For decades, the United States has defended, with greater or lesser effort, the two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the wake of the Gaza war, President Joe Biden has revived the idea, but is he serious about this commitment?
“A two-state path is required with real security guarantees for Israel,” reiterated US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his sixth tour of the Middle East since the Hamas attack on October 7 that led to the current Israeli offensive. over the Gaza Strip.
Before the war, the Democratic Administration of Joe Biden focused all its efforts on helping Israel seek a historic agreement to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, but the massacre perpetrated by the Palestinian Islamist group, which caused more than 1,200 deaths, dynamited the negotiations.
The unprecedented humanitarian crisis that the Gaza Strip is now suffering, where more than 30,000 people have died due to Israeli attacks, have forced Washington to once again emphasize the need to create a Palestinian state.
Two States, a plan that always comes back
Neither the United States nor most European countries recognize the independence of the Palestinian territories, today divided between the West Bank, militarily occupied by Israel with a pseudo-autonomous government of the Palestinian National Authority, and the besieged Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas.
But Washington’s proposal for a negotiated solution between Israelis and Palestinians to create two states that coexist in peace is not new.
Democrat Bill Clinton proposed in 2000 the creation of a Palestinian State in the so-called Clinton Parameters and Republican George W. Bush presented the Road Map for Peace in 2003 with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations to support an independent Palestine.
Obama tried it too
The Democratic Administration of Barack Obama also opted for the two-state solution, but the negotiations failed due to disagreements over Jewish settlements and the release of Palestinian prisoners, while Republican Donald Trump’s Peace Plan was rejected by Palestinian leaders because aligned with Israel’s interests.
When the Biden administration took office in 2021, it saw no benefit in trying to address this issue because it had “no reasonable prospect” of moving forward and decided to “dedicate its attention elsewhere,” analyst Michael Hanna tells TTU. from the International Crisis Group think tank.
But the events of October 7 demonstrated that the ‘status quo’ is no longer sustainable, Hanna adds.
The State Department confirmed at the end of last January that Blinken ordered his team to analyze “several options” for the establishment of an independent Palestinian State with security guarantees for Israel, but many analysts doubt that the Biden Government can weave a successful plan in this regard.
Dim prospects
One of the biggest obstacles that has hampered prospects for a Palestinian state for decades is the fragmentation of its territory, aggravated by the construction of Israeli colonies within the West Bank.
This Friday, the Israeli Government declared 800 hectares of the Jordan Valley as state lands. It is the largest expanse of Palestinian land designated for Israeli settlement construction in decades.
The news coincided with Blinken’s visit to Israel. He condemned the land grabs because they “make the already challenging two-state prospect even more complicated.”
But it does not seem that it will convince the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most right-wing in the history of Israel and another of the great obstacles to the creation of a Palestinian State.
Netanyahu opposes the idea of two states. He intends to continue the offensive on Gaza until the total eradication of Hamas. He has designed a post-war scenario in which the Israeli Army would man a security perimeter around the enclave.
Therefore, for Lidna Robinson, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, the only possible path to a two-state solution would be through a change of government in Israel and for the Biden Administration to take the issue seriously by increasing the “pressure.” about the Jewish State.
Time is ticking and a victory for Trump in the November presidential elections would once again bury the idea of the two states.
BY: TTU
