The Death of Evidence-Based Two-Statism

One of the most dramatic effects of October 7 is that it turned Palestinian statehood from a remote possibility into an outright impossibility. On that day, supporters of Palestinian statehood, among whom I used to count myself until recently, lost their strongest argument for their view.

Let me start with a couple of biographical remarks. For a long time, I was a supporter of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Over the years, I have become convinced that a full-blown solution to the conflict isn’t possible, because eliminationist irredentism is such an integral aspect of Palestinian national identity that even full-blown Palestinian statehood will never constitute a solution, and thus will never put an end on the conflict. However, I believed that separation from the Palestinians was still a necessity, and that even if the conflict could not be solved, it could be “frozen”—turned into something resembling the conflict between India and Pakistan, which has never been resolved but in which the level of violence can be kept low. In short, I used to believe that Israel must finish the late prime minister Ariel Sharon’s plan of unilateral withdrawal and clear out of part of the West Bank, while keeping most settlers within Israel’s final, unilaterally declared borders. Lately, however, I have become doubtful of this approach, and after October 7 I have become unambiguously opposed to it.

There are two ways of being a two-statist about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: faith-based and evidence-based. Faith-based two-statists aren’t prepared to give up on the two-state paradigm under any circumstances. Sometimes they argue that justice demands that the Palestinians be allowed to exercise their self-determination in an independent state, no matter what the cost is for Israel. Others argue that without a two-state solution, the final outcome would “inevitably” be one state. (It’s rarely explained exactly what is inevitable about it. Advocates of the argument usually imagine a future sanctions regime that would browbeat Israel into giving citizenship to the Palestinians, but since enfranchising millions of hostile Palestinians would be a far greater existential threat to Israel than the sanctions regime itself, this doesn’t sound realistic to me.)