Two States – and Then What?

There is a number in the latest Palestinian public-opinion poll that sounds wonderfully encouraging: 56%.

That is the share of Palestinians who, according to one increasingly common reading, support a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.

Wonderful. Someone alert the Nobel Committee.

The August 2026 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) is an unusually valuable window into Palestinian opinion after the Gaza war. Taken as a whole, it tells a fascinating story. Palestinians have changed their minds substantially about how to pursue their national goals. What is far less clear is whether they have changed their minds about what those goals ultimately are.

Start with those two states.

PSR first asks the straightforward question: Do you support or oppose the two-state solution? No details, no embellishment.

Then PSR asks a different question. Respondents are presented with three possible arrangements: “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders,” “a confederation between the two states,” and “a single state with equal rights for both sides.”

Given those three choices, 56% prefer the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, compared with 14% for a confederation and 10% for a single state with equal rights. Another 20% choose none of them.

That is an interesting result.

It just is not the same result.

If I ask whether you want chicken for dinner and you say no, and then ask whether you would prefer chicken, sardines, or boiled cabbage, your selection of chicken does not retroactively become an enthusiastic endorsement of chicken.

More importantly, neither question asks what Israelis actually need to know:

Would Palestinians accept two states as the permanent end of the conflict?

That is where things get more complicated.

The most dramatic development in the August poll has little to do with two states.

It is the collapse in Palestinian confidence in armed struggle.

In September 2023, just weeks before October 7, 53% of Palestinians said armed struggle was the most effective way to end the Israeli occupation and establish a Palestinian state. Only 20% chose negotiations.

Today the numbers have almost reversed. Forty-four percent choose negotiations and only 27% armed struggle.

That is a remarkable transformation.

But there is a problem with interpreting it as evidence that Palestinians have embraced peace.

Negotiations are a method. So is armed struggle.

Neither tells us what the negotiator or the fighter hopes to achieve.

And on that question, Palestinian attitudes have been remarkably durable.

For years, PSR has asked Palestinians to rank four “vital national goals.” One option is “Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Another is “Obtain the right of return to refugees to their 1948 towns and villages.”

This is not a vague question about sympathy for refugees or compensation. It says their 1948 towns and villages – places overwhelmingly located inside Israel.

And roughly three in ten Palestinians have consistently chosen that as their first national priority. Since 2012, the figure has remained remarkably stable, ranging from 28% to 33%.

In the August 2026 poll, PSR reports that 43% identify Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as the highest priority, while 28% prioritize the right of return.

Think about what that means.

The question does not allow respondents to say that ending the occupation and returning refugees are equally important. They have to rank them.

In 2022, 40% said the highest national goal should be ending the Israeli occupation in the territories occupied in 1967 and building a Palestinian state. But 32% chose return to the refugees’ 1948 towns and villages instead.

In other words, nearly a third of Palestinians were explicitly saying that return to homes inside what is now Israel was a higher national priority than ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state.

And when respondents were asked for their second goal, another 37% chose return.

That is not a footnote to this conflict.

It may be the conflict.

There is a comforting argument one hears frequently in discussions of the peace process.

Yes, Palestinians continue to speak about a right of return. But everyone serious understands that millions of Palestinian refugees are not actually going to move into Israel. Palestinian negotiators understand this. American negotiators understand this. Arab governments understand this. Various negotiating rounds contemplated compensation, resettlement in a Palestinian state and third countries, and some limited number entering Israel with Israeli consent.

Perhaps Palestinian negotiators do understand all of that.

Fortunately, PSR has asked Palestinians something quite close to the real thing.

In 2013, respondents were presented with a detailed refugee compromise modeled on the Clinton Parameters and Geneva Initiative. Refugees would have unrestricted residence in the Palestinian state and territory transferred to it. Residence in Israel, third countries, and existing host countries would depend on those states’ decisions. Israel would determine how many refugees it admitted. All refugees would receive compensation.

The result?

Forty-six percent supported the compromise. Fifty-two percent opposed it.

The previous year, 41% supported it and 56% opposed it.

PSR’s longer historical series is more revealing still. Between 2003 and 2013, this sort of refugee compromise never received majority support in the surveys reported there.

That does not prove Palestinians will never compromise.

It does mean we should stop treating the compromise as something the Palestinian public has already made.

Which brings us to the Board of Peace.

The Board’s ambition extends considerably beyond arranging a ceasefire. Its roadmap talks about Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian governance, reconstruction, economic development, demilitarization, and eventually a credible path toward Palestinian self-determination and statehood.

This is an admirable objective.

But there is a conspicuous issue missing from the agenda: the refugees.

Not the Gazans displaced during this war. I mean the descendants of the refugees from 1948 and their claim to return to towns and villages inside Israel.

That omission is puzzling because the whole project depends, at some level, on a simple assumption:

Not merely a place where they live until the next war. Not a territory whose political future remains subordinated to an unresolved claim over Jaffa, Ashkelon, or the communities from which their families came.

A home.

The territory in which Palestinian national aspirations can be realized while Israel remains Israel on the other side of the border.

If that is what most Palestinians want, then we have the foundation for something enormously important.

But if a large portion of the population believes that Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the West Bank is only one stage of a continuing claim to territory and homes inside Israel, then we have solved a very different problem.

We may have figured out how to rebuild Gaza without figuring out how to end the conflict.

And that matters because the Board of Peace is not merely trying to stop the shooting. It is trying to build a sustainable future for the people of Gaza.

There is little point in spending billions of dollars building permanent homes without knowing whether the people who will live in them regard Gaza as their permanent home.

What did the war actually change?

The latest polling does contain reasons for cautious optimism.

Only 20% now say Hamas won the Gaza war; 60% say neither side won. Half of Palestinians agree that armed resistance failed to protect Palestinians or end the occupation and instead brought destruction. Among Gazans, 65% agree with that assessment.

And negotiations have gone from the preference of one Palestinian in five before October 7 to the preferred strategy of more than two in five today.

That matters.

Taken together with the historical polling, it suggests something important about Palestinian attitudes toward violence:

When Palestinians believe violence works, support for it tends to rise. When they conclude that it has failed, support falls.

That is good news.

But it is not necessarily the news we think it is.

The Palestinian public may have reconsidered the road without reconsidering the destination.

And that distinction should matter enormously to Israelis deciding how much risk to take for peace.

I am not arguing that Palestinians do not want peace.

I am arguing something simultaneously more modest and more important:

We don’t know.

At least not from the statistics normally invoked to prove it.

We know how many Palestinians support the vaguely defined “two-state solution.”

We know how many, when given three choices, prefer “the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders” to “a confederation between the two states” or “a single state with equal rights for both sides.”

We know whether they currently think negotiations or armed struggle is more effective.

But those are not quite the questions on which the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns.

The question is something like this:

Ask that question.

Ask it in Gaza.

Ask it in the West Bank.

Ask it repeatedly.

If a clear Palestinian majority says yes, Israelis should know that. It would be one of the most consequential findings in the history of the conflict.

And if a clear majority says no, Israelis should know that too.

Because “Do you support two states?” and “Are you prepared to end the conflict with Israel?” sound like the same question.

After a century of conflict, it might be worth checking.