Gaza Conflict Exposes “Two-State Solution” Fallacy
Over thirty years of negotiations to end the conflict over the "Holy Land" by establishing a Jewish Israel and Muslim Palestine have come up empty.
For approximately a century, Muslims and Jews have been contending for political control over a part of the world labeled “the Holy Land” by the followers of three great religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In 1948, Jewish residents of the parts of the “Holy Land” named “Palestine” by the British Empire and The League of Nations, created a Jewish state named Israel. Elements of “Palestine” that remained under Muslim Arab political control fell at that time under the sovereignty of Jordan (“the West Bank”) and Egypt (“Gaza”).
Since creation, Israel has always emerged victorious whenever the Muslim-Jewish competition for “the Holy Land” has descended into military conflict. This pattern appears to be on course for repetition in the war that Hamas began with its heinous October 7 attack on Gaza’s peaceful Jewish neighbors.
The current conflict in Gaza, along with prior Hamas attacks against Israeli territory from Gaza, have made it abundantly clear that the Camp David Accords’ Gaza experiment is a failure. During the 1978 negotiations that ended the 30-year state of war between Israel and Egypt, both parties to the negotiation declined the opportunity to take sovereign control over Gaza. Egypt had exercised sovereignty over Gaza between 1948 and 1967.
By default, Gaza was reserved to be part of a future, to be negotiated, Palestinian state that would also include the territories labeled “the West Bank.” For over 40 years, U.S. negotiators have chased the chimera of the “Two-State Solution” – a Jewish Israel (whose Supreme Court has ruled emphatically that Israel is a Jewish state) side-by-side with a Muslim Palestine (The provisional Palestinian constitution declares that Islam is the country’s official religion) within the borders of “the Holy Land.” Over the course of these negotiations, Palestinian Muslims (uniformly Sunni), along with their local Christian allies, have refused at every opportunity to accept any negotiated version of a “Two-State Solution.”
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel understandably launched a powerful counterattack against Hamas in Gaza. Demonstrating broad support among all Muslims for Hamas, Shi’a Hizballah militias in Lebanon responded with artillery barrages into northern Israel, and Shi’a Houthi forces in Yemen have attacked international shipping in the Red Sea. Additionally, pro-Hamas demonstrators around the world have expressed their support for Hamas and its objectives, chanting the slogan, “From the River to the Sea.”
Under the circumstances, it is hard not to conclude that Hamas and its global supporters expect to achieve a unitary Muslim-ruled state that encompasses the entire part of “the Holy Land” they call Palestine. Hamas’s atrocities committed on October 7 provide a useful template for the fate of Jewish residents once a unitary Palestine is established.
In retrospect, the possibility of negotiating a “Two-State Solution” probably died on November 4, 1995, the day former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. He was the only Jewish leader who had the strategic sense, international respect, and broad domestic political support within Israel to have engineered it. Yet even he might have been unable to overcome deep seeded perpetual Palestinian opposition to a “Two-State Solution.”
Since the latest “Holy Land” conflict began, the Biden Administration has deployed its top diplomats trying to achieve a cease fire and gain release of the hostages Hamas took on October 7. These efforts remain firmly entrenched within the “Two-State Solution” rubric that U.S. diplomats have pursued for decades. So far, U.S. diplomatic efforts have made very little progress, perhaps because the conflict’s protagonists no longer share the American “Two-State” vision for a final peace settlement. They appear to be “in it to win it.”
Inertia is a powerful force, both in Physics and in human behavior, and America’s foreign policy and national security elite have been locked into pursuit of the “Two-State Solution” for decades. The proponents of this idea are deeply vested in terms of personal and professional reputations, not to mention pocketbooks. It will take a significant force to cause a shift in U.S. policy towards one grounded in a realistic assessment of the situation – “the Two-State Solution” has no clothes. As the current Gaza conflict seems to be of insufficient force to effect such a change, the next opportunity may well be the 2024 U.S. presidential election.