‘Two State’ Is Dead
On September 12th of this year, the United Nations voted — over the abstention of ten nations including the United States — to endorse a non-binding resolution in favor of a proposal to formally recognize Palestinian statehood, evincing a pernicious international mythology about the prospect of a peaceable two-state solution to the seven decades of conflict in the Levant. Notwithstanding that various leading organizations for the Palestinian community have rejected or refused to consider similar post-WWII proposals at least five times in that timeframe, in the wake of brutal attacks by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023 — supported broadly by Palestinian sentiment — any serious potential of such a solution is rendered moot.
The State of Play
The product of a UN conference hosted by France and Saudi Arabia earlier in the year, the proposal referred to by the resolution outlines key parameters within which the international community would bring the state into fruition. Among its more important declarations, the proposal details:
We reaffirmed our unwavering support, in accordance with international law and the relevant UN resolutions, to the implementation of the two-State solution, where two democratic and sovereign States, Palestine and Israel, live side by side in peace and security within their secure and recognized borders on the basis of the 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem…We called on the Israeli leadership to issue a clear public commitment to the Two-State Solution, including a sovereign, and viable Palestinian State, to immediately end violence and incitement against Palestinians, to immediately halt all settlement, land grabs and annexation activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, publicly renounce to any annexation project or settlement policy, and put an end to settlers’ violence, including by implementing UNSC resolution 904 and enacting a legislation to punish and deter violent settlers and their illegal actions…We called on both sides to pursue efforts for their respective political parties to adhere to the principles of non-violence, mutual recognition and the two-State solution.
Under the current Trump administration, the US has continued to stymy efforts by the UN to press forward with these and similar proposals with the latest pronouncement from the State Department in stark language labeling such efforts as an “unproductive and ill-timed…publicity stunt.” This reflects a general and consistent posture that views the UN attitude as a non-starter bereft of any particular demand both for the release of dozens of Israeli hostages amid the ongoing war in Gaza and a change of position by the international community in its refusal to insist on a formal recognition by the Palestinian Authority of the State of Israel and its right to exist.
Further, in the present context, the administration’s attitude mirrors Israel’s protest that any move to establish a Palestinian state cannot be viewed as anything other than a reward for the atrocities committed by Hamas against Jewish civilians during its incursion into sovereign Israeli soil on October 7th.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered this protest poignantly in his remarks following the UN vote on the resolution:
You know what message the leaders who recognized a Palestinian state this week sent to the Palestinians? It’s a very clear message. Murdering Jews pays off. Well, I have a message to these leaders: When the most savage terrorists on earth are effusively praising your decision, you didn’t do something right, you did something wrong. Horribly wrong. Your disgraceful decision will encourage terrorism against Jews, and against innocent people everywhere. It will be a mark of shame on all of you. ‘But, but, but, wait a minute, Mr. Prime Minister’, they tell me. ‘Wait a minute. We believe in a two-state solution, where the Jewish state of Israel will live side by side in peace with a Palestinian state.’ There’s only one problem with that. The Palestinians – they don’t believe in this solution. They never have.
Notwithstanding that Hamas themselves declared recognition of a Palestinian state to be “fruits of October 7th”, to fully understand why Netanyahu and now a clear majority of his contemporaries in the Knesset have come inexorably to this conclusion, we must acknowledge the full historical context from which it springs. Therein lies a premise to the notion of a two-state solution that the international community willfully ignores in each iteration of its similar proposals. We shall consider a few of them.
The Backdrop
With the atrocities against Jews at the hands of the Nazi regime still fresh in their minds, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 in November of 1947 formally recommending the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into separate states. This was the first attempt in the context of the UN for what might have become a two-state arrangement after the slipshod carving of the region from the former Ottoman Empire into eventual nation-states following the Great War, which were tragically neither nations nor properly constituted states in a Westphalian model.
