The history of the two-state solution (in six maps)

As Gaza plunges further into crisis, Arab countries in particular have focused on the two-state proposal to solve the conflict. Without such an agreement, their relations with Israel will continue to hang in the balance.

Israel’s opposition, however, has become ever more entrenched. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has finally said loudly what the Israeli government has been quietly saying for years: Israel won’t accept two states, despite urging from US President Joe Biden.

Hamas is equally adamant in its refusal to accept any solution that would require a recognition that Israel has a right to exist.

So, what is the history behind a two-state solution? Who wants it? Are there any other options?

1. These maps show how borders have changed since 1922 and what a two-state solution could look like.

What happened in the Mandate for Palestine

In November 1917, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote a 67-word note to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew, promising to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, albeit not at the expense of “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. This wasn’t a specific promise for a Jewish state, but the Balfour Declaration’s ambiguity and ambivalence set the stage for the entire Israel-Palestine saga.

After Britain captured Palestine from the Ottoman Empire during World War One, one of Balfour’s ministerial colleagues, Herbert Samuel, went to Palestine as the first high commissioner over the Palestinian Mandate. He started to lay the groundwork for a greater Jewish presence, while also trying to develop Arab governance structures. The Arabs, alarmed by the way things were going, refused to co-operate. During the stalemate, Jewish immigration picked up pace. Within a decade, the Jews and Arabs were involved in regular violent clashes.

By the mid-1930s, the rift was already looking difficult to reconcile. The British government launched a royal commission, headed by the journalist, lawyer and politician Lord Peel, in 1937. It concluded that the two sides could not live together, and recommended a partition. A frontier would be drawn, and populations moved to either side of it, with the Palestinians relocating to what is now Jordan and the West Bank. The Arabs deplored the plan, and the Jews were worried they would end up with too little.

During the Second World War, the Jews and the British fell out over Britain’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Eventually, in 1946, an Anglo-American committee decided that Jewish refugees should be allowed to go there, but “Jew shall not dominate Arab and Arab shall not dominate Jew in Palestine” – repudiating the two-state solution.

The British, fearing armed resistance from both sides to this arrangement, decided to hand the question over to the newly created United Nations.

The UN Partition plan

In November 1947, an 11-country committee recommended that two states be created, with Jerusalem – site of shared holy sites – under international administration. The Palestinian territory included one-third of the coastline – an area that included what is now Gaza – plus western territory that includes the West Bank, and some northern territory.

Of the 11 countries, three – India, Iran and Yugoslavia – instead advocated a single, federated state. One country abstained – Australia.

In 1948, the state of Israel came into being. The Arab countries immediately declared war on Israel. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from Israeli territory – an event Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Arab countries, including Jordan, Syria and Egypt, joined the Palestinian cause and around 700,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries during this period.

When the fighting ended less than a year later, Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. Over the next three years, nearly three-quarters of a million Jews moved to Israel from war-torn Europe and neighbouring Middle Eastern countries.

The 1967 war and the Green Line

After a tense stand-off lasting about two decades, Israel decided in 1967 to launch a pre-emptive attack on Egypt and Syria, starting the Six Day War. In less than a week, Israel seized control of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Egypt and Syria pushed back in 1973, launching a surprise attack with some support from Iraq and Jordan. Israel quickly repelled them, and by the end of the 1970s, Israel had signed a US-brokered peace treaty with Egypt – which got back the Sinai Peninsula – while Jordan had given up its claims on the Palestinian territory.

At this point, Israel was in charge of more or less the territory it now occupies, although it has made further incremental settlements on Palestinian-claimed land in the ensuing decades. But the most commonly advocated version of two-state solution is not based on the status quo; it is based on the UN-recognised state of play at the end of the first war in 1949 – the so-called Green Line.

How close have Israel and Palestine been to agreeing to a solution?

The Oslo Accords of 1993 created the Palestinian Authority to govern the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation recognised Israel as a state. But Israel refused to accept the Green Line borders as the defining boundary of a two-state solution, and continued to fret about security threats emanating from the Palestinian territories.

The Camp David summit in 2000 was supposed to find a way through. The disagreements remained daunting: carving up the West Bank, agreeing the statues of Gaza and especially East Jerusalem, and allowing Palestinian refugees the right to return. Still, by early 2001, both sides said, at least publicly, they were as close to an agreement as they had ever been. This, it turns out, was the high point.

In 2003, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators launched an unofficial peace effort called the Geneva Initiative (GI), also known as the Geneva Accord. It drew on previous official negotiations, including the Oslo Accords and the Arab Peace Initiative. It proposed the establishment of borders based roughly on the 1967 lines (the Green Line), with land swaps to accommodate some Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

In 2005, Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israel’s 11th prime minister, Ariel Sharon, agreed to end the cycle of violence. They accepted a “road map” devised by the US, EU, UN and Russia – the so-called “Quartet on the Middle East” – that envisaged a process leading to a permanently demarcated Palestinian state.

