Could a Holy Land confederation offer a path to peace?

“When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next,” US president Joe Biden insists. “And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution.” His injunction is an important corrective to Israel’s insistence that the Gaza war began with the bloody events of October 7th and can be ended simply with the extermination of Hamas.

Nor will it be “over” without a framework that tackles the source of enduring Palestinian grievance, brutal occupation and denial of sovereignty, one that also provides allies to Palestine with a justification for engagement on their own part in any path to peace. US secretary of state Antony Blinken was told in no uncertain terms last week in his visits to the Palestine Authority, Iraq and Jordan that Arab/Palestinian co-operation in administering a postwar Gaza is conceivable only in the context of addressing the long-term statehood issue.

Biden’s advocacy of the “two-state” solution echoes the vast majority of international players, from the EU to the UN – a revival of a position long central to international Middle East diplomacy sidelined by the prolonged absence of any real peace process. It has long been the aspiration of the Palestinian leaderships, the PLO and, to a lesser degree, Hamas, and of Israeli governments pre-Netanyahu. The idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel always ran counter to his party Likud’s vision of Israel extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river.

The two-state solution involves dividing that land into two independent, sovereign Israeli and Palestinian democracies existing side by side. The alternatives are the status quo; an independent Israel dominating militarily the West Bank and Gaza, hinted at this week by Natanyahu, which would be a recipe for endless conflict and poverty; or a unitary, binational state covering the whole territory in which both communities share power, a formula which emerged from the failure of the Oslo accords in 1995 and which has steadily gained favour among Palestinians.

World Central Kitchen resumes operations in Gaza

---

Antony Blinken calls on Hamas to accept Israel’s Gaza truce proposal

---

Israel-Hamas war: Hamas delegation will visit Egyptian capital Cairo on Monday for talks

---

‘A red cross puts a target on you’: A surgeon on Israeli strikes on Gaza’s medical system

---

The late Palestinian academic Edward Said called Oslo ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles’, whose purpose was to provide Israel with security, not to give Palestinians a state

Oslo may have seen the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO in preparation for peace negotiations, and the creation of the Palestinian National Authority to manage Palestinian self-governance over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it offered no path to statehood.

The late Palestinian academic Edward Said called Oslo “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles”, whose purpose was to provide Israel with security, not to give Palestinians a state. The Oslo “Declaration of Principles” doesn’t make a single reference to a Palestinian state, self-determination, or sovereignty.

In reality, moreover, ordinary people on both sides have lost faith in the two-state solution. A 2022 poll for the Israel Democracy Institute think-tank recorded support from only 32 per cent of Israeli Jews, down in five years from 47 per cent. Israeli Arabs, a fifth of the population, still endorsed the idea, although support was down from 87 per cent in 2017 to 71 per cent. Among Palestinians, the decline is even more dramatic. A June 2023 survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found that just 28 per cent still support a two-state solution.

[ Too many people are in denial about events of October 7th, says Israeli ambassador ]

Critics of the single state option warn that such is the gulf in trust between Israelis and Palestinians, massively reinforced by the terrible events of the past month, that sharing power in common institutions would be inconceivable.

For Israelis, the population mathematics make the single-state option particularly difficult. Currently Jews make up 74 per cent of Israel’s nine million population. The population of the West Bank and Gaza is close to 5.5 million, which, when added to the 2 million Palestinians living in Israel, makes nearly 7.5 million, or a significant majority. A permanent minority status for Jews is an “inconceivable” outcome for the historic Zionist project of a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

It would be based on separate democratically elected parliaments, agreed mutual security guarantees, close economic integration and, crucially, a framework of equal rights in both states

But could a potentially oppressive majoritarianism be muted by requirements for mandatory power sharing, as in Northern Ireland or Belgium? Both models demonstrate somewhat ineffective forms of intermittent Government and, in institutionalising division, also tend to reinforce those divisions in the political culture. Elections remain tribal competitions, rewarding sectional extremism, with no incentive for the sort of cross-community linkages and affiliations so crucial to the long-term reconciliation.

[ Israel-Hamas conflict: Thoughts turn to what happens ‘the day after’ the war ]

[ What happens in Gaza when the bombing stops? ]

In the end, geographical separation politically may be the only realistic way forward; a two-state solution the imperfect, least-worst option. And one variation worthy of consideration is the idea of close Israeli-Palestinian confederation proposed by Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli peace negotiator, and Hiba Husseini, a Ramallah-based Palestinian lawyer. It would be based on separate democratically elected parliaments, agreed mutual security guarantees, close economic integration and, crucially, a framework of equal rights in both states.

Other difficult questions also remain unanswered, but not unanswerable – the future of Israeli illegal settlements, the status of Jerusalem, perhaps as a common capital, the right of Palestinian refugee returns. But firmly stepping out on the road to Palestinian statehood is the first necessary step to peace.