Without a two-state solution or single state with equal rights, what hope is there?

Well, here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that the terrible events of 7 October 2023 never happened. No Hamas slaughter, no subsequent Israeli obliteration of Gaza. What would Israel/Palestine look like now?

The biggest difference would, of course, be in Gaza, which would not now be a flattened hellscape. Israel, though, would still control the borders, the airspace, the surrounding sea and all movement of people and goods. Hamas would still be in power and as lethal to Palestinians (as the latest public executions show) as to Israelis. Hamas represents not Palestinian resistance but its degeneration, part of the broader rot of Palestinian political leadership. Its power came largely from the backing of Iran and Qatar, and, though this is almost entirely ignored, from the tacit support of Israel, which, until 7 October, saw Hamas as an “asset”, helping reduce prospects of a Palestinian state. On 7 October, the Times of Israel observed, the strategy “of indirectly strengthening Hamas … went up in smoke”.

The West Bank would have been much as it is now, under occupation, penned in by walls and military force, with burgeoning Jewish settlements and Palestinians being driven off their land. The Palestinian Authority, the nominal ruling body, would still be as corrupt and undemocratic.

Little would have changed for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, either. They have more rights and freedoms than were they living in Gaza or the West Bank. But most remain marginalised, facing discrimination in every area from education and jobs to access to land.

Israelis would have been spared the carnage of 7 October and the hostage trauma that followed. Israel would have continued with its policy of containment: of keeping the West Bank and Gaza under such a tight leash that it could effectively ignore the Palestinians and their aspirations and struggle.

So, while the past two years have brought unspeakable suffering and destruction, and the ceasefire is more than welcome, most of the issues that need confronting have not arisen from the Hamas attack or the war but long preceded it.

The most intractable problem is that neither of the two main solutions to the conflict – the creation of two states for Jews and Palestinians or a single, secular democratic state for both – is currently viable.

For all the talk of a two-state solution, Israel’s West Bank annexation policy makes it almost impossible. As its finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, recently observed in approving a huge new Jewish settlement, such building “buries the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood lies deeper than simply settlement policy. As the historian Seth Anziska describes in his bookPreventing Palestine, the aim of Israeli negotiators in the peace process – from the 1978 Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered by US president Jimmy Carter, to the Oslo Accords, between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, two decades later, and beyond – was always to grant Palestinians a degree of “autonomy” or “self-rule” while denying any possibility of “self-determination”. As Rabin told the Knesset in 1995, the Oslo Accords would establish a Palestinian “entity … less than a state”. A less-than-a-state with no control over borders, not even control of aquifers, and hosting an Israeli military presence within.

At the same time, the growth of sectarian and ethnonationalist views have undermined the possibilities of a single state for Jews and Palestinians. The secularism of Palestinian politics has long since given way to the hardline antisemitic, theocratic outlook of groups such as Hamas, fuelled by hatred of Jews. Racist contempt for Palestinians has grown in Israel, too, while the 2018 “nation state” law declares “the right to national self-determination” to be “exclusive to the Jewish People”. Maintaining the Jewish character of Israel, the then justice minister Ayelet Shaked insisted, “comes at the expense of equality”.

All of which might explain why Trump’s 20-point plan proposes a 21st-century version of the old mandate solution established by the League of Nations after the first world war to allow “advanced nations” to “govern peoples not yet able to stand by themselves” – colonialism by another name. Trump’s plan envisages Gaza as being “temporarily” ruled by a committee of “qualified Palestinians and international experts”, under the “supervision” of a transnational “board of peace” headed by the US president. A mainly Arab “international stabilisation force” would maintain security and order.

Whether this process gets off the ground remains to be seen. But, even if it does, the deeper question is: how will it end? Without the possibility either of a true two-state solution or of a single state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians, it is difficult to know what the “temporary” phase might lead to. The question the Palestinian American academic Edward Said rhetorically, and presciently, asked about the Oslo Accords – “Does this mean, ominously, that the interim stage may be the final one?” – applies here too.

There are now, as the historian Rashid Khalidi has put it, “two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being”, and their “mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights”. If that sounds utopian, it is largely because of the decay of political leadership in both Israel and Palestine.

Whatever happens with the Trump plan, no amount of bulldozer diplomacy or external governance will alter that.

Photograph by Jehad Alshrafi/AP