The two-state solution is dead. Or, at the very least, it has been reduced to the one and a half state solution. But then the other Palestinian half is likely to be killed off in the next few weeks.
The concept of a Jewish and Palestinian state living side by side cannot work without American backing. No other state has the international clout or sufficient leverage over Israel.
The Palestinian state was envisaged as existing in two distinct halves—the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Donald Trump’s proposal that the US take control of Gaza, move out all the Palestinians, bulldoze it and turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” means that the US has in one press conference eliminated the Gazan half from the political equation.
The other half is expected to soon follow suit. Trump has promised a statement on the West Bank “in a matter of weeks.” In his first term he declared Israeli settlement was no longer—in his opinion—a breach of international law. He also recognised Jerusalem—which is part of the West Bank—as the capital of Israel. In his second term he quickly lifted Biden-imposed sanctions on violent Israeli West Bank settlers.
It is extremely likely that he will announce approval of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-held wish to annex the West Bank. That means an estimated 5 million Palestinians would be forced out of their homes. Where do they go?
“They should go to new homes,” said President Trump. “Someplace where they live and not die.” Specifically, the president has suggested Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and possibly Saudi Arabia. They have all responded with an emphatic: “No way!!!”
There are several reasons for their opposition. First of all, it is morally wrong and a clear breach of international law. Secondly, their own populations would object to a sell-out of the Palestinian cause. This is one of the main reasons that the Saudis have so far refused to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
Next, is that millions of Palestinians would be a heavy strain on the national resources of any country or countries that agreed to take them. And finally, exiled Palestinians would quickly became a state within a state which would end up destabilising the host country.
This has happened several times before. After the creation of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 war, Jordan took in hundreds of thousands of fleeing Palestinians. These Palestinians became the nucleus of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Yasser Arafat and operated as a state within the Jordanian state. They had their own army, training camps and controlled roads and checkpoints. Jordan became their base for attacks on Israel and Israel retaliated with attacks on Jordan.
Starting in September 1970, Jordan’s King Hussein, re-asserted his authority by expelling the PLO to Lebanon. From 1970 to 1982 they controlled all of southern Lebanon and large chunks of Beirut. Their presence undermined the central government’s fragile sectarian balance and laid the foundations for Lebanon’s current status of “failed state.”
In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and the PLO was forced to flee to Tunisia. Because that Arab state has no border with Israel, the PLO was forced to shift its efforts from the military to diplomatic recognition. This did not, however, stop the Israelis from bombing Tunisia in October 1985. The PLO left Tunisia in 1993 when Arafat returned to Gaza following the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Egypt, meanwhile has had a long and unhappy experience in Gaza. From 1948 to 1967 it was the administering authority for the Gaza Strip. Its military government ruled with a heavy hand and refused to invest in the territory. To do so, argued the Egyptians, would be a tacit admission that the Palestinian refugees would not be returning to the homes they fled in 1948. The experience left the Gazans with bad feelings towards Egypt and the Egyptians with a keen desire to never again become involved.
But Trump does have leverage over Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. All three countries are heavily dependent on the US for financial assistance which keeps their governments in power. Egypt receives more than $1.3 billion in US aid—most of it military. When Trump recently announced his aid freeze, Egypt was one of two countries (Israel was the other) that was exempt from cuts. Autocratic President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi needs that aid to maintain his iron grip on power.
Jordan is also heavily dependent on US aid—mainly to help it cope with the roughly 3 million refugees are already being hosted by that country. The country has a total population of 10 million. In 2022 Jordan and the US signed a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding for Jordan to receive $10 billion in US aid over the following seven years.
Both Jordan are key pillars in America’s Middle East policy. Withdrawal of US aid to force them to take Palestinian refugees would have a profound effect on the ability of President al-Sisi and King Abdullah II to govern. Trump’s advisers will tell him that, assuming that they have not been fired and he is listening.
If Trump is listening, then his advisers will probably also tell him that his proposal has threatened the success of the Gaza peace deal. Hamas may now take the view that there is no point in releasing any hostages if all the Gazans are about to be marched into exile. This would provide the Israeli far-right with the excuse they need to continue the war.
Alternatively, Trump may be cashing in on his reputation for unpredictability to throw out an idea which he retracts later. Or he is using his position as the world’s “disrupter-in-chief” to throw a set of spanners into the machinery of the Middle East. None of the above are an appetising scenario.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and author of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain".
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17 Comments
Yes, I have to agree that some people in Israel and on the US evangelical right appear to be getting what they want. Sadly, in their opposition to the creation of the state of Israel out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the newly formed Arab states post 1918, together with their subsequent aggression post 1948, only have themselves to blame for the rise of Zionism within its ever expanding borders.
If he’s looking down on the current mess, I wonder whether Arthur Balfour is regretting putting his name to that Declaration just as Messrs Sykes and Picot might be wondering whether they didn’t get things quite right in redrawing the map of the Middle East either.
Once again, it’s compromise that appears to be lacking on ALL sides.
Tom is normally a reliable commentator, but his pessimism here is unjustified. Trump habitually rocks the boat with crazy ideas, and drops them if they turn out to be unworkable. He won’t be able to legitimise the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, or the West Bank. Seeing him sitting next to a smirking Netanyahu will have turned stomachs in the US as well as elsewhere in the world, and although the people of Gaza will rightly get the support of all of Israel’s neighbours, I believe it will be the American political establishment which will bring Trump to heel.
