PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as U.S. President Bill Clinton stands between them after the signing of the Israel-PLO peace accord at the White House in Washington on September 13, 1993.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The story so far: Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and the latter’s continuing war on Gaza have brought the Palestine question back to the fore of West Asia. As the war has destroyed much of Gaza and killed 36,000 of its people, the world has also seen more countries voicing strong support for a future Palestine state. Recently, three European countries, Spain, Ireland and Norway, recognised the Palestine state. Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, say there wouldn’t be lasting peace in the region unless the Palestine question is resolved. An internationally recognised solution to the crisis is what’s called the two-state solution.

What’s the two-state solution?

The short answer is simple: divide historical Palestine, the land between the Jordan River on the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west, into an Arab state and a Jewish state. But the long answer is complicated. Israel, a Jewish state, was created in Palestine in 1948. But a Palestine state is not yet a reality. Palestinian territories have been under Israeli occupation since 1967. So, a two-state solution today means the creation of a legitimate, sovereign Palestine state, which enjoys the full rights like any other nation state under the UN Charter.

What are the origins?

The roots of the two-state solution go back to the 1930s when the British ruled over Palestine. In 1936, the British government appointed a commission headed by Lord William Robert Peel (known as the Peel Commission) to investigate the causes of Arab-Jewish clashes in Palestine. A year later, the commission proposed a partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. At that time, Jews accounted for some 28% of Palestine’s population. According to the Peel Commission proposal, the West Bank, Gaza and Negev desert would make up the Arab state, while much of Palestine’s coast and the fertile Galilee region would be part of the Jewish state. Arabs rejected the proposal.

After the Second World War, the U.N. Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) put forward another partition plan. It proposed that Palestine be divided into three territories — a Jewish state, an Arab state and an international territory (Jerusalem). Jews, who made up roughly 32% of Palestine’s population, were to have 56% of the Palestine land as per the UNSCOP plan. The partition plan was adopted in the U.N. General Assembly (Resolution 181). Arabs rejected the plan (India voted against it), while the Zionist leadership of Israeli settlers in Palestine accepted it. And on May 14, 1948, Zionists unilaterally declared the state of Israel. This triggered the first Arab-Israeli war. And by the time an armistice agreement was achieved in 1949, Israel had captured some 22% more territories than what the U.N. had proposed.

How did it get international legitimacy?

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria (Israel continues to control all territories except the Sinai which it returned to Egypt after the 1978 Camp David Accords). Palestine nationalism emerged stronger in the 1960s, under the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The PLO initially demanded the “liberation” of the whole of Palestine, but later recognised the two-state solution based on the 1967 border. Israel initially rejected any Palestinian claim to the land and continued to term the PLO as a “terrorist” organisation. But in the Camp David Accords, which followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which Egypt and Syria surprised Israel with an attack, it agreed to the Framework for Peace in the Middle East agreement. As part of the Framework, Israel agreed to establish an autonomous self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and implement the U.N. Resolution 242, which has demanded Israel pull back from all the territories it captured in 1967. The Framework laid the foundation for the Oslo Accords, which, signed in 1993 and 1995, formalised the two-state solution. As part of the Oslo process, a Palestinian National Authority, a self-governing body, was formed in the West Bank and Gaza and the PLO was internationally recognised as a representative body of the Palestinians. The promise of Oslo was the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state which would live next to the Israeli state in peace. However, this promise has never been materialised.

What are the hurdles to achieving the two-state solution?

The first setback for the Oslo process was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the accords, in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist. Rabin’s Labour party was defeated in the subsequent elections and the right-wing Likud, under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, came to power. The rise of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that opposed the Oslo Accords saying the PLO made huge concessions to the Israelis, also contributed to the derailment of the peace process. After the collapse of the Oslo process in the 1990s, there were multiple diplomatic efforts to revive the two-state plan, but none of these made progress towards achieving the goal.

Multiple reasons could be identified for this failure. But there are specific structural factors that make the two-state solution unachievable, at least for now. One is the boundary. Israel doesn’t have a clearly demarcated border. It is essentially an expansionist state. In 1948, it captured more territories than it was promised by the UN. In 1967, it expanded further by taking the whole of historical Palestine under its control. From the 1970s, Israel has been building illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories. While Palestinians say their future state should be based on the 1967 border, Israel is not willing to make any commitments.

Two, the status of settlers. Roughly 7,00,000 Jewish settlers are now living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If Israel is to withdraw to the 1967 border, they will have to pull back the settlers. The settlers are now a powerful political class in Israeli society and no Prime Minister can pull them back without facing political consequences. Three, the status of Jerusalem. Palestinians say East Jerusalem, which hosts Al Aqsa, Islam’s third holiest mosque, should be the capital of their future Palestinian state, while Israel says the whole of Jerusalem, which hosts the Western Wall, the holiest place in Judaism, is Israel’s “eternal capital”. Four, the right of refugees to return to their homes. Some 7,00,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. According to international law, they have a right to return to their homes. Israel says it won’t allow the Palestinian refugees to return.

