The mirage of the two-state solution 

From every corner comes pressure upon Israel to acquiesce to a two-state solution. Allegedly doing so will eliminate the main source of tension and the numerous wars between Israel and the Arabs/Palestinians since 1947.   

Thus, we are told that Israel must grant the Palestinians a political horizon. And such luminaries as Josip Borrell, the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy and David Cameron, the United Kingdom’s foreign minister insist that a Palestinian state is necessary. Borrell actually expressed the willingness to impose one from the outside because of the antagonism of the protagonists. Yet at the same time, he argues this is the best guarantee of Israel’s security. Clearly, he dismisses the inherent contradictions of his stance. 

Lest anyone misread what is implied here, Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the U.K. said that, “If implemented, the Cameron declaration would remove Israel’s veto power over Palestinian statehood [and] would boost efforts towards a two-state outcome.”   

In line with administration support for a two-state solution, the State Department has been tasked with drawing up options for this two-state solution.   

In other words, Israel’s sovereignty and security are to be overridden by the EU and the U.S. to, if necessary, impose a Palestinian state. At best there will be so called “robust guarantees” of Israeli and Palestinian security apart from a resolution of all the outstanding legal, demographic, economic and political issues that have obstructed resolution of this long-running conflict. And that is the optimal solution envisaged by these architects of a two-state solution. 

Here we should remember that earlier United Nations, U.S. and EU guarantees of Israeli security have always been found to be unavailing.  

Israel has fought by itself in 1967, 1973, 1982 and in the multiple intifadas and wars since then with either the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Even in 2007 when Israel discovered that North Korea was building a nuclear reactor for Syria, Washington refused to act, leaving Israel no choice but to act alone to destroy it. And if anyone needed more proof of the inconstancy of these actors regarding assurances to Ukraine, he or she need only look at the current spectacle of the congressional debacle on that issue to be disabused of the wisdom of relying on such guarantees. 

While Washington, Brussels and London have been stampeded into embracing the mirage of the two-state solution, we need to see this tragic issue in a more realistic light. The idea of a two-state solution has been around for almost a century but has consistently failed. One key reason is that Palestinian leadership has never been willing to accept the legitimacy of Israel on what really is the same territory “from the river to the sea” even though the Jewish claim to Israel long predates any Arab presence.  

In 1939, 1947, 1993, 2000 and 2008 Palestinian leaders fully rejected all offers of an opportunity to begin a state on this territory because they insisted on a one-state solution, i.e. a wholly Palestinian state that would be free of Jews. So Palestinian leadership, which has served its people probably worse than any other in history and for a longer time than many other such leaderships, not Israel, has exercised a veto on self-determination.  

Instead, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have regularly resorted to terror, most recently on Oct. 7. Under the circumstances it should surprise nobody that Israeli public opinion, not just Prime Minister Netanyahu, uniformly opposes a two-state solution. The problem here is not Netanyahu despite a major press assault on him. Rather it is public opinion in a democratic state.  

Similarly, most Palestinians, who have been fed on fantasies of revenge in addition to more recent realities of Israeli oppression — itself due to the not unjustified fear of terrorism — oppose this solution and the legitimacy of Israeli presence there. And that was in a March 2023 poll before this war began. Any effort to impose this state violates the sage maxim that one does not impose intolerable decrees upon a population. 

Adherents of a two-state solution have also utterly overlooked the fact that the Palestinians are riven by civil war. As long as Hamas survives, even under new leadership, it will conduct a lethal struggle with the Palestinian Authority that will inevitably engulf Israel as well. And, if experience holds, nobody will do anything but condemn Israel for its supposed excesses. 

In that context we do not see many of the people supposedly outraged at Israel’s conduct, professing similar outrage at Moscow’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine against children, the elderly, women, Ukrainian citizens, culture and history. This double standard leaves the impression that much of this protest against Israeli operations smacks of antisemitism as well as ignorance, whether it’s willful, or not. 

Certainly, the effort to impose this solution in the wake of powerful historical and real political contradictions also gives rise to the thought that many of the political leaders urging a two-state solution do not know what they are talking about. Certainly, no state in the world would accept the presence of a terrorist movement or state on its border that regularly lobs missiles into its territory.  One can easily imagine what Texas and any administration in Washington might advocate if Mexican terrorists were engaged in performing such acts.  

The arguments presented here represent only a few of the claims that can and should be brought against the delusion of a two-state solution. It flies in the face of the ancient Talmudic wisdom that two kings do not share the same crown or the insight of the early modern French political philosopher Jean Bodin who observed that sovereignty cannot be divided.   

It would be better for all concerned if Western statesmen understood that terrorism and antisemitism must first be extirpated not appeased and then acted on that insight rather than on the organized hysteria of the moment. At present, they are instead chasing a mirage but when they and their victims regain their sight, they will then be in a desert of their own making. 

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a Foreign Policy Research Institute senior fellow and independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College.