Negotiations ground on, but in 2006 there was a seismic shift: Hamas won the election for the Gaza Strip. The terrorist group was founded in the 1980s with the goal of destroying Israel. In 2017, its charter was amended to accept the creation of a Palestinian state based on 1967 boundaries, although it still failed to recognise Israel.

Once Hamas was installed in Gaza, the group began firing rockets into Israel. In December 2008, after several military skirmishes, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert ordered Operation Cast Lead – a three-week ground invasion that killed more than 1000 Palestinians. Further military clashes have erupted periodically before the devastating Hamas attack on October 7 and its horrific aftermath.

Who (or what) is preventing a two-state solution from going ahead?

Israel’s far-right government is viscerally opposed to the very idea of an independent Palestinian state, and Netanyahu has blocked progress on the issue for many years.

October 7 was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust and has fundamentally changed Israel’s perceptions of its own vulnerability, meaning it will now demand a much higher price, in security terms, before allowing any self-governing Palestinian state.

Even if Israel was willing to negotiate, it is unclear what it would be prepared to offer. Successive governments have been allowing settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that have complicated the path to a two-state solution. The Green Line is ever more perforated and permeated.

Many hardline Israelis are adamant about not giving up these settlements. But for some, the rhetoric goes even further – the most extreme, some of whom are serving in Netanyahu’s wartime coalition, talk openly about driving out the Palestinians altogether.

On the Palestinian side, Hamas hardly looks like a group that can sit at the negotiating table. But in the West Bank, the octogenarian Abbas is a diminished and unloved figure among Palestinians, meaning he and his Fatah administration are in no position, politically, to offer compromises or concessions to the Israelis.

It’s also unclear what concessions he could make. The Palestinians may have given up on the Golan Heights in the north, but they will never concede the lands that Israel has occupied over the past two decades. The right of return for refugees is totemic. The security guarantees Israel will seek could amount to a form of annexation. The status of Jerusalem looks as intractable a problem as ever.

There’s also the question of who might broker a deal. If Donald Trump returns to the White House, he is more likely to throw petrol on the fire than find a way to damp things down. The Israelis don’t trust the Europeans, and the British don’t have enough clout on their own.

The key Arab countries, having started to normalise relations with Israel, are keen to restore stability, but they can’t be seen to sell out the Palestinians cheaply.

“People [in the Arab world] are very angry. It has brought home to governments across the Gulf that the public is not ready to normalise with Israel, especially if they feel there’s no gain for the Palestinians in doing so,” Kristian Ulrichsen, of Rice University, said in a recent Chatham House paper.

But Israel will want to see the Americans in the room, and the levels of trust and respect are low. Also, with the issues so intractable and now so bitter, many people wonder if anyone can broker a two-state solution.

Yet, the problem, as the perceptive former British minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt points out, is that there is no other viable option.

Are there alternative solutions?

The Palestine/Israel Pulse survey of Israelid and Palestinians shows an erosion of support for a two-state solution.

By the end of 2022, only 33 per cent of Palestinians and 34 per cent of Israeli Jews supported the idea of two sovereign nations, with two-thirds of Palestinians and more than half of Israelis opposed. The researchers noted this finding coincided with a significant rise in armed clashes between Palestinians and Israelis in 2022 and the electoral success of extreme right-wing forces in Israel.

Respondents were also asked about their support for two alternatives; one democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians, and one state in which one side or the other dominates the entire region and the other side is denied equal rights.

In 2022, Palestinian support for a two-state solution was higher than that for one unequal state (30 per cent) and the one equal or democratic state (23 per cent). Among Israeli Jews, support for one unequal or non-democratic state, at 37 per cent, was higher than the support for the two-state solution recorded at the end of 2022.

A survey conducted this year of 500 Israelis found there was collectively more support for either mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza (26.2 per cent) or a one-state solution without citizenship to Palestinians (19.2 per cent), than there was for a two-state solution (31.7 per cent).

Significantly, in light of the UN General Assembly vote, more than three-quarters of those surveyed this year in by the Palestine Peace Coalition agreed with the view that the war on Gaza had revived international attention and could lead to increased recognition of Palestinian statehood. Some 37 per cent supported a return to negotiations to achieve a two-state solution.

For the international community, decades of failure to achieve a future in which two sovereign nations can exist peacefully side by side has not dented the belief this goal must still be pursued.

“A two-state solution is the only hope of breaking the endless cycle of violence,” Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong said last month.

The UN vote is a de facto survey of global opinion on what is still viewed as the best possible option for peace – even if the likelihood of it happening is slim.