ONE-STATE, TWO-STATE, NO STATE?

Both Israelis and West Bank Palestinians have lost faith in a “two-state solution.” They’re all living in a one-state reality — with Israel in charge.

The main street of the West Bank Palestinian town of Hawara was still shuttered when I visited in late April, two months after a large group of Israeli settlers had entered and set dozens of houses and cars on fire.

The attack, which killed one Palestinian and injured 98, was vigilante revenge for the deaths of two Israeli settlers who had been shot while driving through the town, and who came from the Jewish settlement of Har Bracha in the hills above Hawara.

At one end of the town, a blackened three-story building and an open lot piled with charred cars offered vivid reminders of the violence. Israeli soldiers in groups of three nervously patrolled the nearly empty, two-lane shopping street.

I ducked into a falafel shop — one of the few businesses open — that stood next to a makeshift concrete bunker from which a lone Israeli soldier peered, assault rifle at the ready. As I purchased my sandwich, the manager, who would not give his name, whispered that he feared more violence.

He was, of course, correct.

‘Victory by settlement’

For me, this trip was about more than an assignment.

I have been writing about Israel — and the Palestinian issue — for more than 40 years.

Yet this time, I witnessed events more stunning than on any previous visit: namely, the pushback by hundreds of thousands of Israelis against an unprecedented threat to Israeli democracy. The most right-wing government in Israel’s history is trying to gut the powers of the Supreme Court and eliminate the country’s system of checks and balances. Israelis who believe in liberal democracy are confronting religious nationalists, many of whom prefer Torah law to a written constitution.

An equally scary threat to Israel’s democracy is the current government’s push to irreversibly annex the West Bank to Israel, creating one Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The drive is led by two messianic nationalist cabinet ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who have been given extraordinary powers by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he needed their support to form a government.

Ben-Gvir, now national security minister, is a former acolyte of Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was banned from the Israeli parliament — the Knesset — for racist ideology. The minister has criminal convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. Several weeks before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, he said on camera, “We got the car. We’ll get to Rabin, too,” while holding an emblem stolen from the prime minister’s Cadillac.

A perfect background for Netanyahu to give Ben-Gvir authority over the police, and promise him his own private militia, is it not?

As for Smotrich, he was arrested by the Shin Bet — Israel’s domestic intelligence — for suspected Jewish terrorism in 2005 and is openly racist and homophobic. After settlers torched Hawara, he proclaimed that “Hawara should be wiped out,” but insisted the Israeli government should do it. (Following widespread international criticism, he issued a tepid apology.)

As finance minister, he has already allotted budgetary funds for infrastructure aimed at doubling the current number of 500,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank. The funds would help vastly expand existing settlements and build back unauthorized outposts that the Supreme Court has ruled are illegal.

Already, the far-right majority in the Knesset has been retroactively legalizing outposts that had previously been dismantled.

One reason religious nationalists are keen to see the Supreme Court neutered is because it has occasionally limited their push to seize Palestinian land for settlement use.

Buoyed by his power, Smotrich has outlined in his “Decisive Plan” the fate he intends for nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank (with apparent backing from Netanyahu and the ruling coalition).

Palestinians can remain on the West Bank if they accept to live in noncontiguous cantons, linked by tunnels or bridges. They will be allowed to elect mayors but will have no sovereignty and few civil rights. They will also live under a different legal system than Israelis (including settlers), and be subject to military and security controls. If they don’t like this, they can emigrate. If they choose to fight, they will be dealt with harshly.

The plan is clear: Making life intolerable will force many Palestinians to quit the country.

“Victory by settlement,” Smotrich writes in his plan, will show the Palestinians they have no hope of ever obtaining a separate state.

Yet the one-state reality sought by the extreme right, as former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have pointed out, leads inexorably to an Israeli version of an apartheid state. In the Israeli version, Jewish settlers on the West Bank live under Israeli law with free movement, but West Bank Palestinians live permanently in ethnic Bantustans controlled by checkpoints.

Many retired Israeli military and intelligence officials oppose this apartheid system, and not just because it would eviscerate their democracy. They recognize that Israel would have to permanently repress a Palestinian population that will soon outnumber Jews in Greater Israel: Already there are roughly five million Palestinians in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank (2.7 million of them in the latter). Add in the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the number of Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean already equals the seven million Jews.

Down that road lies eternal civil war.

Yet organizers of the ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations told me they have made a deliberate choice not to raise the Palestinian issue at their rallies because they fear it would dissuade many centrist or center-right Israelis from joining the movement to prevent the gutting of the Supreme Court’s powers. First things first, they say.

