Two-state Israel-Palestine solution is Washington’s empty liturgy

When the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declares, once again, that “the only way” out of the Israeli-Palestinian impasse runs through two states, one is reminded less of a policy proposal than of a Latin Mass. The words are sacred. They are repeated on schedule. The faithful nod. Whether anyone present believes they describe the world as it is — or as it will be — has long since become beside the point.

That is the condition of the two-state solution in 2026: an article of diplomatic faith floating above a reality that has been moving in the opposite direction for 30 years. The ceasefire that took effect in Gaza last October; the recognition of Palestine by Britain, France, Canada, Australia and a half-dozen others the month before; the shuttering of the PLO mission in Washington; the approval of the E1 settlement that all but bisects the West Bank — none of these events points toward partition.

Several of them quietly close the door on partition. And yet the Quartet, the General Assembly, the editorial pages of the New York Times, and a depressingly large portion of the American foreign policy establishment continue to recite the formula, as though incantation were a substitute for cartography.

It is worth recalling that the two-state idea, in the form Washington now defends, is not ancient. It dates, in practical terms, to the Oslo Accords of 1993 — a framework whose architects, the late Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, are both more than a quarter-century gone, along with the political coalitions that produced them.

The Israeli Labor party that signed Oslo has been a marginal force for two decades. The Palestinian Authority that emerged from it is propped up by donor money and survives at the sufferance of an Israeli security apparatus that no longer pretends to regard it as a partner. Mahmoud Abbas, now in the twenty-first year of a four-year term, governs a fragment of the West Bank while Hamas — battered, decapitated, and still standing — retains de facto authority over what remains of Gaza.

To call this a “peace process” requires the kind of imagination one used to associate with Soviet five-year plans.

The conventional response to all of this is to say that the alternatives are worse. A one-state outcome, the liberal-Zionist argument runs, will either extinguish Israel’s Jewish character or render it formally what its critics already call it. A continued status quo — military occupation indefinitely extended — corrodes Israeli democracy and condemns Palestinians to permanent statelessness. Therefore: two states.

The logic is impeccable, in the manner that syllogisms tend to be. It is also unmoored from the facts on the ground.

Consider the demographics. Some seven hundred thousand Israelis now live east of the Green Line, in settlements whose growth has, if anything, accelerated since October 7. The ultra-Orthodox population that supplies a disproportionate share of new settlers has a fertility rate roughly twice that of West Bank Palestinians. The infrastructure — roads, utilities, a security architecture that treats the West Bank as a single operational theater — has been integrated for years.

The question is not whether dismantling all of this is politically difficult; the question is whether anyone in Israeli politics, including the dwindling remnant of the peace camp, believes it is operationally conceivable. Ehud Olmert, who offered something close to the maximum a sitting Israeli prime minister has ever offered, did so in 2008. The country has moved decisively to his right since.

The Palestinian side presents its own arithmetic. Hamas, which won the last election in 2006 that anyone bothered to hold, rejects the two-state framework as a matter of theology. Fatah accepts it but has spent two decades demonstrating that it cannot deliver on its end of any plausible bargain. The younger generation in Ramallah and Nablus, polled repeatedly, does not believe in the project either; it believes in resistance, or in emigration, or in some combination of both.

A negotiated settlement requires negotiating partners, and the supply of plausible ones on either side has been contracting for a generation.

What, then, accounts for the persistence of the formula? Inertia, partly. The diplomatic establishment, like any guild, defends the framework that justifies its existence. American Jewish organizations that once treated two-state advocacy as moderate centrism are reluctant to admit that the center has dissolved beneath them. European foreign ministries discover that recognizing a Palestinian state costs nothing and signals everything. None of this advances actual statehood by an inch, but all of it relieves the various parties of the burden of confronting what would.

The harder question — the one nobody in an official capacity wants to ask — is whether the conflict has any negotiated solution at all in this generation, or whether what lies ahead is something closer to the long Cypriot or Kashmiri equilibrium: an unresolved partition, managed rather than settled, with the international community’s role reduced to humanitarian palliation and rhetorical maintenance.

That latter outcome is grim. It is also, on present trends, what is actually happening. Pretending otherwise is not optimism; it is the displacement activity of an establishment that prefers its rituals to its problems.

A serious American policy would begin by acknowledging what every honest observer already knows: that the two-state solution, as a near-term political project, is dead, and that calling for its resurrection without proposing the wrenching steps that might revive it is theater.

Whether the United States should expend any further political capital trying to revive it — given the meager record of the past thirty years and the more pressing claims on American attention from East Asia to its own southern border — is a separate question, and one our political class has shown no interest in seriously asking. The first step is admitting the patient has died. The eulogies can come later.

This article was originally published on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is republished with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.