Push Israel now for a two-state solution? You must be kidding.

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Opinion Push Israel now for a two-state solution? You must be kidding.

By Jason Willick
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January 26, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

A display, in Jerusalem on Oct. 29, of posters of Israeli hostages
abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7. (Mahmoud Illean/AP)
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In 2005, Israel, with U.S. encouragement, embarked on a unilateral trial
run for a Palestinian state. It evacuated its soldiers and settlers from
the Gaza Strip, leaving the coastal enclave, then of 1.3 million people,
to govern itself. Palestinians held elections in 2006. Hamas, the
revolutionary party dedicated to Israel’s destruction, swiftly seized power.

That experiment in Palestinian sovereignty is ending in untold
suffering. Hamas thoroughly militarized the Strip, importing arms from
Iran, starting rocket wars every few years, tunneling under civilian
centers, and finally invading and rampaging through Israel’s south on
Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and abducting 250. The humanitarian calamity in
Gaza as Israel’s military tries to extirpate Hamas and free Israeli
hostages is the predictable result.

You might expect the origins of the current war to inspire caution about
the practicality of barreling toward a Palestinian state alongside
Israel. Instead, the concept — essentially moribund before the war began
— is suddenly at the center of U.S. diplomacy. It was elevated by
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 17,
pushed two days later by President Biden in a widely reported phone call
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and this week is the
subject of a Senate resolution supported by 49 Democrats.

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The two-state solution has eluded a series of U.S. presidents. What is
supposed to have changed now? Israelis have learned a brutal lesson in
the dangers of withdrawing from territory. Meanwhile, polls show
Palestinians in the West Bank overwhelmingly support the Oct. 7 massacre
of Israelis, and support for Hamas generally has surged there as well.
Implicit in Blinken’s two-state exhortations is that the Hamas attacks
were driven by the lack of Palestinian statehood. But a Hamas leader
last week exuberantly explained that he sees Palestinian statehood as
just a way station to Israel’s destruction.


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It has long been popular for critics to blame Israeli policy for the
political weakness of Palestinian moderates. Since Oct. 7, that argument
has taken a more pointed form: that Netanyahu empowered Hamas in a
divide-and-conquer strategy against the Palestinians. But it wasn’t
Israel that hurled Palestinians off buildings in the 2007 battle to
control Gaza. Hamas and Fatah did that to each other. Israel has
certainly tried to exploit Palestinian divisions, but it did not create
them. Hamas’s claim to popular legitimacy rooted in a commitment to
destroying Israel is now the foremost obstacle to a Palestinian state.

Former diplomat Alon Pinkas, writing for the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, describes the current two-state discussion as “completely
artificial” and “untethered from political realities.” He observes that
the politically embattled but conniving Netanyahu can nonetheless
brandish the specter of a U.S.-imposed Palestinian state to shore up his
flighty right-wing coalition. But Netanyahu isn’t the only one for whom
a phantom two-state debate is useful. Biden’s election-year advocacy of
statehood might mollify some progressives incensed at his backing of
Israel’s war on Hamas. The two leaders benefit with their respective
political bases from two-state shadowboxing.

For many journalists, meanwhile, the two-state posturing is a delicious
opportunity to play up divisions between the United States and Israel —
and to construct a tidy moral binary about the conflict. But look more
closely at what Biden and Netanyahu are saying, and there might be more
give in both leaders’ positions than is sometimes portrayed.

For example, in one statement deemed as ruling out a Palestinian state,
Netanyahu said that “Israel must have security control of the entire
area west of the Jordan,” adding: “It’s a necessary requirement, and it
clashes with the idea of sovereignty.” In other words, any Palestinian
polity west of the Jordan River would not be fully sovereign. But when
Biden leaned on Netanyahu about Palestinian statehood last week, in the
New York Times’s account, the president also “raised options that would
limit Palestinian sovereignty.”

Biden told reporters after the call that “there are a number of types of
two-state solutions.” The question of Palestinian statehood — yes or no
— misses the point. The relevant question is how to increase the
capacity of Palestinian governing institutions, in the West Bank and
Gaza, in a regime that draws its legitimacy from a source other than the
sort of eliminationism advocated by Hamas.

As political scientist Samuel Huntington observed in his 1968 study of
political development, “The problem is not to hold elections but to
create organizations. In many, if not most, modernizing countries
elections serve only to enhance the power of disruptive and often
reactionary social forces.” There’s every reason to fear that Hamas or
similar entities would control a nascent democratic Palestinian state in
the near-term aftermath of this brutal war.

The term “two-state solution” assumes its own conclusion. If the United
States and other powers recognized the pre-1967 Palestinian territories
as a state tomorrow, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not be
solved. The solution will come only with the demonstration of effective
Palestinian governance and engagement with Israel — and the Israeli
concessions that could come about, under pressure from Washington and
Arab states, in response. The decimated landscape of Gaza shows the
price of getting that sequence wrong.


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Opinion by Jason Willick
Jason Willick is a Washingto