There are only a few placards to be seen at major demonstrations, and some small side rallies, that carry banners proclaiming, “No Democracy with Occupation.”

But a drive around the West Bank shows that the apartheid state is already becoming a reality. One that becomes more dangerous as it is solidified.

‘Two communities in separate worlds’

In 1978, when I was based in Israel as a foreign correspondent, I attended a briefing by then-Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon, where he rolled out a map of the occupied West Bank. He laid out in concrete detail how Israel could keep permanent control of the territory by building settlements along the north-south mountain ridge above Palestinian population centers, and then constructing a lateral road network that linked the settlements with major Israeli cities inside the 1967 borders.

Sharon carried that laminated map around the world. I saw him roll it out once at a Washington, D.C., think tank lecture sometime in the 1980s. When he became prime minister in 2001, he perfected the “Sharon plan,” which advocated using highways and additional settlements to separate clumps of Palestinian cities, towns, and villages into disconnected cantons, linked only by “bridges and tunnels.”

On a tour of West Bank roads and infrastructure in April, I saw how much of Sharon’s dream has come true.

The present Israeli government is expediting the building of nearly exclusive Jewish highways and massive settlement expansion to isolate Palestinian cantons. The goal: to tightly integrate the West Bank into pre-1967 Israel and turn West Bank settlements into suburbs for settlers working in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.

In 2020, a previous Netanyahu government presented a master transportation plan to West Bank municipal councils serving settlers. “This plan connects the settlements to the rest of the country and acts as de facto sovereignty,” the head of the Yesha organizing body for the councils, David Elhayani, told the Jerusalem Post. Under the current government, 25% of the Transportation Ministry’s budget for road infrastructure in the entire country over the next five years has been allotted for West Bank roads.

Drive north or south from Jerusalem and the amount of visible road construction is stunning.

My guides were Yehuda Shaul, cofounder of Breaking the Silence and codirector of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, and Dror Etkes, the head of the Kerem Navot nongovernmental organization (NGO), which researches Israeli land-use policy on the West Bank. Both are longtime experts on settlement building and infrastructure in the West Bank, which are widely considered to violate international law (although ex-president Donald Trump reversed that long-standing U.S. position).

As Shaul and I drove south out of Jerusalem in the direction of Bethlehem and Hebron, I recalled years of tooling along the old Bethlehem Road, a two-lane highway that twisted by and through Palestinian refugee camps and towns. The first leg of that old road, inside Jerusalem, has now been turned into a trendy restaurant and shopping scene in the Baka neighborhood.

For settlers, the old road has been superseded by a five-lane bypass highway that tunnels under the Palestinian town of Beit Jala to connect Jerusalem with settlements in Gush Etzion and near Hebron.

Meantime, Palestinian villages along the highway’s edge are basically forced to stick to their narrow roads. Even if they are technically permitted on some highways with West Bank license plates, there are rarely on- and off-ramps near their towns.

Israel’s settlement master plans, Shaul told me as we wound through the Judean hills, were designed “to cut off Palestinian cities and towns and boost and suburbanize Jewish settlements.” For example, the settlement of Ariel — which has a university, a theater, and a population of 20,000, and extends deep into the West Bank — has a four-lane highway linking it directly to Tel Aviv.

I saw such links firsthand as we drove under a highway serving 60,000 religious settlers in the Beitar Illit settlement, in order to access the Palestinian village of Husan. The narrow road that ran through the Arab town paralleled the highway but had no useful connection with it.

“These are two communities in separate worlds, even though they live side by side,” Shaul said.

The new road system is built with a purpose: to separate Israeli traffic from Palestinian drivers. The Eastern Ring Road around Jerusalem, the so-called Apartheid Road, has a 26-foot fence down the middle separating Israelis from West Bank Palestinians, who need a permit to enter Jerusalem. The so-called Sovereignty Road, still under development, will enable the Israeli government to close off a large section of the West Bank along with a major settlement that it wants to annex — by diverting Palestinian traffic around it.

Equally important, the settler highways enable large orthodox religious families to afford multi-bedroom dwellings on the West Bank that they could never find or afford in Israeli cities. In Samaria (the Israeli name for the northern West Bank), we passed signs advertising new settler homes with five or six bedrooms, something residents of cramped religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem could never dream of. The old style of West Bank settler housing, with modest rowhouses extending down whole blocks, has given way to elaborate single-family mini-mansions.

