The "two-state solution" for Israel/Palestine is a maniacal obsession of an increasingly desperate neoliberal foreign policy establishment

And it probably is creating the conditions for the very global conflagration everyone is trying to avoid

As the war drums grow louder in the Middle East and fighting expands on multiple fronts, Western diplomacy is reaching ever more desperately for the golden ring on the historical carousel – the so-called “two-state solution” to the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The more impossible such a “solution” becomes, the more the diplomatic fantasy-mongers in striped pants dance, chant, and ritually call on the powers that be to make it happen.

As Israel’s initial vow following October 7 to annihilate Hamas begins to look increasingly unattainable, President Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubled down on the very proposition that Hamas’ brutal attack had been cleverly designed to explode, namely, that any sort of durable peace in the Middle East hinges exclusively on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The question, of course, that no one really dares to ask is why, if a Palestinian state could not be achieved in the past under more favorable conditions, could it possibly be considered more feasible nowadays.  Urgency does not in any way equate with necessity.

As the Washington Post columnist Jason Willick argues, “the term “two-state solution” assumes its own conclusion. If the United States and other powers recognized the pre-1967 Palestinian territories as a state tomorrow, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not be solved.”

A “two-state solution” was the original plan of partition issued by the United Nations as Resolution 181 in the year 1947.   In fact, it was urged as far back as 1937 by the Peel Commission under British colonial rule after determining that “Jewish and Arab objectives in Palestine were incompatible”.

The separation of Jews and Palestinians into separate states was never implemented because the latter rejected it out of hand and called on the surrounding Arab nations to mobilize their armies to crush the nascent political entity that came to be known as Israel.

In response, Israel declared its own independence as a nation-state and defeated the invading military forces.  Various Arab states in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006 subsequently declared war on Israel with the aim of destroying the Jewish state and “liberating” the Palestinians.

Each time these efforts were thwarted by Israeli military prowess.  Israel’s current borders and spheres of occupation were never at any time the result of what cynical anti-Israel and coy antisemitic ideologues term “settler colonialism”. 

They were the immediate upshot of repeated attempts by armies of neighboring states, as Egypt’s dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser put it in 1967, “to drive the Jews into the sea”, a popular phrase among the Arab masses with the precisely same meaning as the current chant of “from the river to the sea”.

The second embarrassing question smooth-talking international experts refuse routinely to address is whether the respective parties to any two-state solution actually want such an outcome.

Despite the media focus on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent blunt rejection of a two-state solution, polling shows that most Israelis agree with him, and have been losing patience gradually for decades in the idea.  The Oct. 7 atrocities of Hamas turned out to be the coup de grace.

Similarly, Palestinian support for such a “solution” was dropping even before the outbreak of the Israeli-Hamas war, and it has reached historic lows among the younger generation.  According to Gallup research, only one in six Palestinians between the ages of 15 and 25 were in favor of having two-states.

As recently as December 13 comparable polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research (PCPSR) indicated that “almost three in four Palestinians believe the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct, and the ensuing Gaza war has lifted support for the Islamist group both there and in the West Bank”.

And just this week senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal, a Qatari-based billionaire, made it crystal clear that his terrorist group has absolutely no interest in a two-state solution.  In an interview with a Kuwaiti podcaster Mashaal said that for Palestinians “nearly a consensus” has developed that Israel must be dismantled as a nation-state.

It is becoming obvious as the days go on that the real reason for American and European advocacy for a two-state solution has less to do with peace in the Middle East than a precipitate scramble to prevent the war in Gaza from exploding into a regional, if not global, conflagration.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long-tenured global elites whisperer and Middle Eastern pontificator-in-chief, sees the Gaza strife as just one strategic gambit in a covert gigantomachy between invisible collective players he romantically dubs the “Resistance Network” and the “Inclusion Network” (a DEI version of the board game Risk?).

According to Friedman, everything will be hunky dory if the Iranians can just see the light and stop beating their women for not wearing hijabs and starting wars everywhere, while the Israelis “could one day agree to a long-term process with a transformed Palestinian Authority to build two states for two peoples”.

Kumbaya, my Lord.

The kicker is in the three words “transformed Palestinian Authority”.

Who is going to do the “transforming”?

Right now the only entity with any credibility among Palestinians is Hamas.  And Hamas rejects any semblance of a two-state solution.

Hamas, in fact, won an election in Gaza in 2006, formed a coalition with Fatah, and then unceremoniously eliminated its rivals from the government and established totalitarian control over all residents in the strip. The process was remarkably similar to how Hitler took over Germany in 1933.

If Fatah appears to be the only reasonable alternative to Hamas in a future Palestinian state, it remains, as a letter writer to the Wall Street Journal quips, “Hamas-lite”.  Like Hamas, it didn’t even distance itself from the Oct. 7 carnage, but celebrated it.

As the Times has noted, Fatah can only govern if it includes Hamas, and we have already know how that turns out.  Hamas has made clear that its unshakable objective is the destruction of the state of Israel and the explusion of the Jews from Palestine.

These inconvenient truths, however, seem to have little impact on the thinking of the West’s foreign policy minions.  This week the European Union’s foreign policy head Josep Borell tendered a draft of a comprehensive peace plan for a two-state solution that he strongly hinted would be imposed by the United Nations if Israel didn’t accept it.

Of course, the Brussels bureaucrats have not seriously pondered what it might look like if any resolution from the UN Security Council forcing such a solution on both Israelis and Palestinians were genuinely to come to pass.

If one wants consciously to ignite a world war, such a move would constitute the perfect “road map” (to invoke current diplomatic clichés) for doing so.

Fortunately, given the geopolitics of the present day new world disorder, which encompasses an ampitheater of ever more fractious domestic politics, especially in America and the EU itself, such an eventuality seems highly unlikely.

One of the most absurd, but unspoken dimensions of the progressively delusional discourse of over our neoliberal overlords when it comes to Israel and Palestine is the madcap refusal to recognize that the conflict in the Levant is an ancient religious one between two, or perhaps three, historically warring monotheistic faiths that goes way beyond ethnic feuds like the Genovese and the Gambino mafia crime families, or the Hatfields and the McCoys.

The conflict is, and for a long while, has indeed been over land, but the warrant for the position of each side amounts to a set of competing and foundational theological commitments supposedly contained in their respective holy scriptures. 

Hamas’ resistance to any Jewish political autonomy in the Middle East is derived from a not-so-unconventional rendering of Muslim tradition that considers Palestine, as Article 11 of its charter puts it, “an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day.” 

On the Jewish side there is of course the all-too-familiar Biblical promise of God to Abraham found in Genesis 15:18-21:

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.’

Even though in the Biblical narrative God allows foreign nations to overrun the Jewish state as chastisement for their infidelity to the covenant, the eschatological promise is always a return to the land, a motif that was central even to the scriptural outlook of early Christianity and explains straightforwardly the ongoing evangelical commitment to the post-1948 state of Israel.

In my writings I have called this conflict between the Judeao-Christian and Islamic understanding of the significance of Israel/Palestine not so much a “clash of civilizations”, as a clash of revelations.

The resolution of this struggle, which has been going on in some iteration for over two iterations, is not going to be achieved by the US State Department, the EU, or even the United Nations.

It may come down, in fact, to an event that decides once and for all who is the one true God in the universe, and to try to force the divine hand is an invitation to a catastrophe that we can yet barely imagine.