Israel-Palestine issue: Alternatives beyond two-state solution
By ZohrehQanadi
Staff writer
In the turbulent landscape of the Middle East, tensions flared up on October 7, when the Hamas resistance group attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people. The attack was a result of decades of pent-up anger of the oppressed Palestinians. The Hamas attack and Israel’s violent response reignited a bloody conflict in the Middle East that has been going on for decades.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict traces its origins to the mid-20th century, reaching a turning point with Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories following the Six-Day War in 1967. In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, supporting the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This declaration laid the groundwork for a series of events that have shaped the conflict, including the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the mass displacement of Palestinians, known as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe”. This occupation also led to the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which have significantly contributed to the suffering of the Palestinian population.
The Oct. 7 attack ignited this crisis that has been marked by periods of violence and shifting land boundaries, but rarely prolonged periods of peace. The decades-long crisis has entangled regional states and global powers, raising complex questions surrounding the rights of self-determination.
Two-state solution
Meantime, as a means to address this conflict, international actors and negotiators suggested a two-state solution. The outlines of the two-state process were the result of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), mediated by Norway in 1993. In these talks, Israel and the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat of the Fatah organization, pledged to recognize each other formally.
The two-state solution that would divide the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean to carve out two independent, sovereign Israeli and Palestinian states existing side by side – has repeatedly been endorsed by world leaders. However, the Oslo process never reached its logical conclusion and even left behind more challenging issues.
Issue of land
The issue of land is at the core of the conflict. For a long time, the efforts aimed at achieving a settlement to the conflict were based on the principle of “land for peace,” meaning that if Israel withdraws from the occupied Arab territories, including the occupied Palestinian land, the Arabs will make peace with Israel. The agreement led to the establishment of Palestinian self-governing entities in areas that Israel had occupied during the 1967 war. However, military occupation and the construction of Jewish settlements persisted, leaving the final status issues to future negotiations.
Israel has also been keen to pursue more peace deals with Arab states without giving up land, having won normalization from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and upgraded ties with Morocco and Sudan, in 2020 despite talks with the Palestinians having been frozen for years.
In general, it has proved impossible for Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement. And, since talks brokered by John Kerry, the then US secretary of state, collapsed in 2014, and as Jewish settlements continue to expand in the West Bank and East Al-Quds, the consensus has been that the two-state solution is dead.
Obstacles:
Israel itself
Why hasn’t this suggestion been realized yet? The main obstacle to this solution at the first step has been Israel itself.
Most international supporters of the two-state solution favor returning Israel to the borders that it had before territory annexations after the 1967 war. But Israel opposes relinquishing the lands it occupied and returning to the borders before 1967. The term “occupied territories,” and Israel’s obligation to withdraw from them, was first used in UN Resolution 242 after the 1967 war. It refers to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While Israel calls these “disputed territories,” its policies have indisputably led to dispossession, settler violence, creeping annexation, and charges of apartheid in the West Bank.
The challenges, however, are significant. Palestinians and Israelis currently live within the borders of what could become the other’s potential future state. Many Palestinian families seek to return to areas lost during the 1948 war.
President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, who governs Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, has accused Israel of “systematically destroying the two-state solution.”
“Whoever thinks that peace can prevail in the Middle East without the Palestinian people enjoying their full and legitimate national rights is delusional,” Abbas said at the UN General Assembly in September, before the current war began. Abbas, who is supported by the West, has been in office since 2005 but remains unpopular among many Palestinians.
Hamas
Just as the PLO turned to pragmatism, however, a new organization, Hamas, rejected the Oslo Accords.
However, the Palestinian resistance group that controls the Gaza Strip said in 2017 that it was prepared to accept a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. However, its then-leader, Khaled Meshaal, said the group would not recognize Israel or cede any rights.
Netanyahu
At present, Israel’s far-right cabinet is viscerally opposed to the very idea of an independent Palestinian state, and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has blocked progress on the issue for many years. Few expect him to survive as prime minister once the war is over, but there is no obvious pro-peace alternative in waiting.
