Is a two-state solution still possible?
The Biden White House: The Democratic Campaign for a Resolution of the 2020 Congressional Black and Hispanic Causal Ethics Reconciliation Conference
Perhaps most concerning for Mr. Biden is that in the halls of Congress, the most critical Democratic voices are Black and Hispanic Democrats who helped fuel his 2020 victory. All of the 18 House members who signed on to the resolution being called for an immediate cease-fire in Israel are people of color.
In labor unions, on college campuses, and in high school cafeterias, an emotional divide over conflicts is convulsing liberal America.
In protests, open letters, staff revolts and walkouts, liberal Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden break with decades-long American policy and call for a cease-fire.
One of the co-sponsors of the cease fire resolution said that she had had connection to pain and deprivation in her ancestors. We know that war and violence don’t have good outcomes.
A September survey shows a decline in the belief that a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.
He said he didn’t believe that part of the strategy was to give a political horizon for Palestinians, which is what a peace agreement would ostensibly be.
“As a fundamental proposition, it’s hard to have productive peace talks when no side sees either urgency or necessity to reach an agreement,” says Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The year ended with more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,200 Palestinians dead, along with heightened skepticism of the peace process on both sides. Those feelings seem to have prevailed in the years since, which have been marked by terrorist attacks, military raids, rocket fire, border clashes and other incidents.
The peace accords were signed almost immediately, and according to the professor, Israel enhanced its policy of splitting the Gaza Strip into two parts.
It’s continued in the years since. The population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew from 520,000 to more than 700,000 between 2012 and 2022, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Expectations for a two-state solution were raised by the deal. But it quickly began to unravel after a series of events, including a 1994 attack on a mosque in Hebron by an American Jewish settler and Rabin’s assassination in 1995 by an Israeli settler opposed to the agreement.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was officially recognized by Israel as the “representative of the Palestinian people and a partner in future negotiations.” The PLO also made a declaration that it did not want to cause more harm than good.
Clinton brought Arafat and Rabin to negotiate an accord known as the “Ogden Accords.”
“After the 1948 war, the United Nations thought of Israel as 50% of Mandatory Palestine, while the rest was for Palestine.” After 1967, it was 100 percent-plus for Israel,” he says. “And now Israel is, I think, the only country that’s hard to draw on a map.”
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies says that there was a two-state solution baked in to Israel’s creation.
Israel declared independence in May 1948. Five Arab nations immediately invaded the new country, prompting a major Israeli offensive and many months of fighting. That resulted in the permanent displacement of thousands of Palestinians, which some refer to as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic.
Israel gained territory four times its original size, taking control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
The partition plan was rejected by the Arabs because of concerns about access to resources and how much land would be created under the plan. But the plan was embraced by the Jewish community as legal justification for the establishment of Israel.
Ottoman Palestine was mostly Arab in the late 19th century and was chosen as the new homeland of the Jewish supporters of the Zionism movement. Many more followed suit after the Holocaust.
Security looms large, too. Hamas, which governs Gaza and has a founding charter called for the destruction of Israel, is one of the Palestinian militant groups Israel wants to disarm. Israel hopes to keep the ability to act in Palestinian areas. Palestinians want an end to Israel’s military occupation and full control over their own security.
Ross said that Israelis and Palestinians aren’t going anyplace. “Somehow, given that, we have to find a way towards coexistence, and obviously, we’re not there now.”
Dennis Ross, who was the chief U.S. negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, told NPR that as heartbreaking as the situation is in the Middle East right now, eventually “there needs to be a day after.”
It has been held back from becoming a reality due to failed peace talks, logistical questions, expanded Israeli settlements, and Palestinian attacks. The two-state solution has seen dwindling support from both Palestinians and Israelis over the years. And its prospects now seem dimmer than ever, in light of Hamas’ attack on Israel and Israel’s response.
President Biden said Wednesday that there is no going back to the status quo before Oct. 7 — meaning in part that when the crisis is over, there must be a view of what comes next.
Israel is prepared for a ground attack after bombarding Gaza and preparing for an attack on Hamas. Some leaders are calling for a cease-fire. But what are the prospects for long-term peace?
He believes it’s too early to say where the conflict will go, though he believes that Israel’s politics will move to the right after the Hamas attack, which killed some 1,400 people in Israel.
That doesn’t mean Israeli citizens aren’t pushing for peace at all. Sally Abed is a member of Standing Together, an organization that aims to improve Arab-Jewish relations within Israel, and she’s also a Palestinian.
She told NPR that she don’t want to think that we needed to endure such loss in Israel. From the dark side, I hope we can have a change in the way that we look at wars and how we look atIsraeli control over Gaza and the West Bank.
Is it still possible to create a two-state solution for Israeli-Palestinian peace? An open border and annexation solution for a democratic Israel
There are alternatives to a two-state solution — including a one-state solution, a confederation, annexation and maintaining the status quo — at least in theory.
He said a one-state solution that gave citizenship to all of the natural-born residents of Mandatory Palestine, which included Gaza and the West Bank, didn’t have a Jewish majority. “A substantial line of thought [in Israel] is that it’s more important that Israel be Jewish than democratic.”
Most Americans prefer a democratic over a Jewish Israel, according to a University of Maryland and Ipsos poll this year.
Omer is one of many who see the current reality as that of a single state. She points to the exclusionary practices and annexationist policies of the right-wing Netanyahu government, like a 2018 law that demoted Arabic as one of Israel’s official languages, and the recent findings of human rights groups in and beyond Israel that its practices toward Palestinians amount to apartheid.
Leftists and Palestinians think that the creation of a secular country will result in Arab Muslims outnumbering Jews. But some rightists and Israelis would prefer to see Israel annex the West Bank — either forcing out Palestinians or denying them the right to vote — which is illegal under international human rights law.
A Land for All, a group of activists, argues that solutions based on separation have not worked in the past and they instead push for a confederal framework of two states sharing the capital of Jerusalem and an open border.
Omer says there are “historical examples of life together in this space that is not within the paradigm of domination.” It’s difficult to imagine those kind of possibilities in this moment, but she says that the need for change is clear.
“What we can see depends on, also, an expression of how the paradigm that had been there before Oct. 7 is completely collapsing,” she says. All these contradictions can’t be sustained anymore.
“Because of Israeli injustice, there is a Palestinian understanding of Jerusalem” [Am. J.-P. Morse, 10(1998)) 776-776]
“Then there needs to be a recognition and something to name it, and how can Palestinians be compensated for historical injustice they experienced, and then ways of respecting Jewish citizens in the space through principles of equality and democracy,” he says.
