The Mirage of A Two State Solution
10.03.2026
The Mirage of A Two State Solution
By Michael Žantovský
There is a special category of concepts which owe their appeal and durability to their esthetic qualities rather than practicability or associated benefits. No one can say that the communist idea of a classless society and absolute equality where all enjoy life according to their needs is not beautiful. However, all attempts to put it in practice have not only not achieved the state of universal bliss but ended up in bloodshed, tyranny and total degradation of hundreds of millions of human beings. To confuse likeability with feasibility is a recipe for disaster in the harsh reality on the ground.
The attraction of perfect solutions is so strong, however, that there is almost no way to persuade their supporters to give them up as the dead ends that they are, and try to think of realistic alternatives. Every failure, every disappointment is at best only seen as a proof of the fallibility of human agency that could not do justice to the perfect idea. At worst, it is seen as proof of the existence of dark forces that sabotage even the best efforts to make the idea come true.
Such alternative explanations are not necessarily one hundred percent wrong. The imperfect nature of humanity and the opposition of vested interests to even the fairest solutions of complex situations can be witnessed, without exception, in every attempt at improving the world. The problem is that they are largely seen as external to the problem rather than being its integral part.
The two-state solution history
Along with the “Common Foreign and Security Policy”, and “zero carbon economy”, the “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians (now that the larger conflict between Israel and the Arabs has largely subsided) has been, at least until recently, one of the mantras of the crumbling international order, whose achievements are primarily defined by their absence.
Einstein’s maxim that insanity is repeating the same thing all over again and expecting different results has been repeated too many times and heeded too few. It also applies here. The two-state solution had been first espoused in the Peel Commission report of 1937[1] and dismissed almost immediately thereafter both by the Arab and Jewish leadership within the British Mandate Palestine. It has then been recommended as a majority view in the UNSCOP Report of 3 September 1947 to the UN General Assembly[2]. (A minority proposal advocated a federal union with Jerusalem as its capital.)
Eventually, the UNSCOP report recommendations, with minor modifications, were adopted in the form of the UN General Assembly resolution no. 181 of 29 November 1947 as the Partition Plan for Palestine, providing for the creation of independent but economically linked Arab and Jewish states and an extraterritorial “Special International Regime” for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings[3]. It was immediately rejected by The Arab Higher Committee, the Arab League and other Arab leaders and governments. It was, on the other hand, accepted, albeit reluctantly, by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, representing the Jewish population[4]. Out of the resolute rejection of the plan by the Arab leadership, a civil war ensued, followed by an invasion by the armies of five Arab countries after Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948.
Even after consecutive defeats in the War of 1948 and the Six-Day War of 1967, the Arabs did not change their stance. On the contrary, they doubled down, adopting the “no peace no recognition no negotiation” position of the Arab League in the Khartoum resolution of 1 September 1967[5].
Another Arab defeat in the hard-fought Yom Kippur War of 1973 produced the first cracks in the wall of rejection. First Anwar Sadat’s Egypt in 1979 and a little later King Hussein’s Jordan broke ranks and negotiated peace treaties with Israel. Not only the war, but also the peace brought about casualties. Anwar Sadat and Yitzchak Rabin paid with their lives in assassinations as a direct consequence of peace deals, showing both the importance and the costs of personal leadership.
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the Palestinian leadership, having run out of military options, resorted to terrorism culminating in the tragic events of Jordan 1970, Munich 1972, Entebbe 1976 and many attacks in Israel itself. Only when that, too, failed to dislodge the Jews from the Middle East, did the PLO under Arafat reluctantly agree to try the last remaining option – that of negotiations.
After a promising start in Oslo[6] and the unforgettable moment in the White House Rose Garden, where president Clinton manhandled Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat to make them shake hands, the process unraveled again in Camp David and several subsequent last hope shots in Sharm al Shaik, Washington and Taba. There followed the second intifada of 2000-2005, leaving behind a motley map of quasi sovereign, semi-autonomous and Israeli-policed Palestinian territories (designated as areas A, B and C, respectively), a growing number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank (around 700 000 today) and an ever deepening dependency of the Palestinians on outside help akin on an addiction, with the accompanying phenomena of corruption, clientelism and collapse of any remotely viable indigenous economy.