While these are the structural factors that make the two-state solution complicated, on the ground, Israel’s rightwing leadership shows no willingness to make any concessions. Israel wants to continue the status quo — the status quo of occupation. The Palestinians want to break that status quo.

Palestinians carry mock large keys during a mass ceremony to commemorate the Nakba Day, Arabic for catastrophe, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Wednesday, May 15, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

As Israel keeps up its campaign against Hamas, Arab leaders are mapping out ways to support post-war Gaza, placing one major condition on their involvement: a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

Major obstacles lie ahead in gaining the support of both U.S. President Joe Biden and the Israeli government, which is currently led by hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch opponent of the two-state solution.

But the Arab quintet of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Egypt have made clear that their financial and political support, which would be crucial to the future of the shattered Gaza Strip, comes at a cost.

“We have coordinated on this closely with the Palestinians. It needs to be truly a pathway to a Palestinian state,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told a World Economic Forum meeting in Riyadh last month.

“Without a real political pathway… it would be very difficult for Arab countries to discuss how we are going to govern.”

It is not the first time Arab leaders have come together to chart a path towards a two-state solution, the cherished goal that they believe could defuse tensions in West Asia and help usher in a period of prosperity.

But with the Israel-Hamas war hobbling regional economies and spilling over into neighbouring countries, there is both urgency and opportunity.

Last month, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, European and Arab Foreign Ministers met to discuss how to advance the two-state solution.

Gaza will also be top of the agenda when leaders from the 22-member Arab League meet in Bahrain on Thursday.

Two goals

Arab countries are “pressuring the United States to achieve two things: establish a Palestinian state and recognising it in the United Nations”, said an Arab diplomat who is familiar with the talks.

“What is currently hindering these intensive efforts is the continuation of the war and Netanyahu’s intransigent rejection,” said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Arab leaders “have been trying to work with the Biden administration to mutually support the so-called day after” plan, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Britain’s Chatham House think tank.

Central to their plan is the reform of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to clear the way for a reunified administration in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The PA has had almost no influence over Gaza since Hamas militants wrestled control of the territory from the Fatah movement of President Mahmud Abbas in 2007.

Six months of Israel-Hamas war: revisiting 10 key moments in pictures

At dawn on October 7, at the end of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrate Israel from Gaza by land, sea and air. They kill civilians in the streets, in their homes and at a desert music festival, and attack troops in army bases. They bring around 250 hostages back to Gaza, some of them now dead. Israel vows to destroy Hamas and begins bombing Gaza.

On October 13, Israel calls on civilians in northern Gaza to move south within 24 hours, declaring the north, which includes Gaza City, a war zone. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee to the south of the Gaza Strip as entire districts in the north are razed to the ground.

On October 27, Israeli tanks roll into Gaza at the start of a ground offensive. The troops fight their way towards Gaza City.

On November 15, Israeli troops launch a night-time raid on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s biggest medical facility where bodies had been piling up after food, fuel and anaesthetics ran out. The raid causes an international outcry. Israel claims Hamas is running a command centre below the hospital, which the armed group denies.

This satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies shows an overview Al Shifa hospital and surroundings in Gaza City on April 1, 2024. In March, Israel again targets the hospital in an intensive two-week operation that leaves hundreds dead and the complex in ruins.

On November 24, a week-long truce between Israel and Hamas negotiated in talks mediated by Qatar goes into effect. Hamas releases 80 Israeli hostages over seven days in return for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Twenty-five other hostages, mainly Thai farm workers, are released outside of the deal.
In this photo provided by the Israeli Army, Emily Hand, a released hostage, reunites with her father on November 26, 2023, in Israel.

As part of week-long truce, Israel allows more aid into Gaza during the pause but the humanitarian situation remains dire. When the war resumes, Israel expands its actions into southern Gaza. Seen here are Palestinian children running as they flee from Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on November 6, 2023.

On January 12, the US and Britain launch air strikes on targets in rebel-held Yemen after weeks of attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Iran-backed Houthis acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The strikes add to fears of a regional war.

In an interim ruling on January 26 in a case brought by South Africa, the International Court of Justice finds it “plausible” that Israel’s acts could amount to “genocide”. The world’s top court orders Israel to do “everything” to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering a halt to the war.

On February 29, Israeli forces open fire on desperate residents of northern Gaza who rush towards a convoy of food aid trucks, saying they believed they “posed a threat”. Gaza’s health ministry says 115 people were shot dead and hundreds wounded in what it calls a “massacre”.

At dawn on October 7, at the end of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrate Israel from Gaza by land, sea and air. They kill civilians in the streets, in their homes and at a desert music festival, and attack troops in army bases. They bring around 250 hostages back to Gaza, some of them now dead. Israel vows to destroy Hamas and begins bombing Gaza.

Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City, Gaza Strip on March 25, 2024.

The US, Jordan and other countries begin airdropping food into Gaza. On March 15, the first food shipment along a new maritime corridor arrives in Gaza.

On April 2, seven aid workers from the US charity World Central Kitchen are killed in an Israeli strike when leaving a warehouse in central Gaza where they had just unloaded a portion of food aid from a ship. The dead are Australian, British, Palestinian, Polish and US-Canadian.

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