Israel did not emerge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It emerged from the ruins of the British Mandate in Palestine. The British tried to implement the Balfour Declaration, making Palestine a homeland for the Jews while respecting the rights of the indigenous population. They tried various ways including partition into two states but the Arabs would have none of it. This remains the case today: the Palestinians, whatever they may say, reject the two-state solution.
If you break into your neighbour’s territory, murder 1200 of its people, kidnap hundreds more and use them to further weaken your neighbour’s peace and security, then you’d better be ready to live with the consequences.
@Mark Frankel, yes, it would be nice and neat if it were true that “the Arabs” reject the two state solution. In fact, it is the leadership of the Israeli state which opposes the two state solution. Last September the Jordan envoy to the UN gave Israel a guarantee of future security on behalf of all the neighbouring Arab states if they would agree to the two state solution. Israel took no notice, and didn’t even bother to reject it. It didn’t fit their agenda (annexation).
“it is the leadership of the Israeli state which opposes the two state solution. ”
Quite. Obvious opposition in the form of the settlers in the West Bank.
People who want the whole territory – ‘from the river to the sea’?
Living with the consequences of their actions, @Mark Frankel, would be a novel experience for Netanyahu’s government, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, this time. At least 150,000 people, many of them children or babies, have been either killed or injured in retribution for the October 7 attack. The price Israel should pay is to have the question of Palestinian statehood taken out of their hands.
@Mark Frankel
OK, please excuse my hyperbole. BUT …where did the ‘British Mandate in Palestine’ emerge from? I quite understand your anger at the massacre of innocent civilians that initiated the present conflict. Any rational human being, of whatever religious persuasion as well as none, ought to feel the same way. However, I am still of the opinion that it takes two to tango. I would argue that the majority of people living in the area want peace. Unfortunately they have fallen prey to political forces, on both sides, who use religion to justify their aims.
My abiding memory of the ‘Trump solution’ was that press conference where the President unveiled his plans to beautify what can rightly now be described as a bomb site. Next to him was a smirking Israeli PM whose actions had created the devastation in the first place and who was likely to benefit from any ‘deal’ the one time real estate developer hoped to make.
The risk of displacement from Gaza was not the only threat in Trump’s press conference. Asked whether he would support Israel annexing West Bank “areas”, Trump said while his administration had not taken a position yet, “people do like the idea” and he would “probably” make an announcement on the topic in the next four weeks. Annexation would be far simpler for Trump — who recognised Israel’s claims to sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights in his first term — to approve than taking over Gaza.
My father was a Captain in the ACS Heavy Transport before Allenby’s attack on Beersheba on 31 October 2017. He had been in the British Army since the start of WW1. Granted leave, he refused to return because he felt the Balfour Declaration did not guarantee his Arab drivers their future in Palestine though he supported the Jewish Homeland in their historic land.
Israeli author Ilan Pappe in his book ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ wrote: “There is no denying that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 has been eradicated from the collective global memory and erased from the world’s conscience.”
We are now seeing a repeat of 1948. We are all responsible, if it happens.
@ Mark Frankel,
If you ethnically cleanse 750,000 people from their homelands and treat them and others who you haven’t displaced as second class , haven’t you also “better be ready to live with the consequences.”
Of course Israeli Arabs are considered to be second class. Even Christian Arabs. They aren’t, for example, wanted by the army. Why would the Israeli army not want every soldier it could find?
Sadly, I don’t believe we have seen the low point in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel..
Israel, in the early days of the conflict, denied it had, or ever would bomb hospitals and schools; the world bent over backwards to accommodate that lie…
After a month or so it had dropped that pretence and still the world did nothing but mouth a few regrets..
Gaza is now a wasteland, and the cleansing has moved on..The illegal West Bank settlers now burn whole Palestinian villages and the few timid sanctions on their behavior have been removed by Trump…
Israel KNOWS the world will do NOTHING and is free to take the land ‘From the River to the Sea’**
**Netanyahu’s Likud party manifesto states..”Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”…
If the inhabitants of Gaza are going to be temporarly and voluntary displaced while reconstruction occurs, it must be by a more formal mechanism than allowing them to leave. Areas of land might be made available and resources put in to enable them to see it as their land albeit temporarily. This would include self governance and internal security.
@Peter Hirst 10th Feb ’25 – 2:39pm..
If the Palestinians leave Gaza what are their chances of EVER getting back?
Good if they receive guarantees from the UN and a timetable for it.
You mean the UN whose decisions Israel refuses to accept, the same UN the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, told Keansburg was anti Israel and the UN he calls “morally bankruptcy” in it’s dealings with Israel..That UN?
I almost admire your faith; but I doubt if any Palestinian would…
Mark Frankel is always 110% on the side of Netanyahu and the Israeli state, but his comments are not wholly wrong. I do feel angry that far too many people try to gloss over the October 7th attack and the massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians by Hamas. Without that attack Netanyahu and his cronies would not have had an excuse to devastate Gaza in the way they have. Netenyau’s government’s actions are wholly despicable and unacceptable, but please remember there were street celebrations of the October 7th attacks in Gaza and other places in the Middle East.
Trumps proposals are a non-starter and will make the whole situation worse.
What is needed is cool heads and careful negotiation and a step by step path to a permanent solution, not idiotic ideas that pander to the worst excesses of the Israeli state and the gunmen of Hamas.