Disengagement
When it became evident that left to themselves the two sides are unlikely to ever negotiate peace, the world outside tried to come to the rescue. The Quartet on the Middle East, consisting of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia was established in Madrid in 2002[7]. Although it has not exhibited any visible activity in almost ten years it is still referred to in the present tense as apparently no one has bothered to declare it extinct. The abbreviation MEPP (a misnomer standing for Middle East Peace Process[8]) became a part of the vocabulary of the equally misnamed EU Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) at the beginning of this century and created a political industry out of humanitarian and development aid to the Palestinians, without bringing the two state solution any nearer. Another attempt to reembark on the road to peace, the George W. Bush’s Road Map for Peace of 2002[9], succumbed to both continuing Palestinian terrorism during the Second Intifada and Israeli reluctance to adopt the plan in its entirety. The European Union Border Assistance Mission at the Rafah Crossing Point (EUBAM Rafah[10]) has been yet another of international zombie organizations whose main task is to create an illusion of the approaching two-state solution. It was created in the context of Israeli unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and its declared task was to help monitor and police the only border crossing point between Gaza and a third country, i.e. Egypt. Following Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, the EUBAM declared a temporary suspension of operations and moved its headquarters from Gaza City first to the Israeli city of Ashkelon and later to Tel Aviv, where it had been hibernating in rather comfortable circumstances before showing signs of something resembling life life as a part of the second phase of the Trump peace plans. The blood-soaked ground of the Holy Land is thus increasingly littered with the undead of two-state solution initiatives, proposals, conferences, and, worst of all, gravestones.
Paradoxically, the only man who had endeavoured to break the stalemate on the ground, was the favorite villain of the Middle East peace industry due to his not universally admired record as a military leader in previous wars. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon used the same unrelenting courage and brutal determination to recognize that if the two-state solution was to progress, the Palestinian state would have to be created by others, Israel notwithstanding.
In evacuating Gaza and four small settlements in the West Bank and making clear this was just a start of the process, Sharon was self-admittedly not motivated by a passion for Palestinian statehood, but rather by the recognition that it is damaging to the spirit and the soul of the Jewish people to rule over others. And since Palestinians continued to reject even the most far-reaching offers of an agreement, including obtaining parts of Jerusalem for their capital and the size of the territory equal to the one they had inhabited before 1967, the deed would have to be done unilaterally, without engaging in endless, and invariably fruitless attempts at negotiation.[11]
In advocating disengagement Sharon ran afoul of the radical fringe of Jewish nationalism, the settler movement and the majority of the revisionist movement, heirs to the un-compromising ethos of Lev Jabotinsky, including fellow Likud party grandees like Benjamin Netanyahu.
Of course, it was always possible that the unilateral disengagement process would fail, running against the endless complications of the map of the Holy Land, the resistance of the settler lobby, the Palestinian unwillingness to give up the settlements adjacent to the Green Line in exchange for other territories, the madness of Jerusalem, and the lack of international support for a project that was, for all the benefits it offered to the Palestinians, an Israeli idea. We will never know. When Ariel Sharon suffered a brainstroke at the end of 2005 and went into an irreversible coma, the disengagement plan went with him.
Hamas terror
In 2007, the ineffective administration of the evacuated Gaza strip by the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas was violently replaced by the effective terror of Hamas. The fifteen years of Hamas missile and ground attacks that ensued, interspersed with several less than effective Israeli military campaigns to suppress the terror[12], culminated in the barbaric attack on October 7, 2023 in which 1,195 Israelis, including 815 civilians were slaughtered. (Say what you will about Ariel Sharon, he would have never allowed that to happen if he survived. After the first salvo of Hamas missiles he would have responded with his characteristic toughness.)
After another two years of bloodshed, Gaza lies in ruins and tens of thousands of people, most of them Palestinians, have died. The ceasefire of October 2025 has been accompanied by Donald Trump’s 20 point peace plan for Gaza[13]. Only one of the twenty points vaguely refers to Palestinian statehood, stating: “While Gaza re-development advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” The two-state solution, the extent of the Palestinian statehood and the future relations between such an entity and the State of Israel are not mentioned at all.
