Only a wandering, starving dog managed to get through the Qalandia checkpoint on Tuesday without waiting two hours in line at the nine-meter-high Israeli concrete wall that separates East Jerusalem like a wound from the land that surrounds it: the West Bank. By September 13, when three decades had passed since the Oslo Peace Accords, these two parts of Palestine – which would become the capital and part of the territory of a Palestinian state – had been torn apart by the wall for years. Today, Israel, described by the United Nations as the “occupying power” in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, decides whether a Palestinian can cross at Qalandia and travel through his ancestral lands. Before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel responded by unleashing its war in Gaza, the two-state solution believed to be enshrined in Oslo was left in the drawer of forgotten causes. But in the context of the current conflict, the political path to establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel is now back on the table.
On October 25, US President Joe Biden advocated the two-state solution and has repeatedly referred to it since then, most recently last Saturday in the Washington Post. On October 27, the European Council approved a proposal by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for an international conference to seek peace between Israel and Palestine based on this formula. Even Pope Francis has joined the chorus, repeating an idea that some see, however, as a pretext to cover up “the dispossession of the Palestinian people,” as former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig, defines it has Mokhiber, who resigned in October because the United Nations had “failed” to prevent a “model case of genocide” in Gaza.
In Ramallah, the West Bank capital, a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, speaking on condition of anonymity, echoed another of Mokhiber’s arguments: that the United States and Europe are “complicit” in Israel’s war in Gaza while reviving war two -state solution – which they never forced Israel to use. Sánchez made the case for a “viable” Palestinian state during a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem on Thursday, but the PLO official pointed out that “Spain is the easiest.” [which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union] “What we can do to get closer to this goal is to recognize the Palestinian state.”
The Palestinian official also notes that neither Biden nor any of the other leaders now pointing to the two-state path have referred to what they say is the “indispensable condition” for a viable Palestinian state: “The end of the Israeli one.” Crew.” “
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (l) shakes hands with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (r) alongside Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo during their meeting in Jerusalem. BORJA PUIG DE LA BELLACASA (AFP)
The Israel-Palestine conflict
The history of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinian people since 1948 has exhibited a constant that Edward Said once defined as “the monotonous undercurrent of land dispossession.” This state, said the Palestinian philosopher, is the fruit of a “fundamentally European ideology,” Zionism, a movement that for decades defined itself as colonialist. In 1947, a year before the founding of the State of Israel, the United Nations adopted a plan to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into two states that was “manifestly unfair,” the PLO official says. At the partition, 70% of the indigenous Arab population received only 45% of the land, while 30% of the Jewish population received 55% of the land, a distribution that the Arab countries rejected, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, as a result Israel took over 77% of the territory. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, Israel occupied the remainder of the land allocated by the United Nations to the Palestinian people.
At the signing of the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords, the PLO was content to negotiate only 22% of this territory for the Palestinian state; the pre-1967 borders. In return, Israel accepted the establishment of an interim autonomous administration in Gaza and the West Bank under the direction of the Palestinian Authority (PNA), which was supposed to last five years but still exists in the West Bank. Gaza has been in the hands of Hamas since 2007. The PNA gained only partial control over two of the territory’s three areas, A and B. The remainder, 60% of the total land, is Area C, which remains under Israeli control, however the fact that the Oslo Accords stipulated its handover to the Palestinian authorities.
In the three decades since the signing of this framework, the “reality of Israel’s fait accompli on the ground” shows that far from leading to a Palestinian state, the Oslo Accords served “to legitimize Israel and cover up its occupation; a colonization that has reached stratospheric proportions,” says Isaías Barreñada, professor of international relations at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The main tool of this policy to blur the two-state solution has been illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank area over which Israel fully controls. When the first Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the number of these settlers was around 130,000. Today there are almost 700,000, according to the UN. A plan frozen by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in July 2020 calls for incorporating these settlements and the roads built for them into Israeli territory – Palestinians are banned from driving on them – and thus annexing at least 30% of the West Bank.
Ignacio Álvarez-Ossorio, professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Complutense University, points out that a future Palestinian state would not only have no “physical space” but also no “territorial continuity,” pointing to the fact that the two areas are one below the other The Palestinian autonomous areas do not border each other. They resemble islands surrounded by territory under complete Israeli control. The PNA also lacks some of the basic characteristics of a state: control over the territory and its population, clearly defined borders and a monopoly on the use of force, which remains in the hands of Israel.
Adding to this reality are further obstacles to the two-state solution. Barred names two. The first is that the “extreme violence Israel is using in Gaza” destroys “any chance the parties have of sitting together for the next 50 years.” Secondly, “the willingness of the parties to negotiate” after the war would be “excluded”, the only alternative would be “[the same thing] as happened in Oslo; the United States is forcing Israel to engage in dialogue.”
Barreñada says this is a “remote” possibility, pointing out that between 1972 and October 2023, Washington used its UN Security Council veto power “on 34 occasions” to avoid condemning Israel for its occupation of Palestine. Sánchez’s proposal for a Middle East peace conference is “naive,” adds the expert, who sees only one possible solution to the conflict: an end to Israel’s “international impunity.”
“Moderates on both sides”
Nadav Tamir, director of international affairs at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Tel Aviv, is more optimistic. “October 7th showed us all that the conflict cannot be maintained, but that it must be resolved.” Tamir is confident that “moderates on both sides” will reach a new agreement and that one of the conditions for this is “a Change of government in Israel, which will definitely take place after this major failure, and Palestinian elections in which a legitimate decision will be made.” The leader will be elected for both Gaza and the West Bank.”
The PLO official disagrees: “Israel has never recognized the two-state solution or the rights of the Palestinian people. It’s so easy to ask an Israeli official if he believes in two states: he can say whatever he wants, but the official policy is that there are not two states, but only one: Israel. What choice do you have if you don’t want two independent states and a democratic state for all? Either genocide, as is now happening in Gaza, or what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have denounced: apartheid.”
Barreñada clarifies that despite the difficulties, “the idea of the two states is still a reference point, but has lost its relevance because it is perceived as increasingly difficult”. However, he emphasizes that “a separate state is an inalienable right of the Palestinians, as enshrined in UN Resolution 3236 of 1974.” The conditions on the ground that make it hardly feasible “are subject to change,” he notes and concludes: “Everything is reversible.”
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