Let’s go down through the history of it all to find out, shall we? So all the way back in 1947, the UN General Assembly voted for the partition (Resolution 181) of the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, a Jewish and an Arab one, divided more-less along the actual ethnic lines between existing Jewish and Arab settlements. The territory allocated to Jews was larger, but that was mainly because it was given the sparsely populated Negev desert in the south. The city of Jerusalem was located squarely inside the Arab territory, but was meant to be administered as a corpus separatum, an international holy city.
The Jews accepted the partition plan, while the Arabs - both in Palestine and the surrounding states - outright rejected it; and the following year, a united Arab coalition invaded from all sides, to strangle this fledgling Jewish state in its cradle.
Israel, however, soundly repelled the Arab invasion, took an even bigger chunk of Arab-designated territories of Palestine, and caused the expulsion of over 750 000 Palestinian Arabs from them. This is the infamous Nakba (“Disaster”), as it’s being remembered in Palestinian national memory nowadays. It immediately brought about another UN General Assembly resolution (194), calling for the right of return, or otherwise for fair compensation of all refugees who wished to live in peace with their neighbors. Israel grudgingly accepted that resolution, on precondition however that the right of return and compensation be settled in the context of a wider peace and security treaty with Arabs. The Arab states, however, rejected the said resolution at the time, and voted against it in UN, seeing it as tacit legitimization of Israel’s existence; only later on did they latch onto the right of return as a precondition for peace.
What the Arab world actually did in response to Nakba over the following years and decades, was the almost complete expulsion of Jewish minorities from various Muslim states; as many as 900 000 Mizrahi (”Oriental”) Jews were made to leave their ancestral homes across North Africa and the Middle East, with the greatest part of them settling in Israel. For all the people who keep yapping about Israel being a Western settler colony imposed upon Arab natives, it can’t be stressed enough that it was these, “Arab Jewish” refugees who formed the bedrock of Israel’s emerging demography; around 2/3 of Israel’s Jewish population nowadays are their descendants. To paraphrase the wise words of Sultan Bayezid by which he, supposedly, mocked Ferdinand and Isabela when they expelled the Sephardi Jews from Spain into the Ottoman Empire: ”You’ve weakened your own country to strengthen mine!”
So with all that being said, the 1948 war didn’t end with any kind of peace agreement, but simply in a series of ceasefires between Israel and its neighbors (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). The conflict was temporarily frozen along the so-called Green Line, which the Arabs back then insisted was not to be regarded as a permanent border of anything; again, only later did they come to insist this is the line to which the Israeli side should stick.
In 1967, Arab states provoked Israel into another war, when Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran (Israel’s access point to the Red Sea); with the result being that, mere 6 days later, Israeli armies took control of Gaza Strip, all of Sinai Peninsula, West Bank of the Jordan River, and Golan Heights in Syria. This again prompted another resolution (242) from UN Security Council, which established “land for peace” principle, basically: Arabs make peace with and recognize Israel, and Israel returns them their occupied territories. It’s important to note that UN deliberately left vague what exactly those territories are, or where Israel’s official borders lie, as that was expected to be settled through future peace negotiations with the neighboring Arab states.
Once again, Israel accepted this UN resolution, while once again, all of Arab states rejected it. In September of 1967, at the meeting of the Arab League in Sudan, they issued their own, so-called Khartoum resolution, whose principles were boiled down to the infamous “Three Noes”: no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel, no recognition of Israel!
This led to yet another war against Israel in 1973, when Arab coalition attacked on the Jewish holy day Yom Kippur (and also during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan). That one finally ended in a kind of stalemate, for even though Israel advanced deeper into Syria on one side, on the other its position in Sinai and Egypt became increasingly untenable. But this gave Egyptian president Anwar Sadat enough political capital to eventually seek reconciliation with Israel on its own terms; and in 1978, under American mediation at Camp David, Egpyt became the first Arab country to negotiate, recognize and make peace with Israel - and in return, Israel gave it back the Sinai Peninsula.
Although this caused a huge uproar in Arab world at the time - Egypt was kicked out of the Arab League for a number of years, and Sadat was soon assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad - other of Israel’s neighbors would follow the lead; Lebanon signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1983, and Jordan finally in 1994, with Syria remaining the only one not to have done so to present day. However, what’s important here is that both Egypt and Jordan refused to take back territories of Gaza Strip and West Bank, which they each controlled prior to 1967 war; while Israel, on the other hand, never officially annexed or claimed those territories, but kept them under semi-permanent occupation in hopes of future peace settlements.
Which finally brings us to the issue of Palestinians themselves. As the astute readers may have noticed, I haven’t been mentioning them much so far, because in these early wars between Israel and Arabs, Palestinians really weren’t much of a factor at all. The original All-Palestine Government, lead by Amin al-Husseini, was basically a colonial regime installed by Egypt over Gaza Strip; and it was eventually dismantled by Egypt in 1959. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was likewise founded in Egypt in 1964, and not as a government-in-exile of a country-in-making, but as a vanguard army of the wider Arab front against Israel. PLO wasn’t even officially recognized by Arabs as a representative of the Palestinians until 1974 Arab League summit - and that was done mostly to snuff out Jordan’s attempts to come to peace with Israel, and get the West Bank in return.
