Why the two-state solution is dead

“As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.” — Caliban, Act III, Sc II, The Tempest by William Shakespeare

As the Zionist genocide in Gaza and the West Bank continues apace, the cadaver of a two-state solution is again being revived, with chants of “cumi [arise]” by the very colonial powers that are responsible for and complicit in the murderous violence that has raged in Palestine for almost a century.

That is bad enough. What’s worse is that the Arab countries are in cahoots with them in this project.

On July 29, British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, spoke at the UN Two-State Solution conference on Gaza and the recognition of a Palestinian State. The irony of what he said is only surpassed by the perversity of the Balfour Declaration, which he invoked to press for a two-state solution:

“One hundred and eight years ago, my predecessor as British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, signed the declaration that bears his name. It helped lay the foundations for a homeland for the Jewish people. And Britain can be proud of that. Our support for Israel, its right to exist and the security of its people is steadfast. However, the Balfour declaration came with the solemn promise ‘that nothing shall be done, nothing which may prejudice the civil and religious rights’ of the Palestinian people as well.”

My purpose here is simple, though its treatment can be anything but undemanding: the seeds of violence sowed by Britain and its allies in Palestine during World War I, and which Lammy, himself of colonial heritage from British Guiana (now Guyana), is proud of, demands a rejection of what happened, not an endorsement of it.

The two-state solution, a red-herring at the best of times, cannot atone for the original sin, which demands not just saying peccavi but overturning Britain’s “proud” moment 108 years ago — though it must be said that Britain was not the only culprit. (Space does not allow detailing how another, now forgotten, Zionist, Nahum Sokolow, was assigned by English aristocrat and politician Mark Sykes, to get an undertaking from the French on changes to the Sykes-Picot Pact and support for the establishment of a Zionist entity. Sokolow got what is now called the Jules Cambon letter, which didn’t even mention the existing communities like the Balfour letter does.)

To this end, I propose to give the reader a glimpse of how a new world was imposed on Palestinians and why a two-state solution, even when presented with sincerity, ignores or is unaware of the fact that the Zionist “control system” of Palestine has already turned that land into a single, apartheid state. There’s no space in that hegemonic control for two states. But let’s begin at the beginning.

THE TRAVESTY OF 67 WORDS

On November 2, 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, wrote a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a Zionist figurehead of the British Jewish community. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of the object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country [emphasis added].”

Despite Balfour’s caveat about “existing non-Jewish communities”, Britain, along with other colonial powers, had already engineered a mandate in favour of Jewish colonisation of Palestine. In Palestinian academic Edward Said’s words, it was a promise “made by a European power… about a non-European territory… in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory.”

The Zionists knew this. In his infamous essay, ‘The Iron Wall’, Vladimir Jabotinsky, father of the hardline Revisionist Zionist Movement, wrote that there was not a single instance in history “of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.”

His political foe, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the so-called Zionist Left, agreed: “There is no solution to the question of relations between Arabs and Jews… And we must recognise this situation… We as a nation want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.”

In other words, the clash was structurally set-up and for that reason was inevitable. Citing the body of literature would take up the entire space here but let me make two points: neither Jabotinsky nor Ben-Gurion or Chaim Weizman — president of the Zionist Organisation since 1920 — refer, even in passing, to the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside the Zionist entity.

Israeli historian Benny Morris notes that Ben-Gurion saw the Partition plan as a stepping stone to Palestinian expulsion: “With compulsory transfer, we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” Weizmann, the Zionist entity’s first president, likened the Palestinians to “the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path.”

At the root of it was terra nullius [nobody’s land], a concept controversially applied by colonial powers to occupy other peoples’ lands. But since no land was actually unoccupied, the native needed to be disappeared from the narrative.

In an article for the Yale Journal of International Law, titled ‘The Colonial Order Prevails in Palestine: The Right to Self-Determination from a Third World Approach to International Law’, Tina Al-khersan and Azadeh Shahshahani write: “To support colonial projects across the world, legal frameworks emerged to justify colonisers’ violent land acquisition. One foundational principle of these frameworks was terra nullius… As terra nullius positioned lands as empty, the first person to use the land became its owner. In practice, however, the definition of terra nullius was adopted and expanded upon by the Europeans to justify colonisation.”

