduced further by the political circumstances under which Barak and Olmert presented their proposals. Barak had been focused on a deal with Syria—which proved unattainable—until he was at the tail end of his term in 2000. He lost his bid for re-election to Ariel Sharon, of the right-wing Likud Party, who would never have accepted Barak’s blueprint.
When Olmert was negotiating with Abbas, he was dogged by a corruption scandal and decided not to run in the election that was around the corner. The winner, Benjamin Netanyahu, like Sharon, belonged to Likud and rejected the very notion of a Palestinian state.
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Why the decades-long efforts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using the two-state solution failed, what exactly happened at each of the critical negotiations, and how blame for the failures should be apportioned fairly—these are complicated matters. They can’t be explored adequately in a brief post.
My focus here is on the prospects for a two-state solution given present-day reality. I conclude that the two-state solution is at death’s door and cannot, given current conditions in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, be made to work.
There are several reasons for this downbeat conclusion.
Let’s begin with the current political geography of the West Bank, which is depicted in the map below. Note the demarcation of Area A, Area B, and Area C in the map below. Next, keep in mind that Area A, over which the PA has governance rights on civil and security matters, accounts for a mere 18% of the territory; that Area B, where its governance rights extend solely to civic affairs, covers an additional 22%, and that Area C, encompassing 60% of the West Bank, is under full, indefinite Israeli control.
Source: Anera.org
Note further that Areas A and B do not resemble anything that could reasonably be called a state—not just because the PA has only partial governing authority in Area B, but also because both Area A and B amount to an archipelago. These two areas are each fragmented. They are also separated from each other by Area C and its Jewish settlements as well as by a network of roads, some that Palestinians cannot use, others that they can but under various restrictions, including frequent checkpoint inspections.
The settlements—there are now about 160 of them—plus the settler “outposts,” deemed illegal even under Israeli law, have turned the West Bank into Swiss cheese. The building of settlements, it should be noted, continued during the Oslo years and through the governments led by Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister.
The map below depicts the political geography of the West Bank, though it does not show the settlements built during the past two years.
Source: Jewish Virtual Library.org
Now look at the bar graph that depicts the steady increase in the Jewish settler population within the West Bank, excluding the 250,000 settlers in East Jerusalem.
In the early years after the Six-Day War, there were fewer than 300 settlers, but the number increased rapidly thereafter. By the end of the 1990s, the hopeful years of the Oslo process, nearly 200,000 settlers lived in the West Bank. During the 2000s, Barak and Olmert offered ideas for a political settlement, but both also presided over a continued increase in settlement building—to say nothing of Sharon and Netanyahu.
The result: There are about 750,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, 250,000 of whom inhabit East Jerusalem, which, recall, Israel has controlled since 1967.
The settlers wield formidable influence in Israeli politics, and their clout has become particularly pronounced under the current government. Netanyahu, and more so National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (the latter has poured state money into settlement expansion and construction), are deeply committed to expanding settlements; but their conviction is widely shared among Israelis on the right and far-right.
The settlers and their patrons, within and outside the government, see the West Bank as part of the divinely bestowed land of Eretz Israel (Greater Israel), and they are committed to ramping up settlement building.
On top of that, Netanyahu’s government has permitted an unprecedented growth in outposts, 70 of which now receive government funding and infrastructure support.
What’s more, in 2024, five of them—Evyatar, Givat Asaf, Sde Efraim, Adorayim, and Nahal Heletz—became settlements legitimized by Israeli law. All five outposts lie beyond Jerusalem in the West Bank’s interior.
Today, there are close to 200 outposts in the West Bank, 49of which were created between October 7, 2023 (the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel) and the end of 2024, resulting in land seizures and the displacement of entire Palestinian communities. Last year, outposts sprang up even in Area B—a first since the Oslo years.
For Netanyahu’s government, the outposts—those that remain outside the law and those that have been legalized, along with the settlements—are, among other things, a means to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, something Defense Minister Israel Katz stated openly this year.
Katz is hardly an outlier. Other government officials, settlers, organizations, and individuals agree with him. As Smotrich put it recently, settlements will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”
The Finance Minister was speaking in particular about the plan to build nearly 4,000 housing units and 2,152 hotel rooms in the East 1 (E1) settlement bloc, which will extend the settlement of Ma’ale Adummim. This project would close the space between East Jerusalem, the capital of a Palestinian state under the 2SS, and the rest of the West Bank. It would also create a barrier between the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem and Ramallah, which are 14 miles apart.
Any doubts that E1 is part of the continuing effort to torpedo a future Palestinian state ought to be dispelled by the recent words of Smotrich. The project, he declared, “finally buries the idea of a Palestinian state because there is nothing to recognize and no one to recognize…. Anyone in the world who tries today to recognize a Palestinian state—will receive an answer from us on the ground.”
Peace Now and other Israeli organizations that support the two-state solution condemned the E1 project precisely because it’s another body blow to the 2SS. But their voices count for nothing given the power of the settlers and their supporters, in the Israeli government and in society at large.
The acceleration of plans to build settlements and the construction itself continue.