Despite the promise of a home for Jews by Balfour and even before the declaration of the Jewish State of Israel six months after 181, the terms of conflict were set in motion with the Arab Higher Committee, along with regional Arab leaders, rejecting outright any claim to the land by Jews. The conflict with neighboring Arab forces, which had already begun after the vote on 181, escalated immediately when David Ben-Gurion read to the public the formal declaration of the State of Israel ushering in the Arab-Israeli War.
Later that year, UN Mediator Count Bernadette put forward his plan in two iterations for cessation of conflict, a reconfigured two-state map, and return of Arab refugees to their homes. The Count remarked of his proposal that:
…no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
Arab leaders rejected this second entreaty on similar grounds with particular emphasis on opposing the potential for (re)establishing a Jewish state — which had already been recognized by the US and the Soviet Union — given its insistence on continued Jewish immigration to Palestine. This would prove a recurring theme throughout numerous attempts at compromise in the conflict.
A decade and a half later saw the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 – while the West Bank was still under Jordanian occupation. It is important to remember that the Palestine the PLO intended to liberate was Israel. On June 18, 1967, Israeli government offered to exchange territories captured in the Six Day War for peace that ultimately was rejected by the Arab League via the Khartoum Resolution which declared in no uncertain terms that the League would never acquiesce to existence of the State of Israel.
After successive wars in the following decades, neighboring Arab leaders rallied around the only credible proposal put forth from the Palestinian perspective. Drafted in 1981 by Saudi Crowned Prince Fahd, the plan proffered a number of promising provisions that laid ground for lasting peace. Conspicuously omitted, however, was a formal recognition of the State of Israel. Further complicating consideration was the intractable demand by Arabs of the “right of return” of all Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. But by then what little standing this notion my have had with Israeli leaders and many in the West had already been dashed by the reality of guerrilla warfare within Israeli-controlled towns during the Six-Days War at the hands of Fatah and other Arab paramilitaries.
A decade further amid intermittent skirmishes and routine terror attacks on Israeli soil by Palestinian actors, the Oslo Accords emerged from secret negotiations in Norway between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and PLO President Yasser Arafat. Oslo marked the most comprehensive stipulations for peace since Resolution 181 which enshrined terms for resolution set forth in Resolutions 242 and 338. Notably, it laid an expectation of an eventual State of Palestine, including recognition of the State of Israel by the PLO in stark contrast to the prohibitions in the Khartoum fifteen years earlier.
However, the terms were vigorously opposed by the broader Palestinian community and ultimately abandoned after the assassination of Rabin in 1995. Though the “right of return” was included as a term of negotiation, no geographic details west of the 1967 lines were discussed given the primary focus of reorganization of the West Bank into security Areas A, B, and C.
In the final years, respectively, of the Clinton administration and then 20 years later in the first Trump administration, Palestinian leaders rejected conditional offers of a Palestinian state expressly for the lack of “right of return” to areas inside Israel.
The Poison Pill
In their seminal work War of Return, Schwartz and Wilf argue convincingly that this uncompromising demand for return has been and continues to be the sine qua non in any negotiation for Palestinian statehood to the degree that statehood takes second chair to return. They sum this sentiment:
There are no op-eds, no speeches, no NGOs in Palestinian society taking a position against the Palestinian ethos of return…Palestinian return is not a bargaining chip in the service of a greater goal of independence and statehood. It is actually the greater goal itself. If return were truly just a bargaining chip, it could have and would have been bargained long ago for a Palestinian state. Rather, it is a Palestinian state that is repeatedly bargained away in order to keep fighting for return. Palestinians have constantly rejected any formulation, agreement, or settlement that might foreclose this option of return, even at the price of statehood.
To that end, Palestinian negotiators have proven deft at mastering sleight of hand with words, oftentimes choosing a definition for essential words clearly not intended by the other parties to the negotiation. In the context of return, Western powers have either willfully or unwittingly assumed in numerous negotiations that “return” was understood by Palestinians as an ambiguous reference to those who may elect to return on their own volition, and even then only generally within the borders of Israel.
But as Schwartz and Wilf reveal, the Palestinians’ strategic meaning in the use of “return” has always meant expressly the return of all refugees from the War of 1948, including their descendants, not merely to their towns and villages of origin, but to their previous homes.
