Does two-state solution, long discounted, have a future?
Without viable alternatives, it gains credence
JERUSSALEM — “There has to be a vision of what comes next,” President Biden said last week of the war between Israel and Hamas. “In our view, it has to be a two-state solution.” The surest path to peace, said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, is a two-state solution, a sentiment echoed by President Emmanuel Macron of France.
At first glance, their words seemed like a sepia-tinted throwback: invoking, as a remedy for the worst eruption of bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians in many years, the faded relic of a peace process that many on both sides viewed as dead and buried some time late in the Obama administration.
And yet, the two-state solution — Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in their own sovereign countries — is getting a new hearing, not just in foreign-policy circles in Washington, London, and Paris but also, more quietly, among the combatants themselves. In part, it reflects the lack of any other viable alternative.
“We cannot return to a pattern where every other year, there is a violent confrontation between Israel and Hamas,” said Gilead Sher, who helped lead Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the two sides arguably came closest to striking a two-state settlement.
“If America engages in what President Biden has stated he would commit to, there is a chance,” Sher said. “There is a chance for negotiations that could provide a step-by-step process to two distinct states.”
Such an effort would have to overcome a thicket of obstacles, not least the proliferation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which Palestinians say have eroded the dream of creating a viable state on that land. The rise of ultranationalists in Israel further complicates the task: They oppose Palestinian statehood, seek to annex the West Bank, and know that uprooting the settlers is political dynamite.
Sher listed a string of caveats for Israeli-Palestinian talks: The two sides would have to start modestly, with a political process focused on disengagement rather than a high-stakes negotiation over the details of two states. Both would need new leaders, he said, since the existing ones have proved to be unwilling or incapable of striking a deal. Above all, Hamas would have to be vanquished and the Gaza Strip demilitarized.
Israeli officials say they are focused on the battle against Hamas and that any discussion of a peace process must wait until after the guns are silent. But in think tanks and corners of the Israeli foreign ministry, discussion of what a day-after political process would look like has already begun.
Among Palestinians, suffering Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza, and rising tensions on the West Bank, the prospects for statehood appear even more far-fetched. But some Palestinians argue that the shock of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 has stripped Israelis of the illusion that they can manage conflict with Palestinians without confronting their deeper aspirations for nationhood.
“What happened on Oct. 7 should push us to be more creative and more innovative about the two-state solution,” said Nidal Foqaha, director general of the Palestinian Peace Coalition, a nonprofit group based in Ramallah, in the West Bank. “Without a political horizon, this is an impossible mission.”
The mechanics of such a process are far from clear. The European Union last week called for an international peace conference, an idea championed by Spain, which held a landmark Middle East peace summit in Madrid in 1991. Arab nations could also convene peace negotiations, though an early effort by Egypt last week, as the Israeli military operation in Gaza was gearing up, produced little.
By all accounts, the United States would have to take a central role in any talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. That has not happened since the Obama administration.