The two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict needs to be acted on if the war and misery suffered in the Middle East over the last year is to end. A Saudi initiative offers some hope.

Against the background of atrocities and war of the past year the prospect for the two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict looks dismal. Yet in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Saudi Arabia announced it was creating an alliance to promote a two-state solution. The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan al Saud, is reported to have said “Implementing the two-state solution is the best solution to break the cycle of conflict and suffering and enforce a new reality in which the entire region, including Israel, enjoys security and coexistence.”

It is unclear how many members this alliance will have but the European Union’s foreign policy head Josep Borrell has already announced that he will be at the first meetings to be held in Riyad and Brussels. This initiative comes after a year in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to offer any realistic policy for the day after the Gaza war. His far-right coalition government has fought a war on several fronts with enormous force but has paid little attention to a political strategy that could bring peace. The international community, after years of neglecting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have, it seems, realised that the cost in lives and global insecurity is too high and some robust politics is now needed.

However, the latest opinion polls among both Israelis and Palestinians only show minorities of both sides supporting a two-state solution. There are signs that some small growth among Palestinians since 2022 has occurred for the arrangement. For Jewish Israelis, by contrast, there has been a drastic decline. The current Israeli government is implacably opposed to a two-state solution, and while the Palestinian Authority is formally in favor, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, walked away from the last serious talks in 2008.

There is no doubt that after the atrocities of 7 October 2023, Israelis are highly suspicious of what a Palestinian state would mean for them. The communities along the Gaza border areas that suffered on that day were predominantly left-wing Kibbutzim, many of whose members were peace activists. The scale of the violence and destruction on 7 October has left many Israelis, including peace advocates, wondering how trust between Israelis and Palestinians can be rebuilt.

In 2005 the Israeli government unilaterally disengaged from Gaza. This meant withdrawing all its military forces and forcibly removing all 7,000 Israeli settlers. Those measures have not brought peace. Hamas took control of Gaza two years later and turned it into in a military base to attack Israel. Many Israelis fear that if Israel seeded the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority something similar could result, although on a larger scale. Such fears have been fuelled by statements, such as those of Hamas spokesperson Gazi Hamad, that Hamas planned more such attacks on the lines of 7 October until Israel was “annihilated.”

Israeli peace activists now face a tough call in trying to advance a sovereign Palestinian state to their fellow citizens. The rightwing drift in Israeli politics over the last two decades means that it was difficult to get a hearing before 7 October. Now, the window has narrowed considerably.

Palestinians have experienced the worst year since the conflict began in 1947. The majority of Gaza’s population have been displaced and are living in insecure, temporary accommodation. The death toll in Gaza has been massive. The Hamas Health Ministry puts the figure at about 42,000. Even if you deduct the Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, which Israel claims it has killed around 17,000, that still leaves 25,000 civilians dead. Whole swathes of Gaza have been destroyed and few have homes to return, even when the fighting eventually ends. The dislocation of Gaza society among the ruins of lives lost and buildings crushed will traumatise Gazans for some time to come.

Palestinian misery is not confined to Gaza as the West Bank has also seen a massive upsurge of violence. This has taken the form of organised settler violence against Palestinian civilians and Israeli military action against Hamas cells and other militias. This has been particularly serious in the north of the West Bank in and around the cities of Jenin and Tulkarem where any Palestinian civilians have been killed and injured in the crossfire. It is estimated that over 700 Palestinians have died in the area in the last twelve months. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly in the countryside, have been terrorised by settler groups which have attacked villages and, in some case, seized Palestinian privately owned land.

Thirty-one years ago, the Oslo Agreement seemed to promise a new Palestinian future. While ambiguous on the end result, it did create a negotiation process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, provide for elections, and created the Palestinian Authority with some self-governing powers. The process was meant to be concluded by May 1999, but it broke down, and the last major talks at Camp David in August 2000 failed, which lead to the Second Intifada.

For Palestinians, Oslo’s failure has left them with an increasingly corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and in Gaza the Hamas dictatorial regime.  At the same time, the tripling of Israeli settler numbers in the West Bank since 1993 has increased Israel’s grip on the territory. It is no wonder that the poll figures that illustrate support for a two-state solution are modest.

The Hamas attack on 7 October, however horrifying, has placed the issue of Palestine back on the international agenda. That attack and the Israeli reaction to it underlines how both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have become mesmerised by the idea that the next military blow can bring a decisive victory for their cause. Over the past 76 years we have seen many seeping military victories and tragic defeats which tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israelis, and citizens of neighboring states have paid for with their lives. Far from bringing an end to the conflict, each military confrontation merely prepares the way for the next.

The terrible violence of the past year in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon will sow the seeds of the next war unless there is a turn to a political solution that involves negotiations, reconciliation, and respect for the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians to self-determination.

While opinion polls look bleak for such politics, there are many joint Palestinian-Israeli non-governmental organisations that keep working on joint projects despite the challenges. At the political level there are also signs of hope. The letter issued in July this year by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Nasser Al Kidwa is one example. The letter calls for an end to the Gaza war with an Arab-led military force guaranteeing security in Gaza, and leading within three years to the creation of a Palestinian state in the areas occupied by Israel at the time of the 1967 war.

In the Gaza war, and amid escalation of conflict in Lebanon over the last three weeks of September, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged as a master tactician. But he has no strategy to return Israel, Palestine, and the region to stability. The Saudi initiative offers the only realistic prospect for peace in the Middle East; the state of Israel and the state of Palestine living in peace and security. The international community now needs to follow through on this initiative and create a diplomatic framework that rebuilds Israeli and Palestinian confidence in a two-state future. That should begin by taking the security of both parties seriously and creating an international security mechanism to replace both Israel and Hamas in Gaza. This is something that both sides have indicated they could support.

At the same time the United Nations and powers with influence in the region, the United States, the European Union, and particularly France and the Arab League need to engage with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority in a constructive manner. We need a new international determination to give politicians in both Israel and Palestine the courage to challenge the views of their publics. The last year of violence, displacement, and death in the Middle East demands that the international community finds the political will to act. We have had too much rhetoric and too many florid speeches. We urgently need serious peace-making.

John Strawson is Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of East London and works on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. His publications include: Partitioning Palestine: Legal Fundamentalism in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (2010).

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.