A couple of blog articles ago, I wished the two-state solution, the two-state notional solution, good riddance. And, in summary, I adduced some of the reasons why, ethically and practically, it could no longer even masquerade as a feasible approach to ‘solving’ the Palestinian/Israel situation.
Yet, like a family unwilling to withdraw treatment from a clinically dead patient, individual states, political groupings, special interests, among them liberal Zionist organisations and lobbies, persist in projecting signs of life onto an idea whose hour never was, and is doomed never to come.
Thus, USA President Biden nevertheless reiterated his support for the two-state solution in his speech to the UN and the UK, similarly, supports that hallucinatory, fantasised outcome.
Members of the European Parliament, too, in muscular mood, reiterated their ‘…unwavering support for a negotiated two-state solution for Israel and Palestine on the basis of the 1967 borders…’along with the need for a ‘strong and democratic Palestinian Authority [as] an essential part of reaching that goal’. Feet firmly planted in the air, they also declared that an ‘end to the occupation and to the expansion of Israeli settlements is equally vital’. And so on.
Priority: maintain the status quo
What’s going on here is the manufacture of a fantasy world, a contrivance designed to maintain the status quo.
On the one hand, commitment to the two-state solution fantasy provides its proponents the cover required to further their own geo-political and domestic political interests. As currently conceived, this requires Israel to be viewed as a democratic state like any other, frayed, perhaps, at the edges, but basically an acceptable chap/chapess within the comity of nations. Hence, the encouragement of normalisation between Israel and Arab states serves Western interests well, given the still significant role oil plays in economies. But that’s barely the half of it, for Israel is so woven into the security framework of the West, that it would be difficult to unpick the threads that bind Israel to it. So, these aspects of the status quo yearn for quiet, no rocking of boats, just the attempt to maintain a steady, undramatic, advancement of state interests. Otherwise known as the two-state solution.
Bernard Spiegal 
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