Consequently, as Egypt and other Arab countries were slowly coming to their senses regarding Israel, the PLO stuck to the most hardline positions of yesteryear: no peace, no negotiations, and no existence of Israel were to be allowed, and the only solution to the Palestinian problem was an all-out armed jihad. The very creation of a Palestinian state was contemplated solely in those terms; as a launchpad from which further Arab invasions into Israel could be stagged, until the Zionist menace is finally wiped out from the map.
Article 19:
The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination.
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
Article 21:
The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, or its internationalization.
- 1968 Palestinian National Charter
This, of course, lead PLO to suck up to the most radical and brutal of Arab strongmen around, and by 1980s they found one in Iraq’s budding dictator Saddam Hussein. PLO under Yasser Arafat were the best buddies with Saddam through the 1980s, even as the Iraqi dictator was waging its genocidal war against Iran; while Israel, through the length of that war, was supporting the young Islamic Republic with weapon supplies, military training and direct combat operations against Iraq. And it’s really amazing (by which I mean: not amazing at all!) that Iran has turned completely on the country that proved itself to be “its friend when the world was its foe”, to quote an old American poet - while giving its unwavering support to the people who were all but cheerleading for Saddam as he was gassing Iranian soldiers and civilians with chemical weapons. Kinda like Poland nowadays gives its 200% support to the Ukrainian regime, which has for years been building monuments to its Nazi collaborators that massacred Poles by myriads in WW2. Just goes to show that common sense is so rare in geopolitics, it should rightly be considered a goddamn superpower!
Anyhow, the continuing extremism and bad political choices of PLO led to Palestinian diaspora being treated like leapers by the rest of the Arab world; and this, together with the weakening of both Saddam’s Iraq and the Soviet Union (which also supported the Arab cause through much of the Cold War), in turn lead Yasser Arafat to reconsider his retirement plans, and conclude how West Bank and Gaza might not be such bad options after all. Thus, in 1988 PLO proclaimed the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which tongue-in-cheek allowed for the existence of Israel, and came on board with all hitherto rejected UN resolutions, Green Lines, Rights of Return and what have you not as fundamental rights for Palestinians.
Israelis, unsurprisingly, had considerable reservations about allowing a state to be formed by an organization that until yesterday kept telling them, in no uncertain terms “We want you all dead and gone!” - but after Arafat’s 1988 public statements how “…that was bad, mmmkay?” the international community concluded now everything will be fine and dandy, and accepted PLO as an official representative of Palestinians, no further questions asked. Consequently, the UN General Assembly published two resolutions that year (43/176 and 43/177), which called for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the withdrawal of Israel’s forces from those occupied territories, dismantling of Israeli settlements on them, return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, unrestricted access to everyone’s holy places, peace and security for everyone in the region, and a free unicorn pony for every child in the world!
Well… scratch that last one off, obviously. But anyway, Israel did begrudgingly enter into negotiations with PLO, with both parties officially recognizing each other as legitimate entities in 1993. This led to the Oslo Peace Process, whose chief aim was to transform the PLO from a guerilla army into a Palestinian Authority (PA), with a proper government, parliament, civil administration and a police force that could actually rule the Palestinians. Not much came out of that, truth be told, except the enormous sums of money now being pumped into PLO/PA not just by Arabs, but by EU and USA, to facilitate peace process and help establish the young Palestinian state. Nevertheless, in 2000s Americans once again organized a summit at Camp David in hopes of final peace settlement on two-state issue. There, the Israelis offered Palestinians a reasonable compromise on pretty much everything - giving them the entire territory of Gaza and something like 90% of West Bank, limited right of return for Palestinian refugees, dismantlement of majority of Israeli settlements etc. - only to have Arafat refuse it all in the end because of the status of East Jerusalem, or something. If I had to guess, I’d say he was very worried what would happen to all that international aid pouring into PAs coffers, once an independent Palestinian state was actually established.
After Arafat passed away in 2004 (with a personal wealth measured in bilions, by all accounts) Israel finally tried to unilaterally force the two-state solution into being, by withdrawing its forces and settlers from Gaza Strip, and thus giving Palestinians their proto-state to rule themselves as they saw fit. The results should be well-known by now: in one and only election they ever had, Palestinians voted for Hamas, the most radical of their factions, which clung to the spirit of the original Palestinian National Charter - no peace, no negotiations and no Israel! Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 in a bloody coup, purged it from all the Palestinians who had second thoughts about living under such Islamo-fascist dictatorship, and turned the place into a military base fortified by a milion-and-a-half strong human shield (and growing ever since). The low-intensity war (now intensifying) fought between Gaza and Israel ever since is the horrid reality of what, for all practical purposes, has been an independent Palestinian state for almost two decades by now.
