The two-state solution is often predicated on the 1967 borders, which would leave 78 per cent of the land in the hands of Israelis, and just 22 per cent for Palestinians. ALAIN PITT/ALAMY
BEYOND APARTHEID: THE CASE FOR A ONE-STATE SOLUTION
Among the most serious of the many destructive effects of the ongoing war on Palestine is that it may set back the search for a solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years to come. Despite five Arab-Israeli wars, a plethora of UN resolutions and numerous international peace proposals since 1967, nothing has succeeded in producing a solution acceptable to all sides. Today, the situation is no nearer to being resolved than in the 76 years of Israel’s existence in the Middle East.
And yet finding a future way forward out of this morass is an urgent necessity, no less than that of ending the current war itself. One might even say, as other observers have done, it was this very absence of an agreed way forward that precipitated the current war. Since 1967 Israel has occupied and increasingly colonized the West Bank, and since 2007 it has subjected Gaza to a draconian siege.
Five decades later, this situation had taken on a terrifying permanence which no-one was willing to challenge. It was clearly unrealistic to expect the Palestinians to go on enduring a status quo that stopped them leading normal lives, denied them basic freedoms, and kept them fragmented and encircled under Israel’s military control.
To Israel, its Western backers and many Arab states anxious to avoid confronting their own populations, it has been comforting to ignore this harmful status quo. So long as Palestinians were prepared to tolerate the conditions imposed on them, albeit with bouts of resistance easily managed by Israel, the so-called international community was happy for the occupation to continue indefinitely.
But then came the Hamas attacks of 7 October, and this whole arrangement of wilful ignorance was shattered. Israel’s genocidal war, a collective punishment of Palestinians co-sponsored by the US and its Western allies, is driven at least in part by outrage at having to confront this harsh reality.
A COMPROMISE TOO FAR
Historically, the closest the region and international community has ever come to a consensus on how to end the conflict has been the proposal of a ‘two-state solution’. In essence, this means partitioning the old Mandate Palestine that existed before the creation of Israel in 1948 into two states along the post-1967 borders. Israel would take 78 per cent of the land, and the remaining 22 per cent would become a Palestinian state. Jerusalem would be divided into a western Jewish half and an eastern Arab half, which would be capitals of Israel and Palestine respectively. Palestinian refugees would only be able to exercise their right of return within the state of Palestine, even if their family’s home had existed within Israel’s borders.
This proposition grew out of a long history of Palestinian defeat. Having established their own liberation movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in the 1960s, the Palestinians soon came up against the reality of Israel’s superior power. Military resistance seemed futile. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the PLO started to consider establishing a ‘national, independent authority’ on any part of liberated land, no matter how small. That idea evolved over the next decade into a PLO call for ‘an independent national state’ on the land. This was adopted by the USSR in 1981, and then by the Saudi-backed Fez plan in 1982.
By 1988, the PLO had endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state to be set up on the 1967 territories – the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza. The Palestinians recognized Israel’s control of the rest of Palestine, thus accepting the division of their country into two unequal halves. They put aside the armed struggle, and resolved to pursue a future of peaceful diplomacy. The ‘two-state solution’ entered the political lexicon, and has been with us ever since. Palestinians understood it as the implicit destination of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993 for ending the conflict. But it was not articulated as such at the time, and has never happened to this day.
Since then, the two-state solution has been adopted by a majority of world states, and pushed as the only solution that would be just for both sides. Despite the fact that Israel has formally rejected it, most recently by a majority Knesset vote in July 2024, political leaders still put it forward like an anaesthetizing mantra.
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Successive US presidents from Jimmy Carter onwards have supported this solution, with Joe Biden stressing his conviction in March that it was the only ‘real’ option for saving Israel’s ‘democracy’. Between November 2023 and May 2024, the EU, G7 and the League of Arab States all re-affirmed their positions in support of the two-state solution. The UN Security Council had already, in 2002, passed Resolution 1397, approving the ‘vision of two states living side by side’. This has informed the subsequent pursuit of UN recognition of the putative state of Palestine. In November 2012 ‘Palestine’ was admitted as a UN non-member observer state, and by June 2024 145 of the UN’s 193 states, 75 per cent, had recognized Palestine as a sovereign state.
