JONATHAN KUTTAB’S Is the Two-State Solution Obsolete? is an important, clear-eyed contribution to the conversation about the future of Israel-Palestine. Kuttab directly and with a forgiving spirit addresses what is at stake, making clear why thinking beyond the two-state solution paradigm is necessary for anyone who seeks a just and equitable path forward in the region.
As he writes, the “facts on the ground” are such that the geography of the two-state solution is untenable. He primarily discusses the emotional and social toll of uprooting the settlement enterprise, which is made up of more than 700,000 Jewish settlers living scattered across the West Bank. Israel has been building the infrastructure of a one-state reality for decades now, infrastructure that advances de facto annexation, suburbanizing settlements in the Jewish imagination, and fragmenting huge swaths of Palestinian territory. Jewish Jerusalem and its settlements, roadways, and municipal systems sprawl into the boundaries of Ramallah, Bethlehem, the Jordan Valley, and Palestinian East Jerusalem.
Currently, Israel is working on highway, housing, and water projects that are literally destroying and tunneling through mountains—and communities—in the landscape around Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. This is not to mention the unending settler encroachment—in the past month alone, there have been four new settler outpost projects just in the South Hebron Hills. These steps are not easily undone, and with each construction project, Israel’s pseudo “two-state commitment” becomes more and more deeply embedded in an oppressive and unequal one-state reality.
It is important to articulate that the two-state solution is no longer possible due to facts on the ground, and its failure gives solid justification to why something else is needed. But it is also important to emphasize what has been allowed by the two-state solution paradigm—namely, that stubborn international alignment with this paradigm and Israel’s professed support of it has given Israel a pass for the horribly unequal and violent one-state reality that it upholds and propagates. The facts on the ground are not neutral. Each fact, each change in the landscape, is a seizure of land, is a home demolition, is a loss of access to agricultural land and resources. It is a violent incursion on Palestinian livelihood at the hands of the Israeli authorities or at the hands of settlers who act with impunity as emissaries of the state.
The direction forward is quite clear: equality and shared recognition of stakes and needs. The specifics of that endpoint are not made clear, nor do they need to be to shift the dominant thinking. The untenability of the two-state solution paradigm, coupled with how violent and destructive it has been on Palestinian livelihood, is reason enough to start imagining other possibilities. For Israelis as well, maintaining an unjust one-state reality demands an ever-expanding military-industrial complex. This holds the Jewish-Israeli population in a perpetual state of war that recruits all its youth into the fight as well as foments an obsession with security that feeds racism and erodes democracy. Hopefully, Kuttab’s thoughtful opening of imaginative possibilities can push the discourse in a more just and peaceful direction.
Oriel Eisner, an American Israeli living in Jerusalem, is co-director of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence.
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