Is a two state solution realistic and better for Israel and Palestine ?
The two-state solution at one time was widely viewed as a path to peace - despite the fact that Israel would have received approximately 78% of the land, and the Palestinians, who are about equal in number to Jewish Israelis (without even counting Palestinian external refugees), only 22%.
Yet Israel has crushed any possibility of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state by seizing Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and in order to establish Jewish-only settlements, in violation of international law.
During the so-called “peace process,” Israel increased the number of its settlers to nearly 700,000 in hundreds of illegal West Bank settlements, leaving 167 small islands of land under partial Palestinian control. Because Israel clearly aims to continue its colonization of the West Bank, and no external political forces are able or willing to stop it, the number of settlers is increasing with each passing year.
Today, the Israeli government is no longer pretending to support a two-state solution and is categorically opposed to the creation of a viable Palestinian state, choosing illegal colonization towards permanent apartheid as its official policy.
The tendency of U.S. officials to pay lip-service to the implausible two-state solution, coupled with a refusal to outline accountability and specific consequences for Israel’s ongoing occupation, is a de facto endorsement of the status quo of Israeli occupation and apartheid. That is not the basis for peace built upon justice. Nor is a return to negotiations that merely provide a cover for Israel’s settler-colonial advance in the West Bank.