In reality, the two-state solution is a little like the emperor’s new clothes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. You pretend to see what does not exist. Though repeatedly cited as if it was a plausible outcome to the conflict, it has no chance of being realized on the ground. A glance at the map will show how Israel’s settlement building since 1967 has swallowed up Palestinian territory.
Today there are more than 200 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with a population of over 700,000 Jewish settlers. The territory is segmented by Jewish-only roads, checkpoints, closed military areas, so-called nature reserves and the giant separation wall. Back in 2006, this spectacle prompted the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories to conclude that the two-state vision was unattainable without a viable Palestinian territory.
So, on logistical grounds alone, this solution is unworkable. But regardless of this, it would be unacceptable on other grounds. It is clearly inequitable, giving Israel the lion’s share of the land, and leaving the Palestinians with a fifth of their original territory. Palestinians would be left languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and in exile in other countries. Quite apart from the glaring injustice of this situation, it would be unstable, and at some point the conflict would flare up once more.
But by far the most serious objection to the two-state solution is that it perpetuates the existence of Israel as a Zionist state, even if in a smaller territory. Zionism was responsible for Palestinian dispossession, the rejection of Palestinian rights since 1948 and the constant state of conflict between Israel and its neighbours. Its governing ethos is supremacist and discriminates against non-Jews, hence the allegations of apartheid levelled by human rights organizations. It makes no sense to preserve this damaging status quo through creating a Palestinian state alongside the current Israel.
ANOTHER WAY?
The alternative is the one-state solution. It is not proposed here in the sense of a fall-back position if the two-state solution fails, but rather as a fundamentally different approach to ending the conflict. It means the creation of a single democratic entity in which the two peoples would live alongside one another, without borders or partitions. In a single state, the country’s resources would be shared equally, and Jerusalem would be a city for both peoples, not the preserve of Israeli Jews. Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to their homeland, if not to the actual houses from which they were dispossessed.
If the issues behind the conflict – land, resources, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees – are resolved in an equitable framework, no cause for continuing the current conflict should remain. This is the most obvious, direct and logical route to ending an intractable conflict that has destroyed the lives of so many people and damaged the Middle East so profoundly. That is why it should have been the most actively pursued of all the options. Before 7 October momentum had been growing for the one-state solution following the second intifada (A major uprising by Palestinians against Israel’s occupation between 2000 and 2005). More than 15 organizations advocating for a single state were set up in Europe and the US before 2010, and then spread to include groups in Palestine and Israel, which are active now.
But now, one year on from Israel’s ferocious war on Gaza and the West Bank, the abject misery inflicted on the Palestinian population, the catastrophic loss of life, and the decades of rehabilitation it will take for them to recover, we need to ask if the one-state solution can ever happen. A Pulse survey in January 2023 found that 23 per cent of Palestinians and 20 per cent of Jewish Israelis supported the one-state solution. One wonders what such a survey would show now.
In reality the two-state solution is a little like ‘the emperors’ clothes’ in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. You pretend to see what does not exist
It is impossible to imagine that either population could stomach living with the other after the attack on 7 October and Israel’s retaliation. Israel’s Jewish population has shown majority support for the war since it started. Polls indicate that 58 per cent of respondents thought Israel’s army was not using enough firepower in Gaza, and 80 per cent considered Palestinian civilian suffering only to a small extent.
Given the level of dehumanization, and anger and despair, coexistence looks impossible for Palestinians, at least for now. Whether and when that will change is difficult to predict. But what is not in doubt is that the future for these two peoples will be a shared one. Since 1948, Israel has tried various ways to erase the unwanted Palestinian presence in its midst. The Nakba was intended to expel all of them, but did not succeed. The 1967 war was another attempt, and settlement building where settlers would drive out the Palestinians followed. Since last October, Israel’s genocidal war has become the latest attempt at Palestinian extermination and ethnic cleansing.
Assuming Israel does not succeed this time either, sooner or later the situation will need to be resolved, not by force of arms but by wisdom and political skill. Neither side asked to be in such a position. It is intolerable for both.
The best, most practical and humane answer is a democratic unitary state for all its citizens, where all may live in dignity and equality. For that to happen, Palestinians will need to set aside their anger and anguish, and Jewish Israelis, privileged by their special status in the EU and uniquely supported by the West, will need to accept they are living in the Middle East, not some part of the Western world. It will not happen tomorrow, but planning for this inevitable future must start today.
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