A two-state solution. That is the magic formula intended to end over 75 years of conflict in the Middle East. Those who pronounce this formula rarely ask: what sort of state would be established alongside Israel?
The Palestinian National Covenant of 1968 envisaged “a secular and democratic state”. Were such a state possible, many Israelis – perhaps a majority – might well be able to live with it (or at least would have done before the atrocities of 7 October). But there is in fact no such “secular and democratic state” in the Middle East with the ironic exception of Israel itself.
The Palestinian Authority is certainly not such a state. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected for a four-year term in 2005. He currently has little support but is in the 19th year of his four-year term. A December survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that, in a free election, just 37 per cent would vote for him, while 58 per cent would vote for Hamas candidate Ismail Haniyeh.
The official position of the Palestinian leadership is for a state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza. But for many, that is merely a first stage in weakening and then eliminating Israel.
In the words of Jenin district governor, Akram Rajoub, in June 2022, “Palestine belongs to the Palestinians from the river to the sea.” Abbas Zaki, a Fatah Central Committee member and close associate of President Abbas, spelt it out on Al-Jazeera in 2011, saying that he wants to “remove” Israel. But in stages. “Israel will come to an end,” he insisted. “But this is not a [stated] policy. You can’t say it to the world. You can say it to yourself.” No doubt many Palestinians disagree. Their voices ought to be heard more loudly.
In the year 2000, Israel’s then prime minister, Ehud Barak, proposed returning the Gaza Strip and 95 per cent of the West Bank to the Palestinians. PLO leader Yasser Arafat rejected it. “You are leading your people,” President Clinton rebuked him, “and the region to a catastrophe.”
In 2008, a similar proposal, put forward by Israeli premier Ehud Olmert, with the added offer of $50bn in economic aid, was rejected by Abbas.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, uprooting her settlements in the process. She had previously withdrawn from southern Lebanon. Western liberals – including, I have to say, myself – assumed that if only Israel were to withdraw to her pre-1967 borders, the result would be peace. Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime Minister, was one of the few who warned that instead of peace there would be rockets. He was proved right.
In Gaza, Hamas won the election in 2006, a year after Israel withdrew. There have been no elections since. Gaza became not a “secular and democratic state”, but a state run by terrorists, dedicated, as its Charter makes plain, not only to the elimination of Israel but also to the elimination of Jews. Indeed, the Hamas cry on 7 October was not “death to Israel”, but “death to the Jews”.
There is little evidence that Palestinians would be content with a state living alongside Israel. Indeed, a December survey by the Palestinian Center indicated that 66 per cent of Palestinians rejected the two-state solution, while 72 per cent in the West Bank welcomed the 7 October atrocities.
This poll was taken in the Gaza Strip in December with a sample size of 1,231, of whom 750 were interviewed in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip.
Support for the two-state solution was in fact 33 per cent in the West Bank, slightly higher than in October when it as 30 per cent. In the Gaza Strip support for a two-state solution was 35 per cent, slightly up from September when it was 34 per cent.
It is hardly surprising if the peace camp in Israel has been gravely weakened and the right wing strengthened, by the consequences of past withdrawals and, more recently, by the Hamas atrocities. A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, of whose International Advisory Board I am a member, shows that just 35 per cent now support a two-state solution, while 52 per cent oppose it, even if this means sacrificing assistance from the United States.
Clearly Israel can have no guarantee that a state established in the West Bank would not be run by terrorists. What guarantee could there be that Hamas, if it came to power, would not invite its Iranian friends into that state for the second stage of the programme, the elimination of Israel?
Israel’s pre-1967 border was 15 miles wide at its narrowest point. How many Londoners would accept a state run by a terrorist organisation whose borders were in Uxbridge, 15 miles from London’s centre?
Netanyahu has said that Israel’s security border must remain at the river Jordan. While this precludes, for the time being at least, a fully independent Palestinian state, it does not preclude a state which is sovereign over all matters except foreign policy and defence. That perhaps is the best that can be hoped for at the present time.
Liberals in the West believe that a settlement of the Palestinian question is a precondition for peace in the Middle East. But Western liberalism has never been a good guide to the harsh realities of the Middle East.
Perhaps the Palestinian issue will be the last one to be settled, not the first. After all, most of the Arab world is now de facto at peace with Israel, not because it has grown to love the Jewish state, but because it realises that it is a permanent feature of the Middle East and an ally against Iran.
The root cause of the Israeli/Palestine conflict has been well isolated by George Deek, an Arab Christian, who is Israel’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan: “The day we accept the Jewish state as it is,” he has said, “all other persecution in the Middle East will cease.”
Unfortunately that day is still some way off.
Sir Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government, King’s College, London, and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Israel Democracy Institute