In and out of office, Netanyahu has worked consistently hard to thwart Palestinian independence. It is safe to say he is not about to change his mind. If the two-state solution can be revived, it won’t happen while he is prime minister.
Netanyahu said during a 2015 re-election campaign that there would be no independent Palestinian state as long as he holds office. However, since then, he has appeared more receptive to the idea, but with major caveats on security. He told CNN earlier this year: “I’m certainly willing to have them have all the powers that they need to govern themselves, but none of the powers that can threaten us.”
This underscores Israel’s concerns about the future leadership of the official state of Palestine.
Illegal settlements
A two-state solution is no longer possible, said Mark LeVine, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine.
“Just look at the map,” said the chair of the program in global Middle East studies at the university, referring to the hundreds of Israeli settlements across the West Bank.
In 1993, when the first Oslo agreement was signed, these settlers numbered around 130,000. Today, according to the UN, there are almost 700,000.
Before the October 7 war, Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank posed a significant barrier to peace for Palestinians. With a surge in settler violence, West Bank Palestinians now face heightened concerns about potential new displacements. Many in the international community consider these settlements illegal under international law, a view disputed by the regime. The expansion of settlements further complicates the prospects for a two-state solution.
Achcar, the SOAS professor, said that the Oslo Accords contained no provision to stop settlement building, which has exploded in the intervening decades. “To have the Palestinians accept something like a two-state solution, you would need a full withdrawal of the settlements,” he said.
Yossi Mekelberg, an associate fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, noted that the Israeli withdrawal of just 8,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005 “tore apart Israeli society.” Many Israelis see the Gaza pullout as a big mistake.
As prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin had put a freeze on new Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. His cabinet undertook secret negotiations with the PLO that culminated in the Israel-PLO accords (September 1993), in which Israel recognized the PLO and agreed to gradually implement limited self-rule for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In October 1994, Rabin and King Ḥussein of Jordan, after a series of secret meetings, signed a full peace treaty.
In 2000, US President Bill Clinton unsuccessfully attempted to reach a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at Camp David. Months later, clashes broke out after an Israeli politician visited an Al-Quds (Jerusalem) site venerated by both Jews and Muslims. A Palestinian intifada, or uprising, gripped the region for years.
Al-Quds
Al-Quds (Jerusalem) is another major difficulty. Palestinians see East Al-Quds, which was annexed by Israel, as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The situation was further complicated by US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Al-Quds as Israel’s capital in 2017.
Coexistence or non-coexistence
Once all obstacles to this solution are eliminated, a pragmatic concern that remains is the prospect of coexistence – whether it is feasible for populations and states to peacefully coexist side by side. A notable instance is a survey conducted recently by the Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development, revealing that 98 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip harbor sentiments of not “forgiving nor forgetting” Israel’s assault on the besieged coastal enclave.
In Israel, the non-coexistence view has also been reinforced by opinion polls conducted shortly before the October 7 attack. In September, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 35% of Israelis believed “a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully” – a decline of 15 percentage points since 2013.
A Gallup poll found that just 24% of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Al-Quds supported a two-state solution, down from 59% in 2012. Young Palestinians were significantly less enthusiastic than their parents.
If it is possible for people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to envision coexistence, a two-state solution could potentially provide a framework for shared living. Such an arrangement would require mutual recognition, respect for borders, and a commitment to resolving the longstanding issues that have fueled the conflict. The challenge lies not only in the diplomatic negotiations but also in fostering an environment where both sides can coexist harmoniously, sharing resources, and ensuring the well-being of their respective populations. It hinges on the willingness of leaders and communities to embrace the concept of peaceful coexistence and work towards a sustainable resolution for the benefit of future generations.
To these realities, other obstacles to the two-state solution have now been added. Isaías Barreñada, an international relations professor at Madrid’s Complutense University cites two. The first is that the “extreme violence with which Israel is acting in Gaza” ruins “any chance of the parties sitting down together for the next 50 years.” The second is, “the willingness of the parties to negotiate” after the war.
