Long history of moribund two-state solution forms backdrop to Gaza conflict

Israelis backing the emergence of a Palestinian state alongside their own country will press for the revival of the moribund two-state solution once the guns fall silent in the Gaza war.

The peace camp in Israel argues that the country cannot remain Jewish and democratic while occupying restive Palestinians. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert has played the part of the biblical prophet Jeremiah by warning of a “demographic time bomb”. Jewish Israelis, who number 7.1 million, are already outnumbered by 7.3 million Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, combined with Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Having given full backing to Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza following the Hamas-led October 7th attack on Israel, US president Joe Biden said: “The only ultimate answer [for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict] is a two-state solution that’s real.”

Biden admitted, however, that Israel is ruled by its “most conservative government in history, [which] doesn’t want a two-state solution”. Since Biden has done nothing to advance the two-state solution, it is unlikely that he will risk tangling with Israel ahead of next year’s US presidential election.

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For more than three decades, the international community has given verbal support to the two-state solution. But, as the only global power with leverage on Israel, the US has made no serious effort to implement it. Meanwhile, Israel has expanded illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank and tightened its grip on Gaza to deny Palestinians a state in the territories Israel conquered in 1967.

The two-state solution is rooted in 20th-century efforts to partition Palestine. The first partition plan was put forward by a British royal commission headed by Lord Peel (William Robert Wellesley Peel) in 1937 during the 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt against the British mandatory government, which was promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine.

This plan would have given a third of the country to Jewish Zionists, who accounted for 28 per cent of the population, and two-thirds to Palestinians whose share of the territory would be annexed by Transjordan (now Jordan). While the Zionists accepted the plan as a first step towards their goal of a Jewish state in the whole of Palestine, Palestinians and Arabs rejected the plan and demanded an independent state, also covering the whole territory.

Nevertheless, the Peel plan became a model for the 1947 United Nations General Assembly partition plan, which recommended a Jewish state in 55 per cent of Palestine and an Arab state in 45 per cent. At that time Palestinians were two-thirds of the population and owned 94 per cent of the land.

During its 1948-1949 war of establishment, Israel conquered 78 per cent of Palestine and drove 750,000 Palestinians, out of a population of 1.3 million, from their towns, villages and land. The remaining 22 per cent of Palestine was ruled by Jordan until 1967 when Israel completed its occupation of Palestine and captured Syria’s Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

In November 1967, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 242 calling for Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied” during that war. This became the “land-for-peace” formula which has been combined with the two-state solution.

Instead of withdrawing, Israel planted settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Syrian Golan and annexed East Jerusalem. In 1973, Egypt and Syria waged the first Arab-initiated war on Israel and reclaimed lost territory but Israel reconquered Sinai and the Golan.

In 1979, Egypt concluded the first Arab peace treaty with Israel based on land-for-peace involving total Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Although the agreement was also meant to end Israeli military rule in the Palestinian territories and grant Palestinians autonomy, Israel did not comply with this part of the deal. Neither Egypt nor the US insisted on compliance.

[ Taoiseach calls on US to use influence to push for two-state solution in Israel ]

In November 1988, the Palestinian parliament-in-exile issued a declaration of independence, calling for a Palestinian mini state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in East Jerusalem. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat stated: “We accept two states, the Palestine state and the Jewish state of Israel.”

At that time there were fewer than 100,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories. This policy set the stage for secret negotiations in Norway between Palestinian and Israeli teams. This led to the Oslo accord signed under the auspices of US president Bill Clinton on the White House lawn on September 13th, 1993.

Palestinians believed this would end Israel’s 1967 occupation and lead to a Palestinian independent state of Palestine by 1999. However, Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was ready to concede only a Palestinian “entity”, not a state. Under Oslo, the interim Palestinian Authority was established to administer Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza until the sides resolved the fate of Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees, East Jerusalem and borders by 1999. The settler population, meanwhile, had grown to 280,000.

Clinton did not press hard for the resolution of these issues. Nearing the end of his term in office in 2000, he brought Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak together at Camp David for talks that failed. While Clinton and Barak blamed Arafat, the deal that was offered did not meet the “minimum requirements of any Palestinian leader”, according to US negotiator Robert Malley. Former US president Jimmy Carter wrote there was “no possibility” that any Palestinian leader could accept the terms that were on offer and survive.

The 2002 Arab summit, a meeting of Arab League leaders in Beirut, combined land-for-peace with the two-state solution by calling for full Israeli withdrawal from territory occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for full Arab normalisation with Israel. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon rejected the proposal and promptly invaded the West Bank.

The 2003 roadmap for peace put forward by a group of entities known as the Quartet – namely the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN – which defined stages for achieving the two-state solution within three years was accepted by the Palestinians but rejected by Sharon as it mandated dismantlement of some settlements. In 2005, he pulled 8,500 Israelis from Gaza settlements to focus on settlement expansion in the West Bank. Instead of leaving Gaza to develop on its own, Israel retained control by land, sea and air and in 2007 imposed a blockade.

Binyamin Netanyahu and most of his predecessors have done their utmost to block the emergence of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state by accelerating the construction of settlements and military bases

Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert put forward another proposal in 2008 that contained reasonable territorial swaps. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas rejected the deal as there was no agreement on the extent of Israeli withdrawal, nor on the status of Jerusalem or the return of Palestinian refugees.

In 2009, Barack Obama began his first term as US president with an address in Cairo in which he promised a “new beginning” for US relations with the Muslim world. He admitted “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own”. He promised to revive the roadmap, ensure that Palestinians would halt attacks on Israel, Israelis would cease settlement growth and the sides would achieve coexistence in two states. The talks broke down in April 2014, by which time Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister.

He and most of his predecessors have done their utmost to block the emergence of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state by accelerating the construction of settlements and military bases. Today there are 720,000 Israeli settlers living among three million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This is where the two-state-solution/land-for-peace formula is meant to resolve the 75-year-old Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Devastated Gaza with no Israeli settlers is to be a separate issue as there has to be a land link across Israel connecting the strip to the West Bank.

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