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Dangerous Delusions about the Two-State Solution

(Foreign Affairs) Michael Oren - Was the two-state solution ever really alive? The Palestinians violently rejected the two-state offers of 1937 and 1947. Their rejection of two-state plans in 2000, 2001, and 2008 merely reiterated this long-standing Palestinian policy. Because they deny that the Jews constitute a people, Palestinian leaders have never accepted the U.S. formula of "two states for two peoples." No Palestinian leader has ever demonstrated the will or the ability to reconcile with Jewish statehood, and none would likely survive long if they did. The Palestinians have given no indication that they intend to build the kinds of stable, transparent institutions that form the foundations of a modern state, or that they can sustain sovereignty over any areas allotted to them without ushering in chaos. Realizing these facts, many Israelis have concluded that the Palestinians never actually wanted a two-state solution; they wanted only Israel's dissolution. Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, which the Israeli government undertook in the hope of peace, yielded only thousands of terrorist rockets targeting Israeli civilians. The glow of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s was similarly eclipsed by the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005 and the murder of 1,000 Israelis - more than ten times the losses the U.S. suffered in the 9/11 attacks, as a proportion of the population. Consequently, many Israelis recognize what philosopher Micah Goodman calls "Catch-67," the belief that although the absence of a Palestinian state might challenge Israel's Jewish and democratic character, the creation of a Palestinian state threatens its very existence. The writer is a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
2023-06-01 00:00:00
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