Support for the two state solution or the lack thereof
The Hamas atrocity of October 2023 not only put on hold any perspective of Palestinian statehood in the foreseeable future, but most likely put an end to the two-state solution for good. The Israeli support for the idea, which slowly grew in the wake of the Oslo agreements, reaching a high of over 70%[14] in the first decade of this century, has been declining for years, and collapsed totally after October 7, 2023. On the Palestinian side, support for the “peace camp” peaked at about the same time. In a 2002 poll, 72% of both Palestinians and Israelis supported a peace settlement based on the 1967 borders so long as each group could be reassured that the other side would be cooperative in making the necessary concessions for such a settlement.[15] In 2013, 70% of Palestinians in the West Bank and 48% of Palestinians in Gaza Strip, together with 52% of Israelis supported “an independent Palestinian state together with the state of Israel”.[16] In 2021, 39% of Palestinians supported “the concept of the two-state solution”, while 59% said they rejected it.[17] In 2014,the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 60 percent of Palestinians say the goal of their national movement should be “to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea” compared to just 27 percent who endorse the idea that they should work “to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and achieve a two-state solution.”[18] By 2020, only 40% of those polled in Gaza and 26% in the West Bank believe that a negotiated two-state solution should solve the conflict.[19] Another report, published also in 2021 by the RAND Corporation, also found that 60% of Israelis across the political spectrum were opposed to a two-state solution.[20] According to a 2021 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll, support for a two-state solution among Palestinians and Israeli Jews, as of 2021, had declined to 43 percent and 42 percent, respectively.[21] In December 2022, support for a two-state solution was 33% among Palestinians, 34% among Israeli Jews, and 60% among Israeli Arabs. 82% of Israeli Jews and 75% of Palestinians believed that the other side would never accept the existence of their independent state.[22] Prior to the October 7 attack, just 24% of Palestinians supported a two-state solution, a drop from 59% in 2012.[23]
It is not only due to the lack of enthusiasm on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides that the two-state solution has become unrealistic. Any two-state solution along the 1967 lines would necessitate the existence of a land corridor between Gaza and the West Bank. After what happened in Gaza it is fanciful to believe that this would ever be acceptable to Israel. Even if such a corridor existed, the ability of the Palestinian national government, whether in East Jerusalem or Ramallah, to exercise authority over the Gaza Strip would be extremely limited. In spite of all the political and economic support from Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East over the years, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas enjoys very fragile support in the West Bank and hardly any support in the Strip. Unless the terrorist groups (next to Hamas, also the Islamic Jihad and a few smaller groups) can be dislodged from the Strip, the return of murderous terrorism would not be a sceptre hanging over the region but rather a foregone conclusion. Gaza would remain a perpetual powder keg, quarantined by both Israeli and Egyptian governments and perennially dependent on foreign humanitarian aid.
The death of the two-state solution
The two-state solution is dead. It seems that the only people who continue to insist on it are those who would not have to suffer the consequences. The tragic Gaza war and the wildly triumphant “From the River to the Sea” response of the pro-Palestinian camp in the wake of the October 7 attacks even before a single Israeli soldier set foot in the Strip[24] clearly demonstrated what most Israelis had suspected all along: The two-state solution is incompatible with the existence of Israel. It is in fact a one state solution. From having been a plausible roadmap to mutual recognition and reconciliation at a time when there may have existed a reservoir of trust and will to cooperate, the two-state solution became an exercise in irresponsibility, inevitably leading to a cataclysmic orgy of bloodletting down the road.
This is not to argue Palestinians do not deserve nationhood and perhaps statehood. Decades of war, hope and despair have forged in the Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank one of the prerequisites of a state, a national self-awareness. Whether this awareness is the same for the West Bank and Gaza, though, has never been tested for any length of time. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, the ruling Fatah-led and West Bank-based administration of the Palestinian Autonomy lasted not even two years before it was violently expelled by the Hamas militants. Hamas has never made it a secret that there is no place for Israel in its world outlook. Many of the Fatah leaders may be of the same opinion in private.