Article 13:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. […] Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. […] There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
- 1988 Charter of Islamic Resistance Movement (a.k.a Hamas)
So there you have it. The two-state solution could never be agreed upon because the only side ever serious about agreeing to it was Israel. The Arabs all the time fought for a single state, a Sunni Muslim one, cleansed of Jews “from the river to the sea” as the popular chant still goes; and when that couldn’t be achieved through half a century of wars and invasions, Palestinian leaders figured out how to turn their neverending resistance into a very lucrative business. By continuing the good fight against International Zionism / Colonial Apartheid (pick your labels accordingly), they could keep sucking on donations from both the Arab world and the collective West; so it was simply not in their interest to resolve their issues with Israel, let alone actually get an independent Palestinian state. For that would not only close the tap on much of their current revenue streams, it would leave them in charge of a poor and broken country, with a population they themselves radicalized, impoverished and brutalized over the years, that would now have no one else but them to blame for all their misfortune.
Aside Arabs and Palestinians themselves, a big chunk of the blame for the failure of two-state peace process lies on the international community, and especially on that temple of incorruptibility and impartiality otherwise known as UN. All the way from the beginning of this conflict, but especially after 1990s, UN has been imposing very heavy and very specific obligations on Israel - the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the 1967 Green Line borders, the removal of armies and settlers from occupied territories, East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, etc. - while on the other hand demanding next to nothing from the Palestinian side. Israel’s very real, and very reasonable security concerns - how to make certain that people who kept attacking and killing them for almost a century by now finally stop doing that - are either completely ignored, or at best met with “There, there… everything will be fine once you give Arabs their lands back!” I’m reminded here of a joke by Israel’s beloved satirist (and a Holocaust survivor) Ephraim Kishon; of how Moses made a terrible mistake long ago, by leading Hebrew people into a Promised Land “overflowing with milk and honey”, but singularly devoid of oil in all of Middle East.
Finally, let it not be said that Israel also doesn’t bear its share of responsibility for the failure of two-state solution - but it has nothing to do with most of the accusations people nowadays level at it. Israel’s chief fault, IMHO, lies in this:
What makes this state of affairs all the more tragic is that, at the time of the Oslo accords, the Rabin government had a potentially far better peace partner in the form of the West Bank and Gaza leadership. To be sure, Israel's hand-off policies during the two-and-a-half decades from the June 1967 capture of the territories to the onset of the Oslo process enabled the PLO to establish itself as the predominant force there at the expense of the more moderate local leadership. But this meant no blind subservience to the organization's goals or means. Unlike the PLO's diaspora constituents (or the "outside" in Palestinian parlance) who upheld the extremist dream of returning to their 1948 dwellings at the cost of Israel's destruction, West Bankers and Gazans (the "inside") were amenable to peaceful coexistence that would allow them to get on with their lives and sustain the astounding economic boom begun under Israel's control.
During the 1970s, for example, the West Bank and Gaza were the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world, ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, making socioeconomic conditions there far better than in most neighboring Arab states. While the "outside" diaspora had no direct interaction with Israelis (and for that matter with any other democratic system), Israel's prolonged rule had given the "inside" Palestinians a far more realistic and less extreme perspective: hence their perception of Israel as more democratic than the major Western nations;[12] hence their overwhelming support for the abolition of those clauses in the Palestinian charter that called for Israel's destruction and their rejection of terror attacks;[13] and hence their indifference to the thorniest issue of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, and the one central to the PLO's persistent effort to destroy Israel, namely, the "right of return." As late as March 1999, two months before the lapse of the official deadline for the completion of the Oslo final-status negotiations, over 85 percent of respondents did not consider the refugee question the most important problem facing the Palestinian people.[14]
Against this backdrop, the Rabin government had a unique opportunity to steer the Palestinian populace in the West Bank and Gaza in the direction of peace and statehood, possibly in collaboration with Jordan's King Hussein, who just a few years earlier had thrown his hat in the ring only to be rebuffed by Prime Minister Shamir. In a Nablus public opinion poll shortly before the DOP signing, 70 percent of respondents preferred Hussein to the PLO as their sovereign,[15] not least since the PLO had been totally ostracized by its Arab peers following its support for Iraq's brutal occupation of Kuwait. At that point, its prestige in the territories was at one of its lowest ebbs; Hamas was at an early stage of development; the radical Arab regimes were thoroughly disorientated by the collapse of their communist backers; and the West Bank and Gaza leadership was bent on participating in the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Israel and its neighbors, launched at the October 1991 Madrid Conference and sustained in Washington, against the PLO's adamant objection.[16]
But then, instead of seizing the moment and opting for the obvious peace partner that was far better attuned to the needs and wishes of the local Palestinian populace, and against his personal inclination to strike a deal with the "moderate insiders" rather than the "extremist Tunis people [i.e., PLO leadership]," Rabin was persuaded by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin (who reportedly collaborated with the PLO in obstructing the Washington talks) into surrendering the West Bankers and Gazans to an unreconstructed terror organization…
- Efraim Karsh, Why the Oslo Process Doomed Peace, Middle East Quarterly 2016
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