The breakneck expansion of settlements in the West Bank has rendered American talk of a two-state solution increasingly irrelevant.
Ten years ago, Frank Lowenstein, then the United States special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, presented President Barack Obama with maps of settlements by Israeli Jews in the occupied West Bank. The maps revealed that a chronic problem had turned critical. The expansion of settlements crisscrossing the West Bank threatened the hope of establishing a contiguous Palestinian state there. As Jews and Palestinians lived in roughly equal numbers in Israel and the territories it had occupied since 1967, those settlements also imperilled Israel’s claim to be both Jewish and democratic. By gradually accomplishing a de-facto annexation of the West Bank, the settlements would require Israeli Jews either to rule over a resentful non-Jewish population of about equal size or to surrender the Jewish identity of their state. From the perspective of the United States, either scenario would undermine the stability of the region.
Obama was in the final weeks of his Presidency, and Lowenstein’s maps helped persuade him to let the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution condemning the settlements, which most of the world had long considered violations of international law. (The U.S. declined to exercise its veto and abstained from the vote.) In a speech a few days later, on December 28, 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry defended that decision with a stark warning that settlement expansion was “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.” He continued, “Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.”
“The conversation has gone from ‘What can we do to get to a two-state solution?’ to ‘What can be done to stop Israel from literally taking all of the land?’ ” Lowenstein told me. His latest maps—compiled with his associate Liam Hamama, based on statements from the Israeli government and on data from the advocacy group Peace Now, the Palestinian administrative authority in the West Bank, and U.N. agencies—make clear that to envision any viable form of Palestinian self-rule would now require more than an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a halt to settlement growth. It would entail a major rollback of the existing settlements and outposts—evicting the Israeli Jews who established them. Lowenstein argued that a more immediate goal would be persuading Israel to give back at least some of the land to the Palestinians. But Israel’s current political climate makes such a proposal almost inconceivable in the short term. Lowenstein told me that when he served as special envoy, Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders would at least profess support for some distant, hypothetical Palestinian state. Yet in 2025, after the politics of both Israel and the United States had drifted to the right, the Israeli Knesset passed a nonbinding resolution declaring that “Israel has the natural, historical and legal right” to the West Bank and Gaza. Netanyahu is now campaigning for reëlection on the promise that he will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state, and far-right figures in his Cabinet have suggested that they would like to drive out the Palestinians now living in Gaza. “The Israeli paradigm has shifted to ‘We are going to have the full right to all of the land,’ ” Lowenstein told me.
In this context, talking about American support for a future two-state solution, as many politicians in both parties continue to do, is like musing about an alternative history. It is no longer relevant. Instead of allowing politicians only to repeat talking points about eventual Palestinian statehood, Lowenstein argued, Americans should ask candidates the more pertinent question: Will you press Israel, right now, to begin putting more land back in Palestinian hands? Likewise, he continued, voters should not accept “pro-Israel” as a meaningful description of a candidate’s views. With the settlements fast expanding the practical boundaries of the Jewish state, the relevant question is not “Do you support Israel?” The question is: Which Israel do you support? The internationally recognized Israel, with the borders that preceded its 1967 conquests? Or a vision of Greater Israel, in which it formally annexes those territories, and the Jewish half of the population either rules over or seeks to expel the half that is Palestinian?
Kerry, in his warning speech nearly a decade ago, noted how the borders of the Jewish state had moved over time. The 1947 U.N. resolution proposing a partition of the territory left the Palestinians about forty-three per cent of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In the wars that immediately followed, Israel expanded its share to seventy-eight per cent of the land, leaving just twenty-two per cent for the Palestinian half of the population. The Oslo Accords, signed over thirty years ago, gave Palestinians at least administrative control of limited areas as a first step toward eventual control of the West Bank and Gaza—almost all of that twenty-two per cent of the land. But on the most recent map, Lowenstein told me, the settlements and outposts, and the military operations in Gaza, appear to permanently confine the Palestinians to control of even less than those limited areas, amounting to just eight per cent of the total land. Israel fully controls about ninety-two per cent. Lowenstein asked, “Ninety-two per cent of the land for fifty per cent of the people—how is that sustainable?” ♦