According to a European Union report, last year alone, 28,872 residential units were in various stages of planning or construction—18,988 were in East Jerusalem and 9,884 in various parts of the West Bank.
In addition, in 2024, the Netanyahu government appropriated nearly 2,000 acres in the Jordan Valley—the largest land seizure in decades that will further separate the West Bank from Jordan.
The settlements sprouting beyond Jerusalem, along with the land grabs, have compounded the already serious Swiss cheese problem that marks the West Bank and makes a territorially continuous Palestinian state all but impossible.
To all of this must be added the call by ultranationalist Israelis—within and outside the government—to build settlements in postwar Gaza. This could happen either in the 50%-plus part of Gaza that remains under Israeli control after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) first pull back under President Trump’s 20-point peace plan or in the buffer zone along Gaza’s periphery, which Israel will retain, perhaps indefinitely.
All of this—land appropriations, the building and approval of settlements and housing units—has been accompanied by a surge in attacks by settlers, not a few of them armed, on West Bank Palestinians, which have included the destruction of Palestinian homes, olive groves, orchards, and the displacement of entire communities.
Violence by settlers has increased sharply in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, but it was part of Palestinian life in the West Bank well before then. The Israeli government has done little to stop the assaults and even abets them. A study by the Israel human rights organization
Yesh Din found that 93% of police investigations into settler attacks on Palestinians between 2005 and 2022 were wrapped up without indictments.
Another Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, adds that “settler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation” as part of an official land-grab policy.
The governments of Israel and the United States habitually depict Palestinians who take up arms against the occupation as terrorists but never describe the settlers’ rampages as terrorism.
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Given what has been occurring in the West Bank and the war in Gaza, the two-state solution has become impossible—even under the most favorable circumstances.
Imagine for a moment that Hamas renounced any role in Gaza’s politics, surrendered its arms, and that its leaders agreed to go into exile. Imagine further that Gaza’s successor government, comprised of individuals with no ties to Hamas, joined the PA in pledging to live in peace alongside Israel and to recognize its legitimacy as a Jewish state.
Finally, imagine that Marwan Barghouti, by far the most popular political figure in Palestinian politics, was released from his Israeli jail cell, where he has been confined since 2002, became the Palestinian Nelson Mandela and vowed to work for a Palestinian state that would live peacefully alongside Israel and even agree to forsake an army and limit itself to having a police force.
Even under these ideal conditions, there’s no compelling reason to expect the emergence of an Israeli leader who realizes that open-ended occupation and settlement-building have become unsustainable and, just as F.W. de Klerk worked with Mandela to dismantle apartheid in South Africa, decides to work with Barghouti to end the occupation and to usher in a Palestinian state.
The 750,000 settlers who live in the West Bank and whose communities have fragmented its landscape will remain there and will continue to be a powerful political force. Moreover, the politicians, far-right political parties, and organizations committed to continued settlement building—on the grounds that the entire West Bank is rightly part of a Greater Israel—will not go quietly into the night. If anything, given the trajectory of Israeli politics, they will become even more influential.
Even if a Labor government returns to power, is it realistic to imagine that we will see an Israeli government led by a prime minister who is willing to dismantle the settlements, relinquish control of Area C, and work with a Palestinian Mandela to create a territorially unified state in the West Bank linked to Gaza by a land corridor?
Some would say that this outcome is possible because in 2005, Ariel Sharon dismantled Israeli settlements in Gaza. But it would be foolish to hope that what happened back then in Gaza can be replicated anytime soon in the West Bank.
Not only is the West Bank nearly 15 times larger in area than Gaza, it contains many more settlers and settlements than were ever present in Gaza. And Gaza’s significance in the religious and historical imagination of Israeli Jews can’t remotely be compared to the West Bank’s.
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Some who have given up on a two-state solution favor a single state in which Jews, Palestinians, and other communities (such as the Druze), enjoy equal rights. But that would mean the end of the Jewish state that was established in 1948 and fulfilled the Zionist ideal—a political transformation that has scant support among even the most passionate advocates of Palestinian rights in Israel.
Israelis on the right and far right would, of course, reject both a one-state and two-state solution. They would also insist that occupation and settlement building can be continued indefinitely by intermittently “mowing the grass,’’ meaning suppressing Palestinian resistance by using Israel’s superiority in raw power.
But that way lies a future with an endless cycle of uprisings and repression. Palestinians would get the worst of it, but if the decades since 1947 have proved anything, it is that they aren’t going anywhere and will continue to resist.
Mowing the grass will impose hardships on Israelis as well. The violence of repression will be met with counter-violence. Israeli society will, in consequence, be shaped increasingly by political authoritarianism and religious messianism, something that many Israelis will reject and renounce through emigration. Israel’s international isolation, already pronounced, will increase.
The occupation may be sustainable as long as the United States is willing to underwrite it with political and material support. But Israel’s destruction of Gaza has shown that it can no longer depend on unquestioning U.S. support for business as usual, especially once a new generation of Americans starts to gain political influence. Young Americans, including those who are Jews, are much less inclined than their parents and grandparents to support Israel unconditionally.
The two-state solution has become defunct. The one-state solution is impractical. And the mowing the grass strategy is living on borrowed time.
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