The late English historian Patrick Wolfe argued in his 2006 essay ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of Native’, that the “logic of elimination” is central to the settler-colonial project and has “typically [required employing] the organising grammar of race.” The process, according to Al-khersan and Shahshahani, “aims to destroy indigenous societies while simultaneously establishing the colonial society on the acquired land.”

In such a universe, the power of who lords over others is absolute. Robinson Crusoe’s island becomes a metaphor for terra nullius and Crusoe’s story, of the boy from York, becomes that of resilience, tilling the soil and surviving with determination and ingenuity. But we realise that the island is not entirely uninhabited, or he would not have saved the native, whom he names Friday, from the cannibals, the uncivilised eaters of humans.

When Crusoe is rescued by a passing ship, he returns to England, having amassed a lot of wealth from his Brazilian plantation and slave trade. Friday returns with him, his man Friday, loyal and obedient, having been civilised, much like Lammy, but also without his own language and identity.

It is in this vein that Europe set out to civilise the natives, occupy their lands, divide them and, to our present purpose, solve Europe’s “Jewish Question.” Balfour’s proviso that the Jewish state must not violate the rights of existing non-Jewish communities was contradictory to the very idea of creating a Jewish state without the consent of Palestinians.

Imagine the German foreign minister Richard von Kühlmann deciding in November 1917 that, after exterminating thousands of Nama and Herero peoples in the previous decade [in present-day Namibia], Germany would settle them in England on the condition that the rights of the existing non-Nama-Herero in England would not be violated.

Now imagine that, after 108 years of violence and genocide of the white English by Nama-Herero, the current German foreign minister Johann Wadephul were to stand behind a podium at the UN and invoke Germany’s letter as the basis for a two-state solution. I doubt the English, including Lammy, would be amused by such an assertion.

THE TWO-STATE CHIMERA

There are three categories of two-state solutionists. The first involves states mouthing this mantra since Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1995). These states, notably the United States and its Western European allies, while talking about a two-state solution have done everything to bury it effectively. They have armed the Zionist state-entity, branded Palestinian resistance as terrorism, supported or ignored illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Israel’s policy of sabotaging a two-state solution and vetoed any attempt by other UN member states to recognise Palestine as a state.

The second category comprise peace activists within Israel who, while firmly grounded in their Zionism, believe that Palestinians should have a state in order for the Zionist entity to live in peace. There are shades of opinion within this broader category which can’t be detailed here. Briefly, they believe that the Zionist entity must exist with a separation wall (physical and metaphorical) and maintain its military and economic supremacy. Such a deal could be guaranteed by the Arab states normalising with the Zionist entity and helping the nominal Palestinian administrative state to survive.

The third camp comprises of millions around the world, honest folks, who think that the Zionist entity should be forced to live peacefully with the Palestinians because such an outcome is the only practical solution. They empathise with the Palestinians and want the genocidal violence to end.

The common denominator in these categories, intentions aside, is the acceptance of the existence of the Zionist entity. It’s like King Lear telling Kent that “The bow is bent and drawn; make from the shaft” — the deed has been done and cannot be undone. This acceptance of imperial fait accompli is the central impediment to a solution, which must begin by rejecting Zionism.

Several scholars, including Jewish-Israeli ones, have noted the ground reality of Zionist control. Writing in the October 23, 2003 issue of The New York Review, the late Professor Tony Judt begins thus: “The Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed.” Judt, like most scholars, is not particularly concerned about the idea of a “Jewish” state itself but argued that it is “a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project” foisted on a different world. Israel is an anachronism. If Judt were alive today, he would have seen how alive 19th century anachronism is, expressed through the 21st century tools of violence, a genocide unfolding on cameras and in real time.

Haim Hanegbi, a Palestinian Jewish journalist and co-founder of Matzpen, a dissident, anti-Zionist organisation, in an interview to Haaretz, a somewhat progressive newspaper in the Zionist entity, said, “Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has to understand that only a binational partnership can save us.”

Daniel Gavron, in his 2004 book The Other Side of Despair, has two chapters important to our discussion here: ‘The Impossible Solution’ and ‘The Improbable Solution.’ The first details how intricately the current Zionist entity is tied up with the West Bank. Among other details, he quotes Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and architect Eyal Weizman to show how impossible the two-state solution is.

Even under the Oslo Agreements, “Israel retains control of the water under the ground of the West Bank and the air above it”. And Eyal Weizman notes, that “the system of bypass roads, bridges and tunnels linking the Jewish settlements to each other and to Israel, makes it almost impossible to detach the West Bank from Israel.”

