Why The Two-State Solution Never Worked
Why The Two-State Solution Never Worked for both palestine and israel
Transcript
00:00I've been to the occupied Palestinian territories and reported from there for years.
00:05I've spent a lot of time filming stories and documentaries about life under Israeli
00:10military occupation in the places that are supposed to make up a future Palestinian state.
00:16Palestinians are a people.
00:17There's a Palestinian flag.
00:19Palestine is represented at the United Nations.
00:22But for now, there's no actual Palestinian state.
00:25And I think the chance of there being one as part of a two-state solution that divides
00:29this land between Israelis and Palestinians, well, I don't think that's very likely.
00:34And I'm going to tell you why.
00:44More than 140 countries recognize Palestine as a state.
00:47Norway recognizes the state of Palestine.
00:50The path to peace goes through a two-state solution.
00:54We have recognized both the state of Israel and the state of Palestine.
00:58This is where many people expect this state to eventually exist.
01:02More than 5.5 million Palestinians live in these territories, many of them refugees expelled
01:07from their homes by Israel.
01:09Remember that, because it's an important part of the story and we'll get to it later.
01:14But for now, I want you to pay attention to these.
01:17You know, one thing that stands out to me every time I travel between Palestinian towns
01:21in the West Bank is how many Israeli settlements there are.
01:25They're everywhere.
01:27You can see these white stone-walled buildings and red-tiled roofs all over the occupied
01:31West Bank.
01:32And under international law, they are all illegal.
01:35Because this is not Israeli land.
01:38But the people who live in these areas are Israeli settlers.
01:41In fact, about one in every 10 Israeli Jews lives in one of these settlements.
01:45They include high-ranking government officials, military commanders and Israeli Supreme Court
01:50justices.
01:51The Israeli government subsidizes their lifestyle with cheaper housing and tax breaks.
01:57These settlements are built on land confiscated by force from Palestinians.
02:01Stolen is another word for it.
02:03And the settlements are built between Palestinian towns and villages, cutting people off from
02:08each other and from their own natural resources.
02:11The infrastructure of these Israeli settlements — security zones, settler roads and military
02:15bases — have made it impossible to create a contiguous Palestinian state here.
02:21If you're asking me, is a Palestinian state viable with all these settlements spread out
02:27throughout the West Bank, no, it's impossible.
02:29It's impossible to have a state.
02:30That's the reference to the Swiss cheese with holes.
02:32If the West Bank was going to become part of a Palestinian state, then these holes would
02:37have to be filled in by absorbing the settlements into this future Palestine.
02:41Either the Israeli settlers would come under Palestinian rule, or they'd have to be removed.
02:46It's hard to imagine Israel forcing hundreds of thousands of its citizens out of the settlements
02:51it's spent decades building for them.
02:54In fact, Israel has said that it wants to annex those settlements and keep them for itself.
02:59The settlements are the most obvious reasons why Palestinian statehood in the West Bank
03:03remains highly unlikely.
03:05It's a reason you can see and feel.
03:07It's a reason that's literally made of concrete.
03:10But there are also a lot of political reasons.
03:13Let's go back a few decades.
03:15The closest we've ever been to a two-state solution was the 1993 Oslo Accords, a deal
03:20signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel.
03:24The PLO had given up its claims to historic Palestine and hoped the Oslo Accords would
03:28lead to a Palestinian state in just the West Bank and Gaza.
03:32As part of the Accords, the PLO recognized Israel.
03:36Israel did not recognize a Palestinian state in return.
03:39The Israeli prime minister at the time was the Labor Party's Yitzhak Rabin.
03:43The Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, has been shot.
03:46A Jewish gunman attacked him tonight at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
03:50Rabin's assassin accused him of giving up too much to the Palestinians.
03:55But Rabin had never intended to accept full Palestinian independence.
03:59He said the most Palestinians would ever get was an entity less than a state.
04:05And this has always been the most that any Israeli government has been willing to consider.
04:09For example, Rabin was seen as a liberal.
04:12But Israel's longest-serving prime minister, the conservative right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu,
04:17has said that the most he'd allow Palestinians to have is a state minus.
04:21And as we were recording this, the Israeli parliament voted to reject the creation of
04:25a Palestinian state.
04:27So the rejection of a fully independent Palestinian state is mainstream in Israeli politics.
04:33In contrast, even Hamas, the other major Palestinian movement, has said that if a real Palestinian
04:39state were to be founded in the West Bank and Gaza, it would accept that.
04:43Obviously, the Oslo Accords did not lead to an independent Palestinian state.
04:48And there haven't been serious negotiations for a resolution since early 2001.
04:53But one thing every Israeli government has done, even when there were negotiations, was
04:57to build more settlements.
04:59Here's Israeli historian Avi Shleim describing that strategy.
05:02He's like a man who pretends to negotiate over the division of a pizza, and he keeps eating it.
05:11I promise that was the last food analogy in this video, but this whole idea of cutting
05:15up the land and dividing it is not new.
05:18It's actually a pretty old one.
05:19So old that there's an argument that partition, trying to create two states on this land,
05:24is the cause of this conflict.
05:26Let me explain.
05:27In 1917, the British Empire occupied Palestine and promised to establish a Jewish homeland there.
05:34Now, that was a problem because Palestine was not empty, and only 6% of its population was Jewish.
05:40So over the next 30 years, Britain tried to change those demographics.
05:44It encouraged the immigration of European Jews to Palestine and helped them build the
05:49infrastructure of a state.
05:50Today, the refugee from Germany finds 350,000 Jews in Palestine,
05:56finds himself one of 50,000 a year pouring in from all over the world.