Setting aside the impracticality of this stipulation given that generations have been born since the war, the impetus for the flight of Palestinians from Israeli territory, contrary to popular belief, was largely self-initiated. The vast majority of the refugees were not forcibly expelled from Israeli communities.
Moreover, those who were forcibly expelled were the result of a defensive military response to the attacks from Arab forces both outside of Israel and within the communities inside its internationally recognized borders in 1948. Historian Ben Morris details this poignantly:
The Jewish community in 1948 had two possibilities: Either that the Arabs would commit genocide against them—and I have no doubt that an Arab victory in 1948 would have ended with mass slaughter of Jews—or the Jews, to defend them-selves, would expel Arabs, or at least prevent those who fled and were expelled from returning. The Jews chose not to be massacred, and rightly so…What happened here was a struggle between two peoples who both claimed the right to the same land.
Compounding the impracticality of return is that the upper end of estimates for refugees from the war is generally pegged at around 700,000. That number has to-date ballooned to nearly 6 million “refugees”. Enter the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
If the demand for “right of return” is the fire raging at the center of the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, UNRWA is the gasoline ever dripping upon it. A creation of UN Resolution 302 (1949), UNRWA was originally conceived as a vehicle to exclusively address the plight of refugees from the war through direct financial assistance, food, housing, job training, and more in what was officially a temporary agency to be renewed annually until the UN determined the problem solved. Fast-forward three quarters of a century later we find that UNRWA is one of the longest standing among UN agencies with an annual funding stream largely from Western powers of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the key detail in the formation of UNRWA, unique to Palestinian refugees among the dozens of similar refugee aid programs in the last century, is its perpetuation of refugee status to successive generations.
What’s more, there exists no mechanism in UNRWA’s governance to track the particular circumstances of each refugee and therefore to remove any who have no economic need or who have accepted permanent citizenship in other nations. Further, given the average estimated fertility within the Palestinian community of approximately 3.8 births per woman in 2019, this means even with the most conservative estimates UNRWA refugee rolls, left unchecked, will explode to nearly 8 million by 2035.
It comes as little surprise that numerous suggestions and proposals in recent decades to curtail, reform or altogether dismantle UNRWA operations have been met with reflexive rejection from Palestinian and Arab leaders, in some cases tinged with a hint of ultimatum. The end result of this posture is that Palestinian actions in favor of full return speak so loudly, no words spoken to the contrary can be heard.
Rudimentary demographics, then, prescribe a lesson which was learned most recently in various European nations in an attempt to peaceably integrate refugees from war-torn Syria. Even if Israel agreed to integrate a fraction of the millions of UNRWA-registered refugees into Arab communities west of the Green Line, nothing good could possibly come of such an enterprise.
Further complicating the administration of UNRWA is that it is a United Nations agency in name only. With the exception of a few top UN brass, UNRWA is almost exclusively managed by hardened Palestinian operatives and is the largest employer of Palestinians second only to the PA. That management includes full scale infusion of anti-Israeli, pro-terror propaganda in the form of textbooks at Palestinian-run schools and job training materials. In one fourth-grade textbook, for example, children run through math drills by counting (favorably) suicide terrorists. This harsh reality became all too real on October 7th two years ago.
The Gaza Strip, relinquished to Palestinian control by Israel in 2005, must be viewed as a trial run for what full “right of return” might look like with UNRWA intact. Gaza was captured soon after by one of the most radical terror groups, Hamas, in 2007 in a violent coup against the Palestinian Authority. PA officials were murdered along with their families, some even thrown off rooftops. Hamas then proceeded to divert nearly all international aid, including resources from UNRWA, into munitions, infrastructure, and propaganda for war against Israel. All of this was perpetuated with control of a population in the Strip of roughly 2 million.
The collective conclusion from Netanyahu, the Knesset, the Trump administration and others begs the obvious question. Acquiescence by Israel to a two-state solution including the Palestinian demand of “right of return” for all UNRWA registered refugees would be national suicide. Why would any nation agree to that?