Gavron then moves to “the improbable solution” with a quote from Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” According to Gavron, “Having reached the conclusion that the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River must be shared but cannot be sensibly partitioned, we are left with only one alternative: Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in one nation.”

American political scientist Virginia Tilley has studied the problem in great detail and presented the case in her 2005 book, The One State Solution. She lays out, systematically, the intricate problems that attend the two-state solution and presents her argument through elimination.

On the settlement grid, Tilley shows, as others have done too, that the grid’s very design, “in terms of its density and territorial dispersion”, is meant “to make the occupation irreversible, by fragmenting the territory of the potential Palestinian state and making the removal of the settlements impossible.” She was writing in 2005. In the past two decades, settlements have not only mushroomed, they have become even more intricate.

More recently, in his 2019 book Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, political scientist Ian Lustick has made a detailed case against the two-state solution. In doing that, he has listed the many initiatives and formulae that have sought to create a viable Palestinian state, none of which has worked, and most of which were shot down by the Zionist entity.

As I have noted in this space before, the Oslo Agreements, on which the entire idea of a two-state solution rests, never envisaged a sovereign Palestinian state. This was the crux of Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin’s speech at the Knesset, 29 days before he was assassinated. Today, the Zionist entity’s forces operate openly and arbitrarily even in Area A which, under the Oslo Agreements, is the sole administrative domain of the so-called Palestinian Authority and constitutes merely 18 per cent of the West Bank.

Most illegal settlements are in Area C, which comprises 60 per cent of the West Bank and is under the full civil and military control of the Zionist entity. It was to be transferred, hypothetically, to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Agreements, but that transfer has never happened. Why? Because it was never meant to happen.

Settlements were and are part of the Zionist entity’s politico-military policy. According to the American Jewish Israel Policy Forum (IPF), “In allowing and encouraging the establishment of Jewish communities in the West Bank, a disputed territory over which Israel does not exercise [legal] sovereignty, the Israeli government’s initial priority was security. By placing Israeli civilians in certain areas to solidify Israel’s control, Israel sought to ensure that the territory’s political future would be consistent with the country’s perceived security needs.”

The situation has since changed. The IPF says: “Over time, messianic Religious Zionist ideology developed as a significant driver of the settlement movement, based on the notion of a religious imperative for Jews to settle the entire Land of Israel. Settlements established as part of this religious movement were often placed in regions with a large Palestinian population, in order to secure Jewish dominance over the territory, prevent a Palestinian state, and secure the entire West Bank for Israel [emphasis added].”

The reality is that settler activity did not become messianic “over time.” It was messianic from the get go. Rabbi Avraham Kook saw the 1967 War as a sign of messianic redemption. Religious Zionists still refer to his speech, which mesmerised them. The 2016 documentary The Settlers by Shimon Dotan unpacks the history of the settler movement and how the settlers consider it their sacred duty to purge the land of Palestinians and occupy Eretz Yisrael [Greater Israel].

Just last week, Bezalel Smotrich, a far right minister of the Zionist entity, showed a map and spoke of a plan to build a settlement that would effectively cut off the West Bank from East Jerusalem. He told the media that it would thwart the idea of a Palestinian state, “because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise.”

Smotrich is not alone in rejecting the idea of a Palestinian state. On August 12, the Zionist entity’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a war criminal against whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants, spoke to i24, a tv channel in the Zionist entity, and told the interviewer that he is “very attached” to the vision of a “Greater Israel.” The map depicting that entity includes all of Lebanon and Jordan, parts of Syria and even Saudi Arabia. The interview prompted the Saudi Foreign Ministry to issue a statement of condemnation.

Let me now come to Edward Said. Initially a proponent of a two-state solution, Said came round to the reality on the ground. In his book The End of the Peace Process, he wrote: “No negotiations are better than endless concessions that simply prolong the Israeli occupation… with Palestinian consent.”

In two essays, ‘Israel-Palestine: The Third Way’ (1998) and ‘The Only Alternative’ (2001), Said laid down his paradigm for a one-state solution: a secular, democratic state, grounded in the idea of citizenship, not nationalisms. His second essay refers to South Africa, then under the African National Congress (ANC), struggling “to complete the task of bringing equality and social justice to this still-divided and economically troubled country.” He called the end of apartheid the greatest human achievement in recorded history.