“The new Israeli middle class design their own style of houses [on the West Bank],” I was told by Etkes. “The prices can go up to one million shekels. There is a sense of permanence.”

“The bypass roads made possible the expansion of the settler population from 116,000 in 1995 to 465,000 in 2022,” Shaul added. And now that highways have been built, enabling ultraorthodox families to travel easily from their settlements to Jewish religious centers in Jerusalem or Bnei Brak, more than 50% of new settlement growth comes from such families. Posters advertising multi-bedroom homes can be seen along the roadways.

“This is one-state planning, one land, one grid,” said Shaul. “These roads are an illustration of Israel’s intention to prevent any Palestinian state and to completely fragment the Palestinians into enclaves. They are squeezing a growing [Palestinian] demography into a shrinking geography.”

In other words, expanded settlements and infrastructure further limit the land available to the Palestinian Bantustans.

“In the minds of the planners, this is definitely meant as a one-state solution,” Shaul points out. And under the Netanyahu government, the one-state “solution” is going into overdrive.

‘In jail or in the grave’

The headline in Haaretz read, “Settler suspected of burning mosque becomes Knesset member.”

I met this settler activist, Zvi Sukkot, in his small Knesset office, where he was clearly enjoying his new role as a parliament member from Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionist Party. He wore a kippah and the long side curls of his ultraorthodox faith.

Before taking office, Sukkot was director of the extreme right-wing Jewish Power Party and helped found the unauthorized settler outpost of Evyatar (one of around 150 such illegal outposts), which sits on land seized from the nearby Arab village of Beita. He was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of torching a village mosque, but released for lack of evidence.

In 2012, he was temporarily expelled by the Israeli security services from the West Bank over suspicions he was a member of a clandestine group known for violent attacks on West Bank Palestinians — as well as on Israeli security forces.

Now, Sukkot is a resident of the Yitzhar settlement in the hills above Hawara. Youths from the settlement are regularly accused of violence against Arabs, including as part of the mob that attacked the Palestinian town.

But the Knesset member had clearly been briefed on what to say (through a translator) to a presumably credulous U.S. journalist. “I don’t know of a single case where any Israeli Jew took private property from someone,” he assured me solemnly.

Right. Only two days before, I’d been with Etkes driving on the mountain ridge that rises above the city of Nablus and the wounded town of Hawara. I was gazing at the lush rows of grapevines on the premises of the Har Bracha settlement that were being tended by workers from Thailand. (American evangelical volunteers also turn up at harvest time to help pick settler grapes).

Nearby signs advertised the world-class wines that could be purchased at the Tura Winery. Yet the land on which the grapevines grew had been taken in part from the nearby Palestinian village of Burin.

Seizures of Palestinian village lands, grape arbors, olive groves, and water sources have been an endless story in decades past, accelerated this year by hilltop youths emboldened by Netanyahu’s far-right government. Palestinian pastures are arbitrarily used by “grazing youth” to feed their sheep.

And even before one gets to private land seizures, roughly 60% of the West Bank is under full Israeli government control.

As for settler violence, Sukkot insisted righteously that “only the police are permitted to use force. For civilians, it is forbidden.”

As this Knesset member must know, violent acts by settlers against Palestinians have been on the upswing, even extending to attacks on Israeli military units who they claim aren’t tough enough on Arabs. Youths from Sukkot’s own settlement of Yitzhar have been involved in continuing attacks on cars, property, and residents of Hawara, according to Israeli press reports.

One Yitzhar settler attacked a Hawara man with an axe in early May.

Not surprisingly, the violence has gotten uglier this year since the latest, most radical Netanyahu government took office. Some, but far from all, of the settler violence is tit for tat for Palestinian terrorist attacks.

At least 20 people have been killed by Palestinians targeting Israelis since the start of 2023, according to an Associated Press tally, including the murder last month of a British Israeli mother and two daughters who were driving from their settlement to a vacation in Tiberias.

Over the same period, at least 107 Palestinians, around half of them militants, have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank. The toll included the killing of a 2-year-old child by an Israeli military sniper as his father was strapping him into a car seat.

But Sukkot got annoyed when I raised the issue of settler violence. He was much more engaged when speaking of Israel’s God-given right to settle and annex Judea and Samaria (the religious terms for the southern and northern regions of the West Bank).

“Until now, there have been limits on construction for Jews [in Judea and Samaria], and I want to cancel those limits,” he told me. As for whether Jewish settlements should fall under Israeli law, his answer was swift: “Of course.”

