The two-state solution is dead

Tzipi Hotovely has committed the gravest sin in diplomacy: speaking candidly. In an interview with Sky News, Israel’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s rejected the creation of a Palestinian Arab state. Hotovely told a plainly horrified Mark Austin there could ‘absolutely not’ be a Palestinian state now, saying: ‘It’s about time for the world to realise that the Oslo paradigm failed on 7 October.’ She added: ‘Israel knows today and the world should know now that the Palestinians never wanted to have a state next to Israel. They want to have a state from the river to the sea. They are saying it loud and clear.’ 

Hotovely not only transgressed in diplomatic terms, she blasphemed against the most cherished belief of the global norms-setters: the EU, the State Department, the Foreign Office, the international relations schools and the foreign correspondents. For these people, conflict resolution everywhere else is about nuance, pragmatism, and evidence, but the two-state solution is religion. Entire careers have been built on it, foundations created to promote it, endowments gifted to push for it. The Israeli left, the custodians of the cause, have not won a single election this century, largely because of it. For decades, it has been the great infallibility of international affairs. No heresy was permitted.   

No one familiar with Israeli politics was shocked by the ambassador’s remarks. Hotovely made a name for herself in the Knesset as one of the most ideological right-wingers in the Likud, giving countless speeches in support of the application of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank. But it is a mistake to see Hotovely’s answers to Mark Austin as an attempt by her to change the policy of the Israeli government. For one, Benjamin Netanyahu long ago stopped pretending to be open to a two-state solution. For another, Hotovely belongs to the Oslo generation of Israelis who came to adulthood seeing Israel offer the Palestinians one peace deal after another, handing over Jericho, Hebron and Gaza, only to receive suicide bombing, rocket barrages and international calumny in return. The ambassador’s rejection of a Palestinian state may come from ideology but it reflects a broader cynicism in Israel that comes from bitter experience.  

We in the West are not used to candour in discussions of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. The two-state solution is packaged for western audiences as a Middle Eastern Good Friday Agreement, in which both sides would make painful but ultimately worthwhile compromises in the name of peace. In fact, the compromises would be largely on one side. It would require Israel to hand its enemies a vast mountainous territory overlooking its major population centres; withdraw to borders rendering the country just nine miles wide at its narrowest point; hand over half its capital city; and relinquish all claims to territories where the exercise of Jewish sovereignty can be traced back 3,000 years. In exchange, the Palestinians would have to abandon their war against Israel and their demand that millions of Palestinians and their descendants acquire the right to live in Israel.  

These are among the more palatable terms. Seldom will the reader of a western newspaper or viewer of a western news bulletin be told that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, considered a ‘moderate’ by the international community, has said: ‘In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands.’ Seldom will they be told of the Palestinian Authority’s reaction when Netanyahu proposed that Jewish settlers be allowed to remain and become residents of a Palestinian state. ‘No settler will be permitted to stay in a Palestinian state, not one,’ insisted Ramallah’s then-chief negotiator Saeb Erekat. Israel has two million Arabs but none of the West Bank’s half-million Jews would be allowed to remain under a two-state solution. Palestine had to be judenrein.  

Be honest: were you aware of the Palestinian Authority’s statements on the fate of West Bank Jews? Now, imagine Israel conditioned its willingness to make peace on a population transfer of Arabs out of its territory. Do you suppose the first time you heard about it would be in a Spectator blog? The two-state solution is an American-imposed construct and necessitates tongues being bitten, blind eyes turned, and downright lies being told to avoid acknowledging its incompatibility with the facts on the ground. Those facts are topographical: an 7 October-style attack launched from the West Bank would result in a great many more Israeli fatalities. They are political: Mahmoud Abbas is an impotent dictator, the Palestinian Authority is on the brink of collapse, and any attempt to make peace with Israel today would spark a bloody power struggle in Ramallah. They are institutional: The Palestinian Authority operates a Martyrs’ Fund, which pays stipends to the families of terrorists captured or killed during attacks on Israelis. They are sociological: new polling puts Palestinian support for 7 October at 72 per cent, consistent with an earlier poll, which I wrote about here, putting the figure at 75 per cent. Two states for two peoples is not an ignoble idea but the two peoples imagined by the international community are not the Israelis and the Palestinians.  

When western policymakers fret about ‘obstacles to peace’, they don’t talk about any of this. They talk about settlements. David Cameron has announced that the government is banning what he calls ‘extremist settlers’ from entering the UK ‘to make sure our country cannot be a home for people who commit these intimidating acts’. Quite right, too. We wouldn’t want the UK to become a home for people who commit intimidating acts. Plus, it’s reassuring to know the government can stop some people arriving in Britain.  

There are extremists and thugs and even murderers among the half-million Jewish residents of the West Bank and they are regarded with contempt by most Israelis, even if the current government prefers to ignore the problem. I have no philosophical objection to banning them from the UK; I just think it’s fantastically silly. The sort of people Cameron is talking about think the UK is a sharia-ruled caliphate where jihad and genital mutilation have replaced tea and scones and where the Isis flag flies over Buckingham Palace. Unless someone uncovers a lost book of the Bible designating Croydon part of Eretz Yisrael, these people have no plans to come here. The Foreign Secretary is, of course, applying diplomatic pressure to Israel while pandering to a home crowd and managing an internal security problem. But it is a dishonest, diversionary approach that will bring two states no closer. It is another way of saying what much of western policy on the conflict implicitly says: Can’t you Israelis get your enemies to stop hating you?  

The 7 October attack did not end the two-state solution, it confirmed a new world in which it has no purchase. The tiny faction of Palestinian politics genuinely committed to peace has been swept away in a fresh wave of enthusiasm for violence. The Israeli left has been traumatised to see its ideal of coexistence gunned down on the killing fields of Re’im, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. The Israeli right has taken the massacres as vindication of its deadly fallacy that Israel can administer hostile territories indefinitely. Western leaders are learning that their calls for two states resonate only with baby boomers and Gen-Xers; millennials and Gen-Z back the Palestinians, no longer believing in peaceful coexistence. As goes the West’s next generation, so goes its governing elites and their policy assumptions.  

Which leaves only the unloved and unloveable Israeli centre, the people for whom two-statism is not an article of faith but the most manageable catastrophe on offer. Israeli centrists believe they understand the nature of Palestinian society better than the left and the nature of Israeli society better than the right. They know that the Palestinians are not ready to make peace and argue that the choice to wait until they are (if they ever are) will corrode Israel’s democracy and see it become an apartheid state. In their hearts, they want to impose a shotgun divorce that would leave both parties dissatisfied but, crucially, disentangled from each other’s national life. It would meet the demands of neither international law nor natural justice. It still would not satisfy questions of security and practicality. It would be a terrible idea but it might be less terrible than the alternatives.  

Tzipi Hotovely is right to say the Oslo paradigm has failed but the status quo has also failed. There are two peoples who cannot govern each other and so they must govern only themselves. Whatever paradigm replaces Oslo must begin there.