There is no “two-state solution.” Can we stop pretending?

Nearly 70 years ago, then-British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly observed that it wasn’t fair to call the Arab-Israeli situation a problem, since by definition problems have solutions. Of course that was just a rhetorical dodge, and no more accurate when it comes to math and science than about global affairs. But the dark joke still resonates: Macmillan and his transatlantic pal Dwight Eisenhower were among the first world leaders to confront the Middle East dilemma by kicking the can down the road, as Mitt Romney didn’t exactly say in 2012.

With Benjamin Netanyahu’s government waging an endless war of annihilation in Gaza — now with the explicit goal of reconquering the entire territory — and the Israeli Knesset on record as favoring the annexation of the entire West Bank, global rhetoric about a peaceful solution and Palestinian self-determination seems increasingly disconnected from reality. So why do elected political leaders and mainstream commentators throughout the Western liberal-democratic world keep repeating Clinton-era cliches about a “two-state solution,” with all the fervor of a nine-year-old resisting the truth about Santa Claus?

Among international relations experts and foreign policy professionals, it’s now an open secret, unremarkable in itself, that the long-promised solution in which some kind of viable independent Palestinian nation exists alongside the Jewish state of Israel is somewhere between unlikely and impossible. In a recent column for Foreign Policy, Harvard professor Stephen Walt argues that the current crisis caused by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent military campaigns has not dramatically altered the overall political calculus of the Middle East and adds, almost in passing, “If, as is likely, the two-state solution is no longer feasible, then Israelis, Palestinians, and the rest of the world will have to explore other visions.”

Walt is in no sense an outlier here; he’s an authoritative voice of what we might call left-liberal “realist” foreign policy opinion. Furthermore, that sentence was cannily constructed to encompass a strikingly large universe of agreement, which extends from Netanyahu and the Israeli right-wing settler movement all the way to Hamas, a likely majority of Palestinians and the Western pro-Palestinian left (“from the river to the sea”), as well as the not-quite-defeated theocratic regime in Iran.

For that matter, it seems to include the Trump administration, at least for the moment; divining the president’s actual views on any subject from one day to the next is a task for necromancers. It certainly includes Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel, who recently observed that if French President Emmanuel Macron wants a Palestinian state so badly, he should carve one out on the Côte-d’Azur. (That a profoundly idiotic and small-minded evangelical zealot like Huckabee was inflicted on the people of Israel and Palestine feels like an act of divine retribution worthy of the Old Testament.)

To clarify the point, all those people (and many more besides) would endorse the general thrust of Walt’s sentence: The two-state solution, as envisioned in the bygone days of the 1993 Oslo agreement, is a dead issue. But they have dramatically different ideas, to say the least, about what “other visions” must now be explored and what kind of one-state solution might lie ahead. For Netanyahu and the Israeli right, the vision is clear enough, although whether the hegemonic Jewish state they desire will include all of Gaza and all of the West Bank, and whether it will require the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population or just its apartheid-style subjugation, remain unanswered questions.

Hamas and its supporters have undeniably genocidal intentions toward Israeli Jews, however those may occasionally be finessed; it doesn’t help the Palestinian cause to evade or sugarcoat that fact. (It doesn’t help the Israeli cause, by the way, to avoid the abundant evidence that Netanyahu tolerated and even supported the Hamas regime in Gaza in the interest of his long-term strategy — that guy has a diabolical ability to turn his most disastrous failures to his personal advantage.) When it comes to the pro-Palestinian left in Europe and North America, however, the picture is more complicated and it’s crucial to keep competing factors in view.

Here’s a news flash: Student radicals at Harvard or UCLA or Evergreen State can lapse into simplistic slogans and naive ideology. Individuals and groups with unsavory agendas can try to cannibalize such movements from within. Is there antisemitism on the left? Sure, Chuck Schumer; I’ve encountered it myself. But it’s entirely mendacious for the Trump administration or the Democratic leadership or anyone else to depict the rising international outrage at Israel’s horrendous war crimes in Gaza as a manifestation of anti-Jewish hatred or support for terrorist violence. Fortunately, that insidious propaganda campaign appears to be collapsing; even the moonbats of the MAGAsphere are in turmoil, and American liberals and progressives at ground level (including a large proportion of the Jewish community) have once again left Beltway Democrats far behind.

As Walt also mentions in passing, the international left is producing the only serious vestiges of a long-term vision for Israeli-Palestinian peace, such as the forthcoming book “From Apartheid to Democracy,” by Israeli journalist Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and human rights activist Sarah Leah Whitson. I haven’t gotten my copy yet, but as I understand it, they outline a plan for a federalist, democratic republic with guaranteed rights for both Jews and Arabs, somewhat along the lines of pre-breakup Yugoslavia. I’m sure that summary doesn’t capture the depth and complexity of their argument, but even to conjure such a possibility, we have to imagine a much better future: Israel after Netanyahu, America after Trump, an international reconstruction of Gaza, a Palestinian nation-in-waiting that has gotten over Hamas.

Does that sound realistic, given our exceptionally bleak current frame of reality? Not exactly: No one who currently holds political power, whether in Israel or the Arab world or America or anywhere else, is willing to advocate a one-state democratic solution for all the people who now live in the historic territory of Palestine. I will not live to see such a thing come to pass, and I doubt my children or my grandchildren (should I ever have any of those) will see it either. But if I had to guess, it’s the kind of idea that Zohran Mamdani would endorse, along with the hundreds of thousands of young, multiethnic New Yorkers he galvanized, and at least it represents a genuine attempt to move forward from the world after Oct. 7, the world after the Trumpiam counterrevolution, the world after the ghastly collective moral failure of Gaza.

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Contrast that dewy-eyed and perhaps impossible vision of the future with the warmed-over vision out of the past now being retailed by Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western democratic leaders who have decided to recognize a Palestinian state that does not exist and probably never will. These people are well-informed and not idiots; we must assume they are aware of the opinions expressed by Walt and any number of other actual experts: The two-state solution imagined 32 years ago in the Oslo accords was fanciful then — when 60 percent of the land in the West Bank was left in Israeli control, and the Palestinian population was split up into 165 non-contiguous chunks of territory, often called “bantustans” — and is entirely fictional now, as illegal Israeli settlements have replaced Arab villages, one at a time, year after year after year.

Maybe it’s admirable, on some symbolic level, that France, Britain, Canada and a bunch of smaller Western nations have broken ranks with the U.S. and, several decades too late, want to legitimize the Palestinian Authority, which is at best a dysfunctional pseudo-state and at worst an Israeli subcontractor. Nice try, I guess, but I’m not buying it.

These fading leaders of the Old World, like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and the editorial board of the New York Times and so many others I could name on our side of the ocean, are clinging to the last doctrines of a dying faith whose last bishop, it would seem, was President Joe Biden, tragicomic hero of a poorly-reviewed melodrama.

Call that faith neoliberalism, call it liberal democracy, call it the Washington consensus or the postwar order or what you will. Those raised within its monastic orders still believe, or pretend to believe, that their version of normalcy is the natural order of things and will somehow be restored, even after a fascist coup in America, after all the death in Gaza, after all the other outrages too painful to list. At least Harold Macmillan understood, to use the parlance of his time, that history was a cruel mistress and was sure to leave him behind.