For decades, successive Washington presidents have supported several versions of two-state solutions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What no one had ever imagined was that the second state was Americans, not Palestinians.
President Trump's astounding plan to expel the entire Palestinian Gaza population and have the US take over the seaside enclaves not only convulsed the Middle East. It may also just write obituaries for the long-standing but infuriating and elusive goal of establishing a Palestinian state with Israel in peaceful coexistence.
The Palestinian vision includes Gaza as an integral part of its vision, along with the West Bank. However, in Trump's vision, Gaza will become the territory of the United States, transformed into the “Middle Eastern Riviera.” It's not Palestinian anymore, but it's open to anyone who wants to live there. And about that, he showed openness to the annexation of Israel in parts of the West Bank, and promised to reveal his position within four weeks.
The Palestinian state's outlook led to Israeli retaliation war in Gaza, which killed 1,200 people and killed 47,000 fighters and civilians, especially after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. , it has already declined in recent years. To Gaza Health Authority. Polls show that neither Israeli nor Palestinian groups view the two-state scenario as a viable plan.
However, the rest of the world, previously led by the US, continues to stick to ideas as an official policy, provided there is no reason other than a lack of alternatives. And Saudi Arabia argued that the Palestinian state must be part of a deal that establishes diplomatic relations with Israel.
“If Trump somehow owns Gaza and thinks Israel is allowing parts of the West Bank to annex, he's totally wrong about it,” said Washington Liberal. said J. Street President Jeremy Benami. – A peace-promoting organization negotiated in the Middle East. “There's no way to go about trading.”
However, opponents of the Palestinian state feel encouraged at this point. While Biden has rarely continued to continue the two state solutions, I am sure Trump's return to power means that a Palestinian state never exists.
“It's a deadly issue,” said Morton A. Klein, national president of Zionist agencies opposed to the two-state solution. “I think most people think it's a deadly issue,” he added. “They had a state in Gaza. How did it work?”
Trump has long cast himself as one person who can bring peace to the Middle East. On Thursday, he told the audience at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to be remembered as a “peacemaker,” but he never achieved his own desire. When he took office in 2017, he took on the mission to ultimately resolve generational old conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, boldly saying, “It's not as difficult as people have thought of over the years.” I predicted.
But it turns out to be as difficult as people have thought of over the years. He assigned his son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a plan released in 2020 that imagines a certain state of Palestine, but the proposal widely said to be leaning towards Israel. It was truncated as seen. Under the plan, Israel was allowed to settle with the West Bank and fully manage a unified Jerusalem as its capital, but the Palestinians would have been offered $50 billion in international investment.
The plan went nowhere, but Trump was called the Abraham Agreement, primarily the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel, Bahrain and several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates. It was a thing.
Saudi Arabia had refused to participate at the time, but Biden was closer to securing the deal until the October 7 attack exploded. Now, Trump wants to finalise such an agreement. This will help transform the region.
However, he has not recommended a solution for the two states since returning to power and returning to Israel's newly designated ambassador, Mike Huckabee. “I'm very surprised when he came and said, 'Let's go there and get a solution for two states,'” Huckabee said last month that a New York-based Jewish magazine He spoke in an interview with Ami Magazine.
Trump remained vague about it this week. When he announced plans to take “ownership” in Gaza at a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said that it means he did not support the solution for the two more states. I was asked if that was the case. “That doesn't mean anything about two states, one state or another,” he replied. “That means we have — we want to give people a chance in life.”
The next day, the day after CBS News, Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz said, “I didn't hear the president say it was the end of the two states' solution.” But neither he nor other regime authorities have explained that taking Gaza from the Palestinians can be reconciled with establishing a state that is acceptable to them.
Trump's response to the Gaza program was extremely negative outside of Israel. Over the past few days, Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Turkey, Canada, Japan and the European Union have all redefine their support for two-state solutions For use. “There's only one solution. It's a solution for two states,” Denmark's Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Danish media.
But at one point, it came across more as a hot topic diplomatic ritual rather than a realistic agenda. On Israeli and Palestinian territories, the concept of two states living side by side in peace has lost its former broad support.
In Israel, only 27% of those who supported Gallup Polling's two-state solution last summer, while 64% opposed it. This was a comeback from 2012, when 61% supported it and only 30% opposed it.
And that is roughly the same view as the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with only 28% of those interviewed last summer supporting such a plan, while 64% opposed it. did. That also represents a fundamental decline in enthusiasm since 2012, compared with 66% of these regions supporting it, compared with 32% who did not.
Yakov Amidler, former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said the long-conceived solution for the two provinces is dead.
“There is no way to rebuild Gaza,” he told Al Arabia's television. “The West Bank is another political issue to be discussed. But in Gaza, 80% of the buildings are destroyed and 2 million Palestinians do not live in less than 400 square kilometres.”
Elliot Abrams advised several Republican presidents in the Middle East, including Trump, during his first term, but even if world leaders refuse to accept it, the two states' solution for a while He said it is quite unfeasible. The president's plan to buy Gaza itself may not be accepted, but Abrams said he focused on the light-shape of Palestinians living in war-torn regions, not on the lines on the map.
“Trump's plan changed the subject from politics to what happens to people,” Abrams said. “He talked about how Gazan lives now, and in the future he could live much better, and he didn't demonize Gazan. So his plan was to say that the two states were the two-state. It is a reminder that the solution is just a foreign minister screaming at each other, and that is not a solution at all.”
From the other side of the debate, Ben Ami agreed that Trump had the points. “There's an element of truth under all of this, which means it's really hard to imagine how to rebuild with two million people,” he said.
He also agreed that “the concept of a traditional two-state solution has actually disappeared for a while.” However, he wanted to be part of a wider, regionally-wide change driven by Saudi Arabia's Arab reconciliation with Israel. “It's going to have to be part of that normalised transaction,” Ben Ami said. “We call it the 23 state solution.”