Israel’s open rejection of a ‘two-state solution’ undermines US Middle East policy
The comments by Israel’s ambassador to Sky News’ Mark Austin are remarkable and hugely significant.
Her insistence that there will be no Palestinian state and that Israel believes there is no prospect of a two-state solution represent a stark, bold, brazen admission.
She echoes a remark made by Israel’s communications minister this week.
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Shlomo Karhi wrote on X: “We live here, this is our country. The historical estate of our ancestors. There will be no Palestinian state here.”
Repurposing the pro-Palestinian chant “from the river to the sea”, which Israelis say is antisemitic because it infers the removal of all Jews from the land, he added: “We will never allow another state to be established between the Jordan & the sea.”
His words were in Hebrew on social media. The ambassador’s were in English and on camera for the Western world to absorb.
There is no longer any pretence. Israel is no longer dancing around the idea of two states. It isn’t going to happen – that is their policy.
Remember, the Western world continues to insist two states is the only answer to end this decades-long conflict.
The plan, set out in the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, envisaged two states living side-by-side and framed around borders close to those from 1967. The West Bank and Gaza would form Palestine. The rest would be the Jewish State of Israel.
America’s backing for Israel’s military offensive, which has now killed more than 18,000 Gazans, is predicated on the policy of two states at some point after.
Yet it’s clear now that America is backing Israel militarily, with US weapons and funding, despite two starkly different end point objectives.
The ambassador’s remarks now put Israel in open defiance of every American president’s policy going back 40 years.
For many observers, Israel’s objection to two states has been clear for years.
The facts on the ground have been shifting for decades and have accelerated in recent years, under the latest iteration of Netanyahu’s government, with illegal Jewish settlements expanding rapidly in the occupied West Bank.
The scale and brutality of the Hamas attacks of 7 October have allowed Israel to make its objectives plain.
Is the military operation in Gaza rendering a Palestinian state politically and geographically impossible? Israel is razing the strip.
The question is – how will America now respond to this?
If it is one state not two, then how does that possibly work? Equal rights for all? How do Israelis and Palestinians power share?
The truth is, they can’t. So where now?