No doubt, with Smotrich as the effective civil administrator of the West Bank, settlements will be assumed to be under Israeli law, while Palestinians will continue to live under Israeli military law with no sovereignty and very limited civil rights.

But Sukkot took the discussion further, making a critical distinction. Even though he believes the West Bank should be officially annexed to Israel — which would violate international law and anger Israel’s Western and Arab partners — he doesn’t believe formal annexation is necessary.

“Much more important than annexation,” he contended, “is to remove all obstacles to Israeli construction [in Judea and Samaria].” In other words, if Smotrich can double the number of settlers to one million and crisscross the West Bank with exclusive settler roads, the area will be de facto annexed. No law need be formally passed.

As for the Palestinians, he echoes his party leader: They can stay inside their limited areas so long as they don’t “commit terror attacks or incite.” If they do either, they “have to be in jail or in the grave.”

One-state, two-state, no state

I spent much of my trip speaking with some of my smartest Israeli and Palestinian contacts about where they thought things were headed.

Of course, much depends on whether and how long the current Netanyahu government lasts, and whether it can neutralize the powers of the Supreme Court and strengthen the political hold of the far-right.

One thing is clear, however. Both sides have lost faith in the “two-state solution” that emerged as the goal after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reached a framework peace accord in Oslo, Norway, in 1993.

A recent joint Israeli-Palestinian poll showed that public support for a two-state solution is at an all-time low.

“The Palestinian public can’t support something they think will never happen,” I was told by pollster Khalil Shikaki, the highly respected head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, who also teaches at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

Only 33% of Palestinians support the idea of two states today, Shikaki said, while 30 years ago, 85% backed it. Among Israeli Jews, the percentage was 34%. (Less than a quarter of both sides support one binational democratic state.)

Having covered this issue for more than four decades, I believe the blame for Oslo’s failure lies with both sides: with the movement of radical messianic Jews (now on the rise again) that led to Rabin’s assassination; with the Palestinian terror attacks that undermined Israeli support for two states; with the expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank that convinced the Palestinians that Israel would never leave; with the fatal ambivalence of Yasser Arafat — I could go on, but there’s only so much space.

Irrespective of blame, the phrase “two-state solution” is anathema to the Israeli right. Even those on the center-left, who still cling to that formula for lack of an alternative admit they see no current path to get there. There have been no Israeli-Palestinian peace talks since 2014, and recent Israel-Palestine meetings in Jordan and Egypt accomplished little.

I found general agreement that Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank — and Gaza — were now living in a one-state reality, with Israel totally in charge.

Yet one apartheid-type state won’t offer any permanent solution. Not only will it upset Israel’s democratic allies abroad and Israeli (small d) democrats at home, but it will inevitably lead to continued violence, and probably a third Palestinian popular uprising.

If the two-state option is truly dead, none of the other ideas out there, to my mind, offer more hope.

A binational state

A few optimists in the West Bank and Israel, and among U.S. pundits, believe the one-state reality will eventually evolve into a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.

One such believer is Mustafa Barghouti, a longtime grassroots activist and head of the Palestinian National Initiative, who ran an independent campaign against Mahmoud Abbas for Palestinian president in 2005 and won 20% of the vote.

“I was always a full supporter of a two-state solution, but you can’t sell the population on an illusion,” he told me in his office in Ramallah. “We already live in a one-state apartheid reality. Physically, it is impossible to have a Palestinian state now. One democratic state is the only realistic solution.” He means one binational Palestinian-Israeli state with equal rights for all.

Barghouti believes that the small, violent, armed Palestinian groups that have emerged in the past year “are transitional, but the main opposition will be popular nonviolent resistance.”

He sees the series of strikes by Palestinian teachers, professionals, and other workers as evidence that civil society is ready to express its frustration with the failures of not only the Palestinian Authority but also with the occupation.

It’s a fascinating forecast, but having spent years in the Middle East, I am unable to believe a binational state could work.

For starters, most Israelis and Palestinians do not want to live with each other, as polls show. The wounds are too deep, the history too painful. With few exceptions, I have met no Israelis who believe a one-state solution is possible.

As for Palestinians, Shikaki told me Palestinian interest in a one-state solution plummeted after they saw the clashes that erupted last year between Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in mixed Israeli cities.

Perhaps more critical, while the concept of “one person, one vote” and equal rights sounds sensible to an American, it is abnormal in the Middle East.

This is a region where loyalties attach not to constitutions and institutions, but to ethnic, religious, and tribal communities which vie for supremacy, often by force — think Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon.

