Sami Al-ArianFor more than half a century, the two-state formula—a Zionist regime alongside a sovereign Palestine in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—has been the official exit ramp from a grinding conflict.
It’s not a trendy idea born of the latest crisis; it has been the strategic choice of Arab states since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 after the 1967 war. UNSC 242 didn’t spell out “two states,” but its core objective —withdrawal from the 1967 occupied territory for peace and mutual recognition—became the conceptual scaffolding for two states and the region’s diplomacy thereafter.
The Palestinians themselves codified this trajectory long ago. In 1974, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Ten-Point Program opened the door to establishing a Palestinian authority on any liberated territory—an unmistakable pivot towards an incremental statehood strategy.
In November 1988 at Algiers, the PLO formally declared the State of Palestine and accepted UNSC 242/338 as the basis for a political process. In 1993, the PLO accepted Israel’s “right to exist” and entered the Oslo framework that presupposed a two-state endgame, even though the Zionist regime never explicitly committed to it. These weren’t rhetorical positions; they were historical Palestinian concessions unmatched by the Israeli side.
Arab governments followed suit in their own frameworks. Crown Prince Fahd’s eight-point proposal (adopted at Fez in 1982) explicitly called for an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Two decades later, the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative—the Arab League’s unanimously endorsed “strategic option”—offered full normalisation with Israel in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines and a negotiated refugee solution per UNGA 194.
These were comprehensive, region-wide proposals anchored in two states, despite the historical injustice done to the Palestinians.
Cascading recognition, but still no state
The wider international system has been in the same place for years. The UN Security Council formally endorsed the Quartet “Roadmap” to a permanent two-state solution in Resolution 1515 in 2003.
And in recent months, a cascade of recognitions has lifted the number of UN member states recognising Palestine to about 156—more than four out of five countries in the world—reflecting an unmistakable global consensus on Palestinian statehood within the two-state frame.
If the region, the PLO, and most of the world lined up behind two states, why don’t we have it?
Because policy and facts on the ground moved in the opposite direction.
Since the Oslo signing in 1993, the Zionist regime’s illegal settlement enterprise has expanded relentlessly. In 1993, there were roughly 110–125 thousand illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem); today, counting East Jerusalem, the total number is over 750,000 and rising—numbers every serious monitor says make territorial contiguity nearly impossible. That is not an accident; it is a policy.
Successive Israeli governments have said the quiet part out loud.
In 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on election eve: “If I’m elected, there will be no Palestinian state.” In a leaked 2001 video, he bragged to settlers: “I de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords,” adding, “I know what America is… a thing you can move very easily.”
Furthermore, at the UN on September 22, 2023, Netanyahu held up a “New Middle East” map that erased Palestine entirely while touting an India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor—signaling a future premised on Israeli primacy without Palestinian sovereignty.
US policy, meanwhile, has too often shielded these dynamics. To his credit, US Secretary of State John Kerry uttered the sad, true facts from Washington in December 2016: “If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic; it cannot be both,” warning that “the settler agenda is defining the future of Israel.”
That same week, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, reaffirming settlements’ illegality and calling them a “flagrant violation” and a “major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution.” Yet beyond words, Washington repeatedly wielded its veto or abstention power to prevent effective enforcement, and the bulldozers kept rolling.
What about October 7, 2023, and the catastrophic genocidal war that followed? Cause and effect in politics are rarely linear. Still, one point is clear: choking off political horizons while entrenching domination breeds desperate measures and backlash.
In 2018, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, who was killed last year, said plainly: “I don’t want war… I want an end to the siege.” His plea was ignored.
The idea that Palestinian needs and rights could be indefinitely sidelined—through “economic peace,” siege, and containment—was an illusion. It exploded in a sizzling prison break on October 7, 2023.
Palestinians also absorbed a hard lesson: without leverage, nothing moves. The 2011 prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit—1,027 Palestinians for one Israeli soldier—imprinted a brutal logic in Palestinian collective memory.
For years, endless meetings and vain negotiations delivered little on prisoners, sovereignty, end of occupation, or return, yet coercive resistance often times did. It’s not complicated to understand that calculus or recognise why it persists, or even why purely punitive responses don’t erase the structural incentives that shaped it.
Shifting political ground
Paradoxically, the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza and the horror it unleashed has re-centred the global conversation on the two-state paradigm. Spurred by public opinion and the sheer scale of devastation, a growing list of countries—including in Europe and the West—have recognised Palestine, alongside near-universal calls to end the carnage.
In response, Tel Aviv has doubled down as Netanyahu rejects these recognitions, calling them meaningless, and sends subtle messages of possible unilateral annexations—while US influence looks increasingly isolated. The political ground is shifting, even if power realities lag behind.
Does this mean two states are around the corner? No. In the near term, the world has two urgent tasks: stop the mass killing and famine in Gaza, and halt land grabs and settler violence in the occupied West Bank.
Without those first-order steps, “statehood talk” is theatre politics. Even then, the path back to a viable two-state outcome would require politically bold moves: a settlement freeze (including in East Jerusalem), clear timelines, enforcement mechanisms, and guaranteed rights regimes during transition—not just “process.” Absent that, recognition risks becoming symbolism without substance.
Which leads to the uncomfortable question: Is it already too late for two states? Many argue justifiably that the map has been so fragmented, and that after the Gaza genocide, Zionism is irredeemable. The rise of the ultra-right and messianic movements in the Zionist state makes any talk on salvaging the situation through a political settlement with the current balance of power unrealistic.
The successful example of South Africa is very instructive. Accommodating the ideology of dominance and keeping structures of supremacy are the root of the problem. Dismantling such institutions is the only just, durable solution. That’s a legal and moral baseline: end military rule and racist structures, guarantee equality and political rights, and provide remedies for refugees and their right of return.
If two states can’t be revived with teeth, the alternative cannot be endless inequality and supremacy. The guiding principle must be rights, not slogans.
Here’s the bottom line. For decades, Arab capitals, the PLO, the UN, and the majority of states have endorsed two states. The primary obstacle has been the systematic creation of facts on the ground designed to preclude it, and the lack of sustained, enforceable international will to reverse those facts.
If the world wants two states, it will take more than speeches and symbolic gestures; it will take consequences for actions that make two states impossible.
And if the world cannot or will not muster that will, it owes Israelis and Palestinians an honest alternative that centres justice, freedom, and durable peace not only for those who live between the river and the sea, but also for all Palestinians around the world.