Said also spurned armed resistance. He thought, despite his great intellect and insight, that Zionists could be turned around by appealing to justice and the notion of right and wrong. In that he was misplaced.

Armed resistance is an imperative his student, Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, understands clearly. On October 8, a day after Hamas’ military attack on the Zionist entity’s outposts, he wrote: “[A]s the ongoing war between the Israeli colonial army and the indigenous Palestinian resistance has only just begun, the days to come will surely be crucial in determining if this is the start of the Palestinian War of Liberation or yet another battle in the interminable struggle between the coloniser and the colonised.”

FROM THE IMPOSSIBLE TO THE IMPROBABLE

So, if the two-state solution is impossible, what does the improbable look like, especially if the right wing Religious Zionists also want one state by exterminating and expelling the internal refugees and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, two of the three categories of Palestinians that live outside the Zionist entity?

Massad has a clear perspective on it. In an essay for the Middle East Eye on July 29, 2020, titled ‘Israel Prefers a One-state Solution that Protects its Colonial Privileges’, he argues that there are three different arrangements for the one-state solution: the white supremacist state; the post-apartheid, South-African-style one-state solution; and Zionists’ one-state solution.

Supporters of Israel, argues Massad, fear all three one-state arrangements. The supremacist state will be difficult to justify and could open the Zionist entity to international sanctions. “Algeria-Kenya-Zimbabwe solution,” says Massad, “most of all because it would lose the Jewish colonists all their colonial and racial privileges by making them equal to the natives.” The post-apartheid South African-style, one-state solution is their compromise, “as it seems to be the only one of the three that can safeguard Jewish supremacist privilege without international sanctions.”

The only way the improbable could work is for the international community to reject Zionism and its privileges, for the colonial powers to confess to the original sin and for a state grounded in the “[nullification of] all Jewish racial and colonial privileges”, a process that “decolonises the country in order to grant equal rights to all.”

Is the improbable possible? Yes and no. Yes, if the Zionist entity’s isolation is complete, an entity left marooned; no, because that doesn’t seem possible, both because the colonial mindset persists in the West and the colonised subjugation remains the defining feature of Palestine’s Arab neighbours. Their riches notwithstanding, they remain beholden to the very states that put the dog in the Middle East well.

Elham Fakhro’s 2024 book The Abraham Accords discusses in detail the perspective of the new generation of leaders in the Gulf states and why they remain so eager to normalise with the Zionist entity, despite the limits of that normalisation.

EPILOGUE

Ariella Aisha Azouley is an Algerian Arab Jew and professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. In one chapter of her book The Jewellers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World, she writes a letter to Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani after reading his novella Returning to Haifa.

Azouley creates Tama [‘pure’ in Hebrew and the equivalent of Saffiya in Kanafani’s story]. Tama is the daughter of Dov, Said and Saffiya’s renamed son Khuldun, who was left behind during the Nakba and was taken in by Miriam and her husband, the Jewish couple who didn’t want the child killed. When Said and Saffiya return to their apartment in Haifa, they meet Dov, serving in the Zionist army. Even though Dov knows he is Palestinian, he prefers to exercise the arrogant confidence of Zionists and refuses to recognise Saffiya and Said as his parents.

But Azoulay’s central theme is Miriam, not the Khuldun/Dov contrapuntal. Miriam is like Azouley, who names Dov’s daughter Tama so one day Tama/Saffiya would own Saffiya. This, Azouley believes, would break the vicious cycle: “We had been deprived of the memory of women like her [Miriam]; the Zionist state needed us bereft of our histories so that we could be raised as the children of colonisers and mature into colonisers themselves.”

Azoulay tells Kanafani, assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972 along with his 17-year-old niece, that the return has already begun with Tama/Saffiya, “breaking the Zionist spell over my body, over the land…”

Has it? I doubt Kanafani would agree. As he wrote in Returning to Haifa:

“I mean your presence here, in this house, our house, Saffiya’s and my house, is another matter. We only came to take a look at things, our things. Maybe you can understand that.”
She said quickly: “I understand, but…”
Then he lost his composure. “Yes, but! This terrible, deadly, enduring ‘but’…’”
At the heart of this darkness is this “but”. Unless this “but” is addressed, Palestine, like Caliban, will remain subjugated and locked in violence. The island’s problem is Prospero.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies.
X: @ejazhaider