Antony Loewenstein
Two-state solution won’t deliver peace for Israel/Palestine. But this might
At the end of October, three weeks after the brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers that killed around 1200 people, US President Joe Biden said that he still firmly believed in the justness of the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Two states for two peoples.
“There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6,” Biden explained. “It also means that 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.”
It wasn’t long before this message was echoed by Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong. “Ultimately, a just and enduring peace requires a two-state solution”, she wrote.
The two-state solution is the answer to a question that nobody serious is proposing. It’s become akin to gospel in every Western capital, endlessly repeated by American and European officials, even elements of the belligerent pro-Israel lobby who loathe the concept of Palestinian self-determination, and a whole army of think tanks and organisations in multiple countries.
It’s the zombie solution that’s resurrected every time the Middle East is on fire and presidents and prime ministers scramble for something nominally sensible to say. It’s convenient to mouth the two-state platitudes while knowing it’ll never happen. Making it a reality would require putting pressure on the more powerful party, Israel, to cease its obsession with colonising more Palestinian land.
A leading veteran settler leader, Daniella Weiss, recently told The New Yorker that her vision for borders of the Jewish state are to “the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.” This includes land of many Middle Eastern nations along with territory currently controlled by Israel.
To those who dismiss this as the rantings of an extremist, you’d be mistaken. This is a view shared by many in the settler population and key members of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I used to be a card-carrying member of the two-state solution club. In my first-ever piece for The Sydney Morning Herald in July 2003, I concluded that, “a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza should, hopefully, see the establishment of a vibrant, independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside a secure Israel.”
Years later, after reporting extensively in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, I realised the fallacy of this unattainable arrangement and embraced the far more democratic and realistic option, a one-state solution, crafted by Israelis and Palestinians.
In 2013, I co-edited a collection of essays, After Zionism, with Palestinian Ahmed Moor, and we included a range of Jewish and Palestinian voices explaining how “Palestinian and Israeli lives are intertwined, enmeshed, irrevocably.”
It’s not a utopian idea, divorced from the reality of Israel and Palestine. Some in both communities don’t like or trust each other. Many Jews want a supremacist state that solely prioritises their lives (in other words, today’s Israel). Some Islamists loathe the concept of Jewish self-determination.
However, other Jews and Palestinians recognise the urgent need to find a way to safely live alongside the other with equal rights under the law (something that is currently only available to Israeli Jews).
The unconscionable Hamas attacks on October 7 will inevitably deepen the divisions between many Israelis and Palestinians. The relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza, surging settler and Israeli military violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and an avalanche of genocidal statements by Israeli politicians, journalists and the Israeli public increases the need for a different path forward. Public opinion polls in the US and Israel/Palestine show growing support for one state, despite the undeniable challenges.
What would the one-state solution look like? There are many ideas, but it could include a total separation between church and state, secular education, Arabic, Hebrew and English as the official languages and a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the crimes by all parties, allowing victims to give testimony. The aim is reconciliation, not retribution.
To achieve real peace will require Palestinians not being forced to ignore their legitimate grievances after decades of Israeli occupation, violence and dislocation. Israeli Jews should not be expected to give up their legitimate historical ties to the land. Many Jews have understandable anxieties about Israel no longer being a Jewish-majority state, so religious, cultural and political safeguards would be put into place to legally protect Jewish (and Palestinian) lives, participation and safety. A one-state solution allows both peoples to have their own histories because there is no one shared narrative.
It’s highly unlikely that Israeli Jews will willingly forgo their current privilege – few occupiers ever have, historically – so it will require interested nations, including Australia, telling the Jewish state that the current treatment of the Palestinian people is unacceptable in the 21st century.
Today’s reality is a de facto one-state arrangement, with millions of Palestinians forced to live under a brutal, Israeli-led regime, fully backed by the West as a form of historical absolution after the Holocaust. The time is now to imagine a different future where all peoples in the land of Israel and Palestine are truly equal and free.
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory who was based in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020.