The US’s empty commitment to a two-state solution

A man walks along a road by Israel’s separation barrier between the occupied West Bank village of Nazlat Issa and the Arab-Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiya in northern Israel on February 1, 2020. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

"Young American Jews are less likely to unconditionally support Israel than previous generations.

Black Lives Matter activists link the struggle for rights in Palestine with those disenfranchised in the United States.

A movement pushing to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel shows what the next phase of peaceful protest against Israeli policies might look like —

and the result has been laws in 34 states that seek to ban the right to boycott when it comes to Israel."

It’s a particularly dangerous moment for Israel and Palestine.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the Middle East last week on a previously scheduled trip after 48 hours of violence: a terrorist attack in East Jerusalem killed seven Israelis and an Israeli raid on the refugee camp of Jenin killed nine Palestinians, culminating a month in which Palestinians experienced the highest level of killings at the hands of Israeli forces and Israeli settlers in more than a decade. The situation called for US leadership.

Blinken was there to “urge de-escalation,” as the Biden administration described it, at a time when an extreme far-right Israeli government pushes for incendiary changes to the judiciary that contradict Israel’s stated democratic tenets, reorders the way the occupation of Palestinian territory is administered, and pursues a variety of policies that likely violate international law.

Yet throughout the trip, Blinken’s comments felt retrograde, like they came from another era.

He kept offering up calls for a two-state solution. Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, American policy has focused on creating a sovereign, independent Palestinian state alongside Israel with Jerusalem as its capital, on the land that Israel has occupied since the 1967 war. A version of the two-state solution has broadly been the consensus of Democratic and Republican presidents, the United Nations, and US partners. But recent Israeli governments have expressed little political will for Palestinian statehood. The Trump administration reversed longstanding US policies in ways that undermined Palestine (while still sticking to two states), and Biden’s team has since offered no hints of how to revive the long dormant negotiation process.

If the two-state message rings hollow, that’s because the US still has an outdated approach to the Middle East that simply doesn’t acknowledge what’s happened in Israel over the last several decades.

The US policy does not take into account how entrenched the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem has become. Israeli settlement growth in the West Bank has made a viable Palestinian state all but impossible. The US-led talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been on hiatus since President Barack Obama’s second term, and even at the time, there was little hope that they would amount to much. And Arab states like Morocco, UAE, and Bahrain have abandoned Palestinians, as they normalize relations with the State of Israel and eliminate any incentives for negotiations toward a Palestinian state.

Even establishment voices like former Ambassador Martin Indyk, who served as Obama’s Middle East envoy and is now a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledge that a one-state reality has set in.

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