Palestine’s gradual triumph
While the end of the current war remains still unknown, in the unfolding process of the conflict and warfare, what is happening is the gradual triumph, or, at the very least, the emergence of the Palestinian narrative against the Israeli algorithm – despite its difficulty to be seen in the political arena.
Peace needs more blood!
Many diplomats and analysts agree that lasting peace must follow the bloodiest fighting between Israelis and Palestinians for decades.
Moreover, advocates of the two-state solution believe that the violence has contradicted the ideals they strive to promote. However, it doesn’t seem like an appropriate prelude for an agreement that resolves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 18,800 people, mostly children and women, during nearly three months.
But according to Aaron David Miller, an adviser on the Middle East to both Democratic and Republican administrations, there are numerous obstacles in the way of a two-state solution, not least that, in the immediate aftermath of the war, “we will be left with two deeply traumatized societies”.
Unlikely prospect
Now as Israel presses its bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, some global leaders are also returning to the stalled diplomatic effort from decades ago to possibly shape postwar policies: the two-state solution.
In the US, traditionally a key backer of the two-state process, Joe Biden’s energies will inevitably be absorbed in fighting to retain his presidency over the next months. If he loses to Donald Trump, the chances of reviving the solution are close to nil.
Biden has recently said that the “day after” the war in Gaza may still be weeks or months away. But it will come. “When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next”. “And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also discussed the “long-term goal of the two-state solution” on a call with Netanyahu. The European Council in October reaffirmed its commitment to a “lasting and sustainable peace based on the two-state solution.” Pope Francis, in an interview with Italian media, called for “that wise solution, two states.”
Despite the public endorsements, some scholars say the two-state solution is an increasingly unlikely prospect.
Is confederation an alternative?
Mark LeVine, a history professor at the University of California at Irvine, has said “We all wish that the two-state solution was possible because it would be easy to do. ‘Okay, you take this part, you take this part,’ like a divorce,” he said. However, “there’s no selling the house and splitting up,” he added.
LeVine envisions a sort of hybrid model: “shared, overlapping, or what we call ‘parallel states’” that isn’t defined by the connection between territory and sovereignty. “Israel could remain a Jewish state, Palestine could be a Palestinian state, but Jews and Palestinians could live anywhere,” he said.
He’s not alone in thinking beyond the traditional two-state model. Some Israelis, Palestinians, and outside scholars have supported the idea of a confederation as an alternative.
Under the confederation plan, Israelis living in settlements deeper in the West Bank would be able to choose whether to relocate to homes inside Israel or stay where they are as Israeli citizens who are permanent residents of Palestine, agreeing to abide by the new state’s laws. A comparable number of Palestinian citizens would be able to move to Israel on the same terms.
However, Rand Corp. focus groups in 2018 and 2019 found significant opposition to several possible solutions, including a two-state solution and a confederation.
“On both sides, there’s no leadership that believes in peace,” said Mekelberg.
Still, he said, the concept is viable. But “the two-state solution in 2023 would look very different from the two-state solution in 1993,” he said.
Iran’s referendum proposal
If the only viable solution, as even Israeli allies opt for, was the two-state process, Israel would not give in to it.
As Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian recently said, the only thing that Iran and Israel have in common is that they both do not believe in a two-state solution.
At an online international forum in Doha, Qatar, on December 12, he reiterated Iran’s proposal that a referendum be held to determine the fate of Palestine, with only descendants of those who lived there before 1948 being permitted to vote.
As mentioned, critics of Israeli policy also say its actions are intended to make the two-state solution impossible.
As a key player, Iran has proposed a significant solution for the issue of Palestine, and that is to hold a referendum among all indigenous Palestinians, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is their right, after seventy-five years, to express their opinion on their destiny through a referendum conducted by the United Nations, and based on the results, bring an end to this matter.
A somewhat aligned perspective with this proposal would be the dream of a Palestinian child: to live in his land with equal rights without considering nationality and religion, but just humanity.