In defense of the two-state solution

Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire during a conflict that claimed nearly 250 lives. But the underlying established order makes another round of fighting about inevitable, and a fundamental solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems further away than ever.

  Worse, the long-running American solution for the matter — a US-mediated social process aimed toward creating a “two-state solution,” with an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and therefore the West Bank existing alongside Israel — has proven to be a dismal failure. Israel has become more and more entrenched within the West Bank, building new Jewish settlements that make it increasingly difficult to imagine a viable Palestinian state thereon land. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains deeply divided: The militant group Hamas controls Gaza, while Fatah, a secular nationalist party, nominally administers the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (with Israel still ultimately in control). This has led to a growing sense among analysts and experts that the two-state solution is not any longer possible. Writing within the ny Times last week, the Arab Center’s Yousef Munayyer proclaimed “a growing global consensus” that “the two-state solution is dead. Israel has killed it.” Last year, influential Jewish American writer Peter Beinart declared that “the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for many years — a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews — has failed.” But while remarking the failings of the present approach is significant, its critics go too far. As distant because it could seem, the two-state solution remains the simplest possible option available for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s in large part because the alternatives are even less plausible. The most commonly proposed replacement may be a “one-state solution,” which might merge Israel, the West Bank, and therefore the Gaza Strip into one democratic country with equal rights for Arabs and Jews. Under this scenario, Arab Muslims would outnumber Jews, thus ending Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Nor would Palestinians have a state purely to call their own, instead of having to accommodate an outsized Jewish minority.

  One state is even less likely to happen than a two-state solution. it might involve the foremost powerful player within the conflict, Israel, choosing to abandon its raison d’être. It’s much more likely to abandon West Bank settlements than to offer abreast of Zionism wholesale. This speaks to the deeper reason the two-state solution remains better than the leading alternative: it's the sole realistic way of handling the very fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one between two distinct nations. Israelis and Palestinians have fundamentally different identities and different ideas about how they need to be governed; in one state, one among their political projects would necessarily be defeated. this is able to make future violence more likely, not less.

  Reviving the goal of a two-state solution is significant. But to try to do that, it must be separated from the moribund social process. Instead, the US should pursue a technique that would be termed “de-occupation”: one that aims to weaken the Israeli occupation’s hold on Israeli minds and Palestinian lives while, ultimately, creating the conditions under which its dismantling may become possible.