06:01No more than 50,000 because that is the quota Britain has set.
06:04At the same time, it brutally repressed Palestinian resistance to British occupation
06:09and put down any attempt by Palestinians to build a state of their own.
06:14And Britain created multiple commissions and reports, like this one, to answer the
06:18question of how to turn Palestine into a Jewish state.
06:22The answer often came back as partition, dividing the land into two countries,
06:27one Arab and one Jewish.
06:29The two-state solution.
06:30But because Palestinians were the majority, this meant that hundreds of thousands of them
06:35would have to be expelled to create a state with a sustainable Jewish majority.
06:39By the end of World War II, an exhausted Britain was retreating from its global empire
06:44and gave up sorting out the problem it had created in Palestine.
06:48The Union Jack was hauled down and the doors closed for good on the British mandate.
06:53It punted the question to the newly created United Nations,
06:56which in 1947 voted to partition Palestine and to give 55% of the land to the Jewish state,
07:03even though Jews were still a minority.
07:05The UN plan didn't explain how this state would be Jewish,
07:09when even in that territory, Jews weren't a clear majority.
07:13So the leaders of what would become Israel began changing those demographics by force.
07:18They began expelling the Palestinian population,
07:21eventually emptying more than 450 cities, towns and villages.
07:26Israel declared itself a state in May 1948 and defeated a feeble,
07:30unorganized military intervention by several poorly equipped Arab armies.
07:35By the time the fighting stopped, Israel controlled not just 55%, but 78% of the land.
07:42Most importantly, it had driven out 750,000 Palestinians,
07:46three quarters of the population, and has never allowed them to return.
07:50Palestinians call this the Nekba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.
07:54And in 1967, Israel went on to occupy the rest of what had been Palestine.
08:00Since then, attempts at creating a two-state solution have focused on reversing what happened in 1967.
08:06They ignore what happened to the Palestinians in 1948,
08:09when they were displaced and made stateless.
08:12Today, there are around 6 million Palestinian refugees,
08:15those who were kicked out by Israel and their descendants.
08:18If partition was to finally succeed and we end up with two states, where would they go?
08:23You might assume they'd all go to the new state of Palestine.
08:26But under international law, refugees have the right to return to where their homes were,
08:30which would be inside Israel today.
08:33So here we are again, trying to square this circle.
08:36To become a Jewish state, Israel forced out most of the non-Jews.
08:40Letting them back in, which Israel is obligated to do under UN Resolution 194 adopted in 1948,
08:47would make Jews a minority again.
08:49You know, the refugee issue isn't a minor problem.
08:52For Palestinians, the right to return is at the center of their struggle and identity.
08:57But even if we were to ignore that and just focus on creating a Palestinian state on the ground,
09:02we have to deal with the fact that neither Israel nor its main backer, the United States,
09:06really accept the idea of Palestinians having full sovereignty.
09:10They insist that a Palestinian state can't have its own military, for example.
09:15It's hard to imagine Palestinians accepting that,
09:17especially considering what happened during the Nakba
09:20or Israel's current destruction of Gaza.
09:22Still, let's assume that all those issues were resolved or put to the side.
09:26In that scenario, Palestinians would accept a state on 22% of their homeland,
09:32that's the West Bank and Gaza.
09:34They'd agree to Israel annexing the settlements it has built on that land.
09:38Millions of Palestinian refugees would give up their right to return to their homes.
09:43Palestine would be made up of disconnected territories.
09:46And it would have less sovereignty than any other country on Earth.
09:50What would a two-state solution mean for Israel?
09:53Because Israel's own laws define the country as a place
09:56where the right to self-determination is reserved for Jewish Israelis only.
10:01As Benjamin Netanyahu once said,
10:03Israel is the national state not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.
10:08That's a problem when about 20% of your population isn't Jewish.
10:12These are Israel's Palestinian citizens,
10:14the ones who managed to stay behind during the Nakba.
10:17If a separate Palestinian state is established and Israel remains a Jewish state,
10:22what would happen to them?
10:23Some Israeli officials have been explicit about wanting to expel them
10:26to any future Palestinian state,
10:28although most Israeli politicians refuse the idea of that state ever existing.
10:33So we keep coming back to the same point.
10:35Every attempt to partition the land and separate Israeli Jews and Palestinians
10:40ends in either population expulsion
10:42or a system where people have different rights based on the community they were born into.
10:47So to recap, Israel's illegal settlements and land grabs
10:51have pretty much made the founding of a Palestinian state impossible.
10:55But even if that wasn't the case,
10:56just creating a Palestinian state doesn't fix the core issue of this conflict,
11:01the forced expulsion of most of the Palestinian population.
11:05It also doesn't address the discrimination facing Israel's non-Jewish citizens.
11:09The two-state solution doesn't solve any of these problems.
11:12What the two-state solution does is try to preserve a Jewish-majority state
11:16that was only created by forcing the Palestinians out.
11:19And to be honest, all of this is based on hopes from decades ago.
11:23It doesn't reflect the reality of today,
11:25where Israel has destroyed Gaza and effectively annexed the West Bank already.
11:30The Israeli human rights group Yitzhalem, like many other human rights groups,
11:34describes that reality as apartheid,
11:37a system of Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea.
11:42Maybe the solution isn't to find new ways
11:44to separate the people on this land by ethnic division,
11:47but to strive for equality among all.
11:50So all those officials from around the world that talk about a two-state solution,
11:54perhaps they should also drive around the occupied West Bank,
11:58understand the reality,
12:00and then figure out what they'll do to change it.
12:14about how Israel was created.
12:16I think it helps put this story into context.