The existence of Palestinian national identity, whether unitary or dualistic, and the equally strong Zionist awareness of most Jewish Israelis precludes the other possibility sometimes bandied about, i.e. the one-state solution for two nations. No amount of constitutional compromises, safeguards and assurances would prevent such an entity from going up in flames weeks after its flag – and what, we may well wonder, would its flag look like? – went up. The bloody half a century of Lebanese history would be a walk in the park in comparison.
The hope of a future based on a past
The tragedy of the Israelis and Palestinians is that the price for the inevitable collapse of visions that other actors, Arabs, Europeans or Americans, project on the situation has been invariably paid in the blood of both people. It is time for the kind of a solution that neither of the two people will like but both can live with. In the troubled history of the small piece of land that has produced conflicts well beyond and above its size, there has been so far a single arrangement that showed any signs of durability. This was the twenty year period between the wars of 1948 and 1967, when the West Bank was administered by the Kingdom of Jordan and the Gaza strip by Egypt.
The benefits of such an arrangement are obvious. Given the relative sizes of Egypt and Gaza, the former would find little difficulty in maintaining the security of the latter. While any Egyptian secular government, including the current one, would be hostile to the kind of religious fanaticism represented by Hamas, it would hardly feel threatened by considerable national autonomy for the Gaza Palestinians. Egyptian control over Gaza, coupled with the existing peace arrangements and international safeguards between Egypt and Israel, would remove the obstacles to free movement of Palestinian people and goods from Gaza over land, air, and sea. After all, Egypt has had a common and almost entirely peaceful 200 km Sinai border with Israel, monitored by the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), for decades. Another 40 kilometres of policing the Gaza border, perhaps augmented by the International Stabilization Force, as envisaged in the Trump plan, would hardly be an unsolvable problem.
Similar arguments can be made for a Jordan-administered West Bank or perhaps a Jordanian-Palestinian federation. Provided security safeguards could be developed for the Jordan Valley, an autonomous Palestinian entity could grow and flourish there. The Jerusalem question would lose much of its combustibility with Jordan and the Islamic Waqf foundation in administrative though nonmilitary control of the Islam holy places. Palestinians could benefit a lot from the history of limited but fruitful cooperation of the two countries. Jordan would need some robust international assurances to make sure that the history of Jordanian-Palestinian conflict ending with the violence of Black September will not repeat itself. Both Gaza and West Bank should then expect and receive considerable economic aid from the Gulf, Europe and America rather than humanitarian handouts fostering dependency and radicalism. Many of the refugees could return home to Gaza or the West Bank. And nothing would preclude the two Palestinian entities from building closer ties and developing joint projects and institutions.
It is obvious and fair that Israel would have to make sacrifices and concessions as well. While it is unrealistic to expect Israeli willingness to accept more than a token number of Palestinian refugees, Israel could make room for a much larger number by imposing the road to peace on its radical nationalist fringe and evacuating most of its settlements in the West Bank. The settlements adjacent to Israeli borders might conceivably stay provided an equal and fair swap of territory elsewhere. This would undoubtedly meet with militant opposition, which only a statesman of the caliber of David Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon could prevail upon. Benjamin Netanyahu is not such a statesman.
It will be undoubtedly pointed out that most of the elements of the solution outlined above, individually and collectively, have been tried and failed before. One thing they had in common, though, was the mantra of the two-state solution, in and of itself one of the principal obstacles to peace.
Strategies that purportedly continue to follow the path of the two state solution, including the ritual recognition of a virtual Palestinian State that some EU member states have undertaken recently, possibly as a sort of a reward to Hamas for its murderous zeal, may satisfy the feelings of the anti-Israel groups and activists in European capitals and provide comfortable livelihood to a large number of “Middle East peace experts” and organizers of pointless conferences, but will not advance peace or the wellbeing of Palestinians one iota. Parallel roads to autonomy and eventual statehood in Gaza and the West Bank are unlikely to win their support because of what they would see as their irreparable flaw, namely leaving Israel in place. They could, however, bring peace, dignity and a perspective of a future to the real Palestinians. The change, if it happens, has to happen on the ground.