Even within Israel, the liberal democratic concepts of individual rights and belief in legal institutions and independent courts — the principles of Israel’s founders — are being threatened by religious nationalists and ultraorthodox Jews who believe God-given rights trump basic laws.

As former Israeli president Reuven Rivlin famously pointed out in a pie chart, Israel itself is divided into four tribes: seculars, religious nationalists, ultraorthodox, and Palestinian Arab citizens. And the seculars have the lowest birth rate.

Israeli tribalism has never been more pronounced — or more fervently promoted by a government — than within Netanyahu’s current ruling coalition. A large segment of Israelis appears to embrace group identity over democratic institutions.

So where lies hope?

I admit that this trip left me uncertain, with no faith in a one-state solution and unable to foresee how the two-state concept can be renewed.

I’m not a believer in “confederation,” the concept now being discussed within some think tanks. I watched that idea — meaning a link between two independent states with open borders — come and go in the 1980s.

Confederation between the West Bank and Jordan — an idea being promoted on the Israeli right — is extremely unlikely. The last thing Amman wants is to be burdened with responsibility for West Bank cantons filled with two million unhappy Palestinians.

Confederation between Israel and West Bank cantons, with open borders, looks equally implausible. Even if the Israeli right lost power, the centrist opposition wants to separate from the Palestinians, not embrace them. And vice versa.

Nor will Saudi Arabian normalization with Israel, if it moves forward, provide a magic bullet that convinces Palestinians to accept their limited lot, as Netanyahu hopes. On the contrary. Last week, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud specified that normalization requires continuing to focus “on finding a pathway toward a two-state solution.”

If the Saudis were willing to actively promote a new peace process based on their 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as the price for normalization, that would be very helpful. Yet there seems little reason why Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman needs to involve himself in messy Palestinian issues at present, since he already gets the security cooperation he wants from Israel.

So where does that leave the future of Israel and Palestine?

“A growing percent of Palestinians see no solution,” Shikaki told me. “No equal rights. No two states. No one state. No Israel-Palestine discussion ongoing that addresses this or future relations, and no prospect for elections. People see no hope in the future.”

The Palestinian Authority is weak, and the 86-year-old President Abbas has lost legitimacy, having not held elections since 2005. Anyway, a West Bank election might result in a win for radical Hamas simply because West Bankers are sick of the PA’s corruption (although pollster Shikaki still thinks a Hamas victory unlikely).

Unless Riyadh and Washington put on a full-court press, there’s no hope of renewing serious peace talks in the near future, given the lack of Palestinian leadership and rejection by the current Israeli government.

And yet, Israel’s Palestinian problem will not disappear.

If there was one Arabic word I heard repeatedly during my West Bank visits, it was sumud, or “steadfastness.” It referred not to some concrete political strategy but to lessons learned from the 1947-1948 and 1967 wars, a time during which many thousands of Arabs fled (or were driven out of) Palestinian cities, towns, and camps.

These days most Palestinians intend to stay put despite the pressures (except for children of the wealthy, who have more options). Their growing numbers will increasingly outstrip those of Jewish citizens in a one-state reality. The pressure to end occupation from inside and outside Israel will grow.

“If Israel wants to annex the land, they have to annex it with us on it,” insisted the grassroots activist Barghouti. “For them, the only alternative is to kick us out.”

In the age of phone video and drones, a massive “transfer” of Palestinians out of the West Bank would be impossible, even for the likes of a Smotrich or Ben-Gvir.

The best hope I see at present — and it’s a long shot — is a victory by the movement that is fighting to preserve Israel’s democratic institutions. A victory that either topples the Netanyahu government or at least forces Ben-Gvir and Smotrich out.

Out of that movement might emerge leaders who recognize that Israeli democracy can’t survive in a state where millions of Arabs are deprived of civic and human rights. Only such leaders might have the renewed energy and the courage to revisit the two-state formula along with Israel’s Arab allies — or seek out a better vision for an Israel-Palestine future.

Toward that end, the Biden administration should press much harder on Jerusalem to curb settlement expansion and strongly consider voting against Israel when the issue arises in the U.N. Security Council. (Cutting U.S. military aid to Israel would no doubt be a nonstarter with Congress, and probably unlikely to impact settlement decisions with Netanyahu.)

As I returned home, the memories of settlement construction spreading across West Bank hills and new roads winding below made it hard to imagine a two-state outcome. Only if the pro-democracy movement triumphs in the internal Israeli struggle do I see a chance of reversing the country’s slide toward a single apartheid state.