Kaddish for the Two-State Solution

The short-lived ceasefire between Israel and its multiple attackers gave me the chance a few weeks ago to head north for the first time since October 7, 2023 to visit my sister- and brother-in-law in Kiryat Shemoneh.

While there, I asked them whether they favor a two-state solution. Always comfortably left of center on the Israeli political spectrum, they told me that they could accept some form of Palestinian autonomy and even a removal of the smaller Israeli settlements in the West Bank as long as Hamas and Hezbollah are thoroughly dismantled; Israel annexes the larger Jewish population centers of the West Bank; security throughout the territories is maintained solely by the Israel Defense Forces; and civilians from Israel and the autonomous Palestinian region within Israel are not allowed to cross the “county line” that intentionally separates them from each other. In other words, having experienced October 7 and its aftermath up close, their current concept of a two-state solution is a social divorce from the Arab population of the territories enforced by permanent Israeli military control of the entire region.

That’s a far cry from the two-state concept most of us once understood as referring to a democratic Jewish majority state with a thriving Arab minority living in mutually beneficial fellowship alongside a democratic Arab majority state with a thriving Jewish minority. Of course, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to the arrangement demanded so far by the Arab states, the United Nations, and the European Union. Yet, that is essentially the position of today’s minority Israeli leftwing. This month’s Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) survey found that just 11% of Jewish Israelis still believe that Israel should even seek a peace deal with hypothetically moderate Palestinians.

And what about most Israelis? The JPPI’s survey reveals that fully 62% of all Israeli Jews support President Trump’s plan to transfer the population of Gaza to neighboring countries with 71% of the rightwing viewing it as both desirable and practical. Tellingly, that idea claimed only minority support prior to Hamas’ blood-soaked October rampage. After nearly a century of spurned Jewish overtures to the region’s Arab population — from Jewish engagement with the Peel Commission to acceptance of the Partition Plan, from a unilateral withdrawal out of Gaza to offers of ceding virtually the entire West Bank — October 7 was the last straw for Israelis.  It convinced the overwhelming majority that there is no living next door to people bent on their destruction.

For decades, Israelis embraced the fantasy that an unbridgeable value gap separated Palestinian civilians from their savage leadership. Jewish spokesmen in Israel and the Diaspora regularly asserted that the vast majority of Gazans and West Bankers simply want to live peaceful, prosperous lives like anyone else. But after suffering a hundred years of depraved Palestinian attacks — from massacres, hijackings, and kidnappings to the most calamitous single-day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust — Israelis are done with making excuses for Arab “civilians” who have consistently and overwhelmingly produced and supported the terrorists who lead them and whom they cheer as national heroes.

This long overdue Israeli acknowledgement of near universal Palestinian extremism is not just Jewish paranoia. A survey conducted in Gaza this January by British behavioral scientists in conjunction with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 20% of Gazan civilians seek to expel all Jews from Israel while an additional 27% “merely” want to dismantle the Jewish State and replace it with a Palestinian State under strict sharia law where Jews would be reduced to second-class citizenship. While the pollsters note that 48% said they could live with some sort of two-state solution, the history of Palestinian rejection of American-endorsed Israeli proposals suggests that they won’t accept anything less than a fully independent state established on the 1948 armistice lines, splitting Jerusalem in half, and expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews from Judea and Samaria, while insisting that as many Palestinian “refugees” living in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria for the past 77 years have a “right of return” not just to the prospective Palestinian state, but to the cities their great-grandparents abandoned inside Green Line Israel, itself, such as Jaffa, Acre, Safed, and Jerusalem. That’s a prescription for the destruction of Israel in phases articulated in the PLO’s Ten Point Plan of 1974. Lest anyone doubt that this is what the Palestinian advocates of a two-state solution have in mind, the poll reveals that 90% of the Gazan population is committed to this so-called “right of return.” There couldn’t be a more sobering figure.