The bleak history of the Middle East peacemaking would suggest that this might be just another pipe dream. Some reasons for hope, however, can be found in the unforgiving landscape of the conflict. The second phase of Trump’s 20 point peace plan for Gaza unveiled on January 14, 2026[25] initiates the transfer of power in Gaza to a Palestinian technocratic committee to be overseen by the Trump-led Board of Peace. No members of Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, are allowed to join the committee. Egypt is visibly involved in the diplomatic process and likely also in the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF), which would police the implementation of the plan. One conspicuous element of what has been revealed so far is the absence of any reference to the two-state solution. Gaza has the best chance at stabilization and a future if handled alone. A plan for the West Bank would have to come later and in a different format, but would have to contain, at least in the beginning, some of the same elements: the transfer of power to a technocratic Palestinian body, international supervision, and a direct involvement of neighbours and regional powers, Jordan first and foremost.
It would be unrealistic to think that Israel, the Palestinians, the Egyptians and the Jordanians can do this alone. Luckily, the Arab world today is more developed, sophisticated and realistic than ever before. For any international attempt to overcome the curse of an eternal Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it does have the capital, the means and the American support to make a difference. The Abraham Accords of 2020[26] opened the way for a broad range of initiatives and cooperation schemes aiming at the resolution of the Palestinian problem. That is still no guarantee that the above scenario will materialize. But anything is better than the current road to nowhere.
/The essay was published in Kontexty revue/
[1] Peel Commission Full Report (1937), https://ecf.org.il/media_items/290
[2] Question of Palestine/Majority plan (Partition), Minority plan (Federal State)- UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) – Report, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-179435/
[3] Palestine plan of partition with economic union – General Assembly resolution 181 (II) Future government of Palestine, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-185393/
[4] The Question of Palestine and the United Nations, https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/DPIQoPPub_280220.pdf
[5] The Khartoum Resolutions; September 1, 1967, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/khartoum.asp
[6] The Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/oslo
[7] The Quartet, https://www.un.org/unispal/the-quartet/
[8] The EU and the Middle East Peace Process, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-and-middle-east-peace-process_en
[9] Road Map for Peace, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/22520.htm
[10] EUBAM Rafah, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eubam-rafah_en?s=410503
[11] Israel’s Disengagement Plan: Selected Documents, https://www.gov.il/en/pages/israeli-disengagement-plan-20-jan-2005
[12] Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022)
[13] Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan in full, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70155nked7o
[14] Two States for Two People? A Long Decline in Support, The Israel Democracy Institute, https://en.idi.org.il/articles/24664
[15] Large Israeli and Palestinian Majorities Indicate Readiness for Two-State Solution Based on 1967 Borders, Program on International Policy Attitudes , December 9, 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20080405210125/http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security_bt/137.php?nid=&id=&pnt=137&lb=brme
[16] Lydia Saad and Elizabeth Mendes, Israelis, Palestinians Pro Peace Process, but Not Hopeful, https://news.gallup.com/poll/161456/israelis-palestinians-pro-peace-process-not-hopeful.aspx
[17] Public Opinion Poll No (82), Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. 27 December 2021
[18] David Pollock, New Palestinian Poll Shows Hardline Views, But Some Pragmatism Too, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Jun 25, 2014, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/new-palestinian-poll-shows-hardline-views-some-pragmatism-too
[19] David Pollock, Catherine Cleveland, What Do Palestinians Want?, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Jul 23, 2021, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/what-do-palestinians-want
[20] RAND Corporation, “Israelis unwilling to risk two-state solution, says new report”, February 10, 2021
[21] The Palestine/Israel Pulse, a Joint Poll Summary Report, Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 26 October 2020
[22] Khalil Shikaki, Nimrod Rosler, Alon Yakter, Dahlia Schneidlin, Israeli, Palestinian support for two-state solution declines – poll, The Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2023
[23] Jay Loschky, Palestinians Lack Faith in Biden, Two-State Solution, Gallup, October 18, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/512828/palestinians-lack-faith-biden-two-state-solution.aspx
[24] Hours after Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, UK anti-Israel group began planning mass protest, https://www.timesofisrael.com/hours-after-hamas-invaded-on-oct-7-uk-anti-israel-group-began-planning-mass-protest/. And many others.
[25] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/us-announces-gaza-ceasefire-next-phase
[26] https://www.